Ecommerce Checkout Not Working
Higher-risk issue — be cautious and consider professional help sooner.
Customers can't complete a purchase — the cart, checkout, payment, shipping, tax, or confirmation step fails. Every hour this stands, buyers with money in hand are being turned away.
Common signs of this issue
- Customers report they can't pay or finish checkout — often vaguely ("your site wouldn't let me order").
- The cart empties itself, errors, or the checkout button does nothing.
- Payment is declined or the gateway errors for everyone, not just one customer.
- Orders complete but no confirmation email arrives — for the customer, indistinguishable from a failed order.
- Sales quietly slowed or stopped — sometimes the only symptom, discovered days late.
- It began after a plugin/app update, a theme change, or edits to shipping, tax, or payment settings.
Safe checks you can do yourself
None of these require sharing passwords with anyone.
- Walk the entire flow yourself, today, on a phone: add to cart → checkout → address → shipping → payment → confirmation page → confirmation email. Note the exact step and exact wording where it fails — "checkout is broken" has a dozen causes; "shipping options never appear for US addresses" has about two.
- Repeat in a private/incognito window and on a second device — this separates a real store problem from your own cached session, and logged-out testing matches what customers actually experience.
- Use your platform's test mode (WooCommerce gateways, Shopify's test gateway, Stripe test keys) for payment-step testing — or place a small real order you refund after. Never diagnose by hoping.
- Check the abandoned checkouts / failed orders list in your store admin and your payment provider's dashboard — together they show how many customers hit the wall, since when, and with what error codes. This is also your measure of urgency.
- Test the specific combination customers complain about — checkout failures are often selective: one country, one shipping zone, one payment method, digital-only carts. A store that 'works when I try it' can still be broken for half its buyers.
- If orders complete but confirmations don't arrive, stop debugging checkout — that's the email-delivery problem (see the guides below), and the orders themselves are safe in your admin.
- List what changed in the 72 hours before it broke: plugin/app updates, theme edits, new tax or shipping rules, currency changes, gateway settings. Checkout rarely breaks spontaneously.
What this usually means
Checkout is a chain of separate systems — cart, shipping calculator, tax rules, payment gateway, order recording, confirmation email — and the failing step names the failing system. Cart/checkout page errors: usually a plugin/theme conflict after an update. No shipping options: a shipping-zone rule excluding real addresses. Payment errors: the gateway connection (see the payments guide). Everything works but no email: deliverability.
Selective failures deserve special respect because owners can't reproduce them: a tax rule that errors for one state, a card type the gateway rejects, a minimum-order rule nobody remembers setting. The failed-orders list and customer reports tell you which combination to test — believe them over your own successful test order.
The stakes are unusual here: unlike a broken blog page, every checkout failure is a customer who had decided to pay you. Most won't report it or retry — they buy elsewhere. That's why store problems justify faster escalation than anything else on this site except security.
What not to do
- Don't experiment with live payment or tax settings during busy hours — wrong settings can double-charge, under-charge, or break working payment methods; test in test mode or quiet hours with a backup of the settings you change.
- Don't disable security, fraud protection, or SSL to 'make it work' — the failures those prevent (fraud, stolen card data) are catastrophically worse than the failures they cause.
- Don't dismiss a single failed-checkout report because your own test succeeded — selective failures are the norm, and one report usually represents many silent ones.
- Don't update all plugins mid-crisis hoping something fixes itself — you'll add variables while the store is losing money on each.
- Don't leave the store silently broken while investigating a widespread failure — a banner ("having trouble checking out? call us") converts some of the loss into orders and reports.
When to get help
A broken checkout is the clearest "get help now" case short of a hack: the meter runs in lost revenue, the systems involved (payments, tax) punish trial and error, and a specialist with your notes — the exact failing step, the error text, the failed-orders list, what changed — can usually isolate and fix it the same day. Ask them to verify the fix with an end-to-end test order including the confirmation email, and to check the recent failed orders so recoverable customers can be contacted.
Not sure what to do next?
Answer a few short questions and we'll point you to the safest next step — DIY, a freelancer, or a direct review. No passwords required.
Is this a business website? If this issue may be costing you leads, sales, or trust, you may want a direct review instead of trial and error.
Frequently asked questions
Orders go through but customers get no confirmation email — is checkout broken?
The checkout is fine and the orders are safely recorded; the email delivery is failing — a common, separate problem with its own fix (authenticated sending; see the email guides). Meanwhile, customers can't tell the difference, so fix it promptly and consider contacting recent buyers.
How do I test checkout without charging real cards?
Use your platform's test/sandbox mode (Stripe test keys, PayPal sandbox, Shopify's test gateway) for the payment step. For a true end-to-end check including emails, a small real order refunded afterward is the gold standard.
Checkout works when I try it, but customers keep reporting failures. Who's right?
They are. Checkout failures are usually selective — one region, shipping zone, card type, or cart combination. Get one failing customer's details (country, device, cart contents, error text) and reproduce their combination, not yours.
Why did checkout break when nobody changed anything?
Something changed anyway: plugin/app auto-updates, a payment gateway deprecating an old integration, an SSL certificate lapsing, or a platform-side change. Check update logs and your gateway's dashboard notices — the trigger is usually findable.
Can I recover the sales I lost while checkout was down?
Partially — the abandoned-checkout and failed-order lists include emails for many affected customers. A short apology email with a working link (and perhaps a small discount) recovers a meaningful fraction, and turns a bad week into data.
Should I take the store offline while checkout is broken?
Usually no — browsing customers are still future buyers. Post a visible notice with an alternative (call, email, invoice) instead. Fully offline is for security incidents, not checkout bugs.