"Held Together with Superglue, Duct Tape, Hopes, and Dreams."
That's how one team described their own Stripe-to-HubSpot-to-site tracking chain, right before walking back 65 purchases their dashboard had already reported as real.
A tracking chain is only as strong as its weakest handoff
A purchase event that starts in Stripe, passes through HubSpot, and gets pushed back to the site's ad pixels crosses several handoffs, and each one is a place data can drop, duplicate, or fire on the wrong event. One team running exactly this setup had an Event Match Quality score of 5.2 out of 10 on Meta, well below what a healthy integration should show, and didn't fully understand why until they started tracing individual purchases through the chain by hand.
Sixty-five purchases that had to be walked back
The events had already reported to the ad platform as real conversions, budget had already responded to them, and only a manual audit caught that they'd never actually happened. Asked what was going on with the setup, the team's own answer was blunt: they couldn't fully explain it either. The system worked, mostly, until it didn't, and nobody could point to exactly where the failure was happening.
Why this keeps happening even to teams paying attention
Almost any stack assembled over time out of tools added for different reasons ends up this fragile. Stripe handles billing, HubSpot runs the CRM, and the site carries its own tags, each one doing its own job well on its own. Nobody owns the seams between those systems, and the seams are exactly where the 65 phantom purchases came from. A single, owned record that every system writes to, and every number gets checked against, replaces the chain instead of extending it.