E-commerce monitoring
Your checkout is up. Can customers actually buy?
A checkout that loads but won't take payment costs you every sale until someone notices — and usually a customer notices first. Sitewatch checks the pages your purchase path depends on — product, cart, checkout — the way a customer's browser does, and alerts you the moment one of them stops working. You find out in minutes, not from a gap in the day's revenue.
- Payment, cart and pricing scripts checked on every run
- Checks what shoppers experience — not just whether the server answered
- Checks from EU and US, so a regional failure does not hide in the average
Checkout can no longer take payments
Plain-English summary
The payment provider's script is no longer being served, so the card fields never appear. The checkout page loads perfectly.
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See what your uptime tool misses on your checkout page.
02What can go wrong
Every minute of broken checkout is revenue you never see.
A store is not one page. It is a path — category, product, cart, checkout, payment — and a break anywhere along it costs you the sale without costing you a single error alert.
- 01Traffic is arriving and the store looks completely normal.
- 02A payment or cart script stops being served after a deploy or a provider change.
- 03Shoppers reach checkout, find nothing works, and quietly leave.
- 04Every page still answers, so every uptime dashboard stays green.
- You find out from the day's revenue, hours later.
03Why traditional monitoring misses this
Your monitor loaded the checkout page. That is not the same as buying something.
Traditional uptime monitoring stops the moment the server answers. We don't just check that your store is online — we check that people can actually use it.
Traditional uptime monitoring
The checkout URL loaded. Whether anyone could buy is invisible.
Sitewatch
Only "healthy" once the whole path to a sale holds together.
04How Sitewatch catches it
One question, on every check.
Not "did the server respond?" — but the one your revenue depends on: could a customer actually complete this purchase?
- ✓Category pages render
- ✓Product images appear
- ✓Pricing displays correctly
- ✓Cart scripts load
- ✓Payment scripts load
- ✓Checkout is reachable
- ✓No redirect traps
- ✓Certificate is valid
05Typical failures we catch
The silent revenue killers.
Payment form never appears
The payment provider's script stops being served after a change on their side or yours.
→Customers reach checkout and cannot pay
Add to cart does nothing
A deploy breaks the cart script and the button stops responding.
→Shoppers assume the store is broken and leave
Product images missing
A cache purge or image service failure leaves thumbnails blank.
→Customers cannot see what they are buying
Prices render wrong or not at all
A broken stylesheet or script mangles currency, decimals or visibility.
→Shoppers do not trust the number and abandon
The path to a sale is closed
A primary button points somewhere dead, or the contact form cannot submit.
→The most expensive kind of breakage — nobody can even ask
Checkout behind a chain of redirects
A misconfigured rule sends shoppers through several hops before arriving.
→Mobile shoppers drop off before they get there
Review widget stopped loading
A third-party reviews script fails to load on product pages.
→Your social proof disappears at the point of decision
Certificate expired
The most preventable outage there is, on the page where trust matters most.
→Browsers warn shoppers away from your payment page
Broken in one region only
An edge location serves failures while everywhere else is fine.
→A whole market cannot buy and the average looks healthy
06A real example
A dead payment form, caught in minutes.
Shoppers arrive
Traffic lands on the store as normal.
Checkout breaks
The payment script stops being served.
Incident opened
Sitewatch confirms it is real and opens an incident.
Your team is alerted
Slack or email, naming checkout and the missing script.
Fixed
Before the day's revenue takes the hit.
07What happens the moment we find it
Detection is not the outcome. Taking orders again is.
Every incident names the page and the file, so the fix starts immediately instead of with an investigation.
We confirm it is real first
Every issue is re-checked before you are alerted, so one slow response from someone else's network never pages you.
Explained in plain English
"The payment script is missing, so the card fields never appear." Not a status code — a sentence anyone on the team can act on.
Sent where your team already works
Slack, email, webhook, PagerDuty, Opsgenie or SMS, with the page and the file named.
You can verify the fix
Ship the fix, run a check on demand, and watch the incident close before you push traffic at the store again.
08The cost of finding out late
The same failure, on the busiest day of the year.
Without page-level monitoring
09:12 — A provider change stops the payment script being served.
09:12 — Every page still answers. The uptime dashboard stays green.
11:40 — A customer emails to ask whether the store is broken.
11:55 — Someone reproduces it and finds the missing script.
12:20 — Fixed. Three hours of peak traffic could not check out.
