Most WooCommerce stores don't lose sales in one dramatic moment. They leak them — a few failed payments a week, a shipping rule that's wrong for one region, a checkout step that's just annoying enough to make someone abandon their cart. None of it shows up as an error message. It just shows up as fewer orders than the traffic should produce.
This checklist covers the places that actually cost stores money, in the order worth checking them.
Checkout & Payments
Place a real test order with every payment method you offer, including cash on delivery. If you haven't done this in the last month, you don't actually know they all work.
Check your payment gateway's dashboard for declined or failed transactions. A pattern of failures on one card type or region usually points to a gateway configuration issue, not the customer's card.
Count the steps from cart to confirmation. Every extra field or page is a chance for someone to give up — especially on mobile.
Shipping
Test checkout from an address in every region you claim to ship to. Shipping rules configured months ago quietly go wrong when a zone or rate changes and nobody double-checks.
Make sure shipping cost is visible before the final step. Surprise shipping fees at checkout are one of the most common reasons carts get abandoned.
Mobile Experience
Go through your own checkout on your phone, not just your laptop. Most store traffic is mobile, and most store testing happens on desktop — that gap is where problems hide.
Check that product images load quickly and variation selectors (size, color) are actually usable with a thumb, not just a mouse.
Products & Inventory
Look for sold-out products still marked as available, and discontinued items still showing in search — both create orders you then have to apologize for.
Check that current offers and prices match what your ads or social posts are promising. A mismatch here is a fast way to lose trust at checkout. See
product uploading and content management if this is a recurring problem.
How To Run This Checklist Yourself This Week
Block thirty minutes. Place one test order per payment method, on both desktop and mobile, checking a shipping address outside your city. Write down anything that felt slow, confusing, or wrong — even if it "still worked." Those friction points are exactly where real customers give up silently.
When To Call In Support Instead
If you find a genuine failure — a payment method that rejects valid cards, a shipping zone charging the wrong amount, a plugin conflict breaking the cart — that's a job for someone who can read server logs and gateway responses, not just click around the storefront. Guessing at a checkout fix often creates a second problem while "solving" the first.
How BS Solutions Supports WooCommerce Stores
We run this exact checklist on every store we take on, then fix what it finds — checkout and payment issues, shipping configuration, and the mobile experience most stores never actually test. After that, it's ongoing: monitoring for the next failure before it costs you orders. See WooCommerce support and store management for what that looks like as a monthly plan.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if I'm actually losing orders, or just have normal traffic?
Compare your cart-to-order rate against typical e-commerce benchmarks for your category. A rate that's noticeably lower usually points to friction somewhere in this checklist, not just "average" customer behavior.
Can you test the checkout without touching real customer orders?
Yes — we use controlled test orders and, where available, a staging environment, so live customers are never affected by testing.
My store was built by someone else. Can you still support it?
Yes — most of the stores we support were built elsewhere. We review it safely and take over from there.
Not sure what your checkout is doing wrong?
Send us your store link — we'll run the checklist for you, free.