A Broken Checkout Breaks in One of Three Places
“The checkout is not working” describes at least three different faults, and they are fixed in different places. Knowing which one you have makes the conversation with anybody — us included — much shorter.
- The payment gateway. The order reaches the payment step and then fails, hangs, or returns the customer to an empty cart. Usually keys, mode, or a webhook that stopped being called after a change.
- Shipping. The customer cannot proceed because no shipping method appears for their address. This is a zone or a class that does not cover where they live, and it is invisible until somebody from that area tries to buy.
- Tax and GST. The total is wrong, or an unexpected charge appears at the last step. Fixable, but it is the failure most likely to make a customer distrust the whole store.
The first two look identical to the shopper. They are nowhere near each other in the settings.
The Only Proof That Anything Works
A checkout that looks fine is not evidence. The only test that counts is a real transaction, paid with a real method, confirmed to land in both the order list and the payment account. Card and UPI can behave differently. Cash on delivery can be enabled while online payment quietly is not.
This is worth doing yourself after any plugin update, not only when something is reported — orders can stop without a single error appearing anywhere. If you have not set up payments yet, our guide on adding a payment gateway covers the process, and Razorpay vs PayU compares the two most common Indian choices.
One Session or an Ongoing Plan?
If something specific has broken and the rest of the store is fine, a single session is the right answer and we will not push you further. This page is the reactive side: you tell us what stopped working and we fix it. The proactive side is a different product — ecommerce website maintenance, monthly, where the updating and the test orders happen on a schedule rather than after a complaint. That one earns its place when updates keep breaking things, when you are heading into a sale you cannot afford to lose, or when nobody in the business is checking that orders are still arriving.
If the site is not a store at all, none of this applies and a plain website maintenance plan is both the right product and the cheaper one.
If the store itself needs building or rebuilding rather than repairing, that is ecommerce website development, which is a different conversation with a different price.