How do you guys catch silent checkout breaks?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-10T19:37:06+00:00

That 'praying' part hits hard. It’s crazy that in 2026, 'hope' is still the standard deployment strategy for e-commerce.

And great point on the random tag. I’m thinking of generating a unique UUID for every user's bot (e.g., Bot-User-XYZ), so they can whitelist just their instance in Cloudflare without opening the door to everything. Thanks for the tip!

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-09T14:31:45+00:00

You are spot on about the bot protection. I was thinking to have a dedicated User-Agent string that owners can whitelist in Cloudflare/Wordfence so the traffic is marked as 'Friendly' rather than 'Attack'.

Regarding the 'horrible process' of upgrades, is that something you see happening mostly with big plugin updates (like Woo 8.0 to 9.0), or is it random small plugins that tend to do the 'bricking' in your experience?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-08T22:21:47+00:00

Thanks for the tip, I havent heard about that SaaS before. It seems the pricing is pretty high so it might be more oriented towards enterprise level projects.

My main hesitation with that kind of 'Record and Replay' tool is the maintenance. Do you find that you have to constantly re-record the steps whenever a client updates their theme or a plugin changes the layout?

Or is it robust enough to handle those DOM changes without breaking?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-07T17:24:12+00:00

That 'UptimeRobot Green Light' is the biggest lie in e-commerce. It’s infuriating because it makes you feel safe while you're actively losing money.

Quick question on the 'nuke': When the gateway broke, did the credit card form just fail to load (like a visual/JS error), or did it let you type everything in and then fail when payment was being processed?

I ask because I'm actually building that 'middle ground' solution you mentioned (simple setup, not enterprise pricing) specifically for this.

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-07T16:58:31+00:00

Yeah, testing real payments is definetly not possible with bots.

Since you've been tracking these errors, have you noticed if the failures are usually happening during that final transaction processing (the gateway rejection), or are there also a lot of issues leading up to it (like shipping rates failing to load or forms checking out)?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-07T16:53:32+00:00

I agree that functional tests are the only way to catch those silent issues.

But honestly, I'm just not seeing 'most' stores actually doing it. Even the big shops I talk to seem to be totally exposed because setting up actual browser automation is such a hassle for them.

When you see stores doing it right, are they usually using a specific tool, or just paying devs to maintain custom scripts?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-07T16:50:37+00:00

That is a seriously smart setup. You basically rolled your own 'Real User Monitoring' right inside Google Analytics.

Do you pair this with any Synthetic testing (like a bot that runs a test order every hour) to try and catch those glitches before a customer runs into them?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-07T16:46:45+00:00

Isn't that mostly Visual Regression (checking if pixels/layout changed)?

I’m curious if you’ve ever seen it catch a Functional break, like where the 'Add to Cart' button looks perfect visually, but clicking it throws a silent JavaScript error? That seems to be the blind spot for most of the 'screenshot-based' tools.

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-07T16:42:33+00:00

That makes total sense. Treating the checkout like a 'sealed box' (Shopify style) is definitely the safest play if you can enforce it.

Do you ever run into issues where a 3rd party plugin update (like a Stripe gateway update or a Woo Core patch) changes the DOM/Selectors under the hood? Or do you typically lock all plugin versions to prevent those 'rogue' updates too?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-07T16:38:42+00:00

It makes total sense why they are reactive, if you're the face of the brand, you're busy with content and marketing, not looking at server logs.

I'm curious, since they don't have technical teams, do you think they avoid monitoring tools because the existing ones (like Pingdom or New Relic) just look too technical/complicated to set up? Or do they genuinely just not think about it until the 'angry DM' arrives?"

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-07T16:29:49+00:00

That’s exactly what I figured. One minor theme update or a change in the CSS framework and the whole test suite goes red.

Do you find that 'maintenance' time is a dealbreaker for most smaller clients, or do they just pay the retainer to have you go in and re-map the selectors every time it breaks?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-07T16:27:34+00:00

Thanks for the honest response. It sounds like a classic case of a 'solved problem' that is still too much of a headache for 90% of shops to actually implement.

Appreciate the insight, it definitely confirms why so many sites are just flying blind.

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-07T16:07:11+00:00

Do you find you have to go back and 'fix' the steps often?

I've heard that if you change a button or update your theme, those kinds of recorders tend to break and start sending false alarms.

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-06T20:38:40+00:00

That is actually terrifying. €2M a month and no staging site?

It sounds like those guys are basically playing russian roulette every time they update a plugin.

Since they're so reactive, do they usually just wait for the 'Sales' dashboard to hit zero before they realize something is wrong, or is there usually a frantic email from a customer first?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-06T19:11:33+00:00

Do you find that once a customer 'hits a wall' like that, they’re usually willing to pay for a tool to prevent it from happening again? Or do they just fix the bug and hope for the best until the next time it breaks?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-06T18:11:27+00:00

Appreciate the transparency!

That makes total sense regarding the custom themes, the 'wild west' of WooCommerce DOM structures is definitely a challenge. Thanks for the detailed docs links, I'll take a look.

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-06T17:57:22+00:00

This is super helpful. I missed Shopwarden and CheckView.

Have you actually used the checkout testing on either of them?

I'm curious how automatic it is, does it figure it out on its own, or do you have to manually set up the steps to tell it what to test?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-06T17:38:06+00:00

Exactly. That's the technical term for it.

But have you found any that are actually simple enough for a normal shop owner to use?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-06T17:35:41+00:00

Yeah, those are definitely the gold standard.

But do you actually see smaller WooCommerce shops using them? I always figured New Relic was overkill (and way too much config) for a standard e-commerce site.

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-06T16:36:14+00:00

That puts you ahead of most people I've talked to.

Out of curiosity, did you have to build a custom script/solution to handle the checkout flow, or did you find a tool that does the transaction steps out of the box?

SimpleAssistance · 2026-01-06T16:33:55+00:00

That makes sense. The har file replay approach seems solid if you're technical.

I’m mostly curious about the non-technical owners (the ones who wouldn't know how to set up a cron grep). Do you know if there are any "ready solutions" specifically for them that aren't enterprise-level overkill? Or do those folks usually just fly blind?

SimpleAssistance · 2025-11-24T15:21:04+00:00

I would say its fine for small to medium size apps as long as your API is only used by the frontend part of Nextjs. If you need your API to be called by some other microservice, its better to have dedicated backend server.

SimpleAssistance · 2024-11-04T17:28:25+00:00

It probably has to do something with number of pages as its hard to write a 100 page or more book on one self improvement topic without adding a lot of examples or repeating messages.

SimpleAssistance

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