How to detect a broken checkout before your customers do

A checkout does not usually fail with an error page. It fails quietly: the Add to Cart button stops binding, a payment script blocks the continue button, a theme update renames the element the basket drawer looks for. The page still loads. The server still returns 200. Nothing alerts.

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What actually breaks

In practice, checkouts almost never go down in the way monitoring expects. The four we see most often:

The button stops doing anything. A JavaScript error earlier on the page stops the handler binding. The button still renders, still highlights on hover, and does nothing when clicked.

An app or script blocks the step. A newly installed review widget, consent banner or upsell modal covers the continue button. On desktop it looks fine because the modal sits elsewhere; on the layout your customers use it sits on top.

The theme renames something. A template update changes a class or an id. Anything keyed to the old one - your own scripts, a third-party integration - silently stops matching.

A variant or region fails alone. Checkout works for the default currency and breaks for another, or works logged out and breaks logged in.

Why your current monitoring cannot see it

Uptime monitoring answers one question: did the server respond? For all four failures above, the answer is yes. The HTML is served, the status code is 200, the response time is normal. The dashboard is green for the entire time the checkout is dead.

Analytics eventually shows it, but as a shape rather than an alert - a dip in conversion that you notice on Monday and that started on Friday afternoon. By then the money is gone and you are reconstructing which deploy did it.

The gap is not that these tools are bad. It is that they measure the response, and a checkout is a sequence of interactions. Nothing in a status code describes whether clicking Add to Cart puts something in the basket.

How SiteOps handles it

Four steps, none of which involve writing a test script.

You describe the journey in plain EnglishType what a customer does: open a product page, add it to the basket, go to checkout, reach the payment step. You do not write selectors or a script.

The AI walks your real site once and records itIt opens your site in a real browser, finds the controls itself, and saves the path it took. You watch it happen live and can correct it before saving.

It replays that path on a scheduleThe saved journey is replayed deterministically - no AI in the run loop, so the result is stable and the same every time. As often as every 5 minutes on the top plan.

You get told which step broke, and what it looked likeNot step 4 failed. A plain-English incident: what happened, the likely cause, what to do next, and a screenshot of the page at the moment it stopped.

What it does and does not do

It stops at the payment screen and never pays. The checkout driver walks the funnel to the card entry step and halts there. It never clicks Pay, Place Order, or Book Now, and never enters card details. You do not need a test card or a sandbox account.
It does not need a staging copy. It runs against the site your customers use, which is the only one whose breakage costs you anything.
It works on Shopify, WooCommerce, and custom builds, because it drives a real browser rather than an API. If a person can do it in Chrome, it can be recorded.

Common questions

Will this place real orders on my store?No. The checkout journey advances to the payment step and stops. It never clicks the final commit button and never enters card details, so no order is created and nothing is charged.

How is this different from uptime monitoring?Uptime monitoring checks that a URL responds. This checks that a sequence of interactions still works. A checkout can be completely broken while every URL on your site returns 200 - that is the normal case, not the edge case.

Do I have to write a test script?No. You describe the journey in a sentence and the AI walks your site to build it. Writing and maintaining Playwright or Cypress scripts is the thing this replaces.

What happens when I redesign the site?If a control moves or is renamed, the replay notices that the recorded step no longer matches and raises it as drift for you to review, with a suggested fix you can apply in one click. It does not silently repair itself, because a silent repair hides a real change from you.

How quickly would I find out?Between every 30 minutes and every 5 minutes depending on plan. You choose the cadence per journey.

Customer journey monitoringHow to automatically test your website's critical customer journeys Regression monitoringHow to catch website changes that break your customer journeys Form monitoringHow to monitor a website form and catch it when it stops working In the docsUser journeys - how a journey is built and replayed

Find out before your customers do

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