WooCommerce checkout failures come in several distinct forms: the Place Order button does nothing when clicked, the order appears to go through but nothing is recorded in your dashboard, the payment is declined even though the customer’s card is valid, or the customer sees a generic error message with no useful explanation. Each pattern points to a different layer of the failure chain.
Loupely is specifically designed for this class of problem because WooCommerce checkout failures almost always involve both browser-side and server-side signals that need to be correlated. A browser-only debugging approach misses the server half of the story. A server-side log approach misses the browser half.
How to capture a WooCommerce checkout failure with Loupely #
The key is to capture during the failure, not after. Here’s the sequence:
- Navigate to your checkout page with items in the cart.
- Make sure Loupely is connected (the extension popup shows “Connected” status).
- Trigger the failure: click Place Order, or do whatever causes the problem.
- Without navigating away from the result page, open the Loupely popup and click Run Diagnosis within 60 seconds.
For checkout failures that don’t allow real payments, use a test Payment Method. WooCommerce’s built-in BACS (bank transfer) or Cheque payment methods work well for testing without involving a Payment Gateway.
What Loupely identifies in checkout failures #
The most common checkout failure patterns Loupely’s correlation rules detect:
- JavaScript conflict on the checkout page. A plugin or page builder is loading scripts that conflict with WooCommerce’s checkout JavaScript. The Place Order button won’t fire because a script error upstream of it broke the execution chain. Loupely identifies the conflicting scripts and their origins.
- PHP Fatal Error in a Payment Gateway plugin. The gateway’s PHP code throws a fatal error when processing the order, returning a 500 response that the browser interprets as a JavaScript error. Without server-side correlation, you’d only see the JavaScript error. Loupely connects them.
- Nonce verification failure. A caching plugin is serving a stale checkout page with an expired security token. When the customer submits, the nonce check fails silently and the order doesn’t process. Loupely identifies the caching layer responsible.
- WooCommerce Save Pipeline incomplete. The Payment Gateway processed the charge but the order record wasn’t written to the WordPress Database. PHP error during the order creation stage. The customer gets a confirmation page but you have no order. See WooCommerce Save Pipeline Events for how Loupely captures this specific pattern.
After the diagnosis #
The triage step will route you to 1 of the 5 routes (rollback, plugin conflict, hosting, cache clear, or developer handoff) depending on what the correlation rules found. See Triage Routes: What Each One Means for exactly what to do with each one.