Found by a customer
With Sitewatch
09:12 — A provider change stops the payment script being served.
09:14 — The scheduled check fetches checkout and everything it needs.
09:15 — Confirmed on retry. Incident opened with the file named.
09:15 — Slack alert lands in the channel the team already watches.
09:31 — Fixed and verified with an on-demand check.
Found by monitoring
Nineteen minutes instead of three hours — on the day it costs the most. This scenario is illustrative, not a customer case study.
09Who it's for
Whatever your store runs on.
Shopify stores →
Shopify keeps the platform up. We watch your theme, apps and cart.
WooCommerce stores →
The checkout breakage that follows every plugin update.
Agencies running client stores →
One dashboard, per-store alerts, client-facing status pages.
Teams running promotions →
Protect the campaign pages feeding the store at peak.
10Everything we detect
The full checklist on every store check
The purchase path
- Missing payment-provider scripts — Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Klarna and others
- Missing cart, mini-cart and quantity scripts
- Missing pricing, currency and tax scripts
- Cart and checkout pages reachable and answering
- Redirect chains and loops on the checkout path
The storefront
- Missing product, category and gallery images
- Missing stylesheets and fonts — the catalogue renders unstyled
- Third-party review, chat and upsell scripts that stop loading
- Hard outages, timeouts and server errors
- Certificate expiry, with warning well before the date
- Failures that appear in one check region and not the other
11vs. your uptime tool
What uptime tools miss on your store
| Scenario | Uptime monitor | Sitewatch |
|---|---|---|
| Payment script missing | Not detected — the page still answers | Detected, with the file named |
| Broken product images | Not detected | Every image verified |
| Cart script failure | Not detected | Checked on every run |
| A dead button or form | Not detected — the page answers normally | Forms that cannot submit and links that go nowhere are flagged |
| After a deploy | Waits for the next interval | Checks instantly via a deploy hook |
| What the alert tells you | "Site is down" | Which page, which file, what to do |
| Who notices first | A customer, or the revenue report | You, in minutes |
Payment script missing
- Uptime monitor:
- Not detected — the page still answers
- Sitewatch:
- Detected, with the file named
Broken product images
- Uptime monitor:
- Not detected
- Sitewatch:
- Every image verified
Cart script failure
- Uptime monitor:
- Not detected
- Sitewatch:
- Checked on every run
A dead button or form
- Uptime monitor:
- Not detected — the page answers normally
- Sitewatch:
- Forms that cannot submit and links that go nowhere are flagged
After a deploy
- Uptime monitor:
- Waits for the next interval
- Sitewatch:
- Checks instantly via a deploy hook
What the alert tells you
- Uptime monitor:
- "Site is down"
- Sitewatch:
- Which page, which file, what to do
Who notices first
- Uptime monitor:
- A customer, or the revenue report
- Sitewatch:
- You, in minutes
5 min
Fastest check interval
2
Check regions on Pro (EU + US)
6
Alert channels
Don't let a broken checkout cost you the day
Add your cart and checkout pages and monitor them in under two minutes. Free plan, no credit card.
12Questions
E-commerce monitoring questions, answered
All of them, because monitoring happens from the outside. Sitewatch recognises Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce and custom builds, and tailors its diagnosis to whichever it finds — but nothing needs to be installed on your store either way.
Yes. Add your checkout, cart and key product pages as monitored pages. Each is checked on its own schedule with its own alerts, and on every run Sitewatch verifies everything those pages load — payment scripts, cart scripts, styling and images.
No, and we would rather be clear about that. Sitewatch verifies everything a purchase needs to work rather than submitting an order. Because most checkout failures come down to a missing file, that catches the bulk of revenue-killing breakage. For scripted test orders, add transaction monitoring alongside it.
Within minutes of a deploy if you connect a deploy hook. On a schedule, every 30 minutes on Free, every 15 on Starter and every 5 on Pro. Every issue is confirmed with a retry before you are alerted, so what reaches you is real.
No. It monitors from outside, adds no code to your pages, and installs nothing on your store. There is no effect on load times for your customers.
On Pro, Sitewatch checks from two regions — EU and US — so a failure that only appears at one edge location is visible instead of being averaged away. This is one of the most commonly missed store failures, because the team testing it is usually in the region that works.
If you run a single store on Shopify or WooCommerce, start with that page — the failures are platform-specific and so is the advice. Use this page if you run stores on more than one platform, or on a custom build.
13Explore more