Reselling and running a panel
What happens to my customers when my provider goes down?
Last updated by The PanelCompare editorial team
Why is it so hard to notice in time?
Because the failure is silent by design. The API returns errors as HTTP 200 with an error field, so a naive integration records a successful dispatch. Orders sit in Pending, which looks normal inside the advertised start-time band, and by the time the band has clearly passed you have accepted a day of orders you cannot fill.
This is also the mechanism behind provider-collapse cascades: a Tier-1 supplier dies and every downstream panel stops delivering at once, without malice and without any of them knowing until buyers complain.
What should you build before it happens?
- 1.Parse the response body, never the status code. A 200 with an error field is a failure.
- 2.Poll balance and services per provider on a schedule; a provider that answered yesterday and not today is the earliest available signal.
- 3.Map at least two providers per service you sell in volume, with the cheaper one primary and the fallback tested rather than assumed.
- 4.Disable the service in your own catalogue rather than accepting orders you cannot fill — a disabled row costs one sale, a stalled order costs a customer.
- 5.Publish a status note. Buyers forgive an outage they were told about and do not forgive silence, because silence is what an exit looks like.
Think this answer is wrong?
Prices, refill terms and platform policies in this market all move, so an answer that was right in September may not be right in December. Every figure above names its source and the date it was checked; if one of them is stale or wrong, the correction process on the about page has a two-working-day reply target, and corrections are published with a dated note rather than quietly patched.