Stall library · Buy
A popup covers a button on the way to checkout
This finding means a popup or an offer drew itself over the add to cart or checkout button while an AI agent was buying, and the agent had to close it before it could press the button. Ottom closed it with the popup’s own close or no thanks control and the purchase went on, which is why this is not a stall. An agent that does not go looking for a way to close a popup stops here, with the product one click away.
Why the agent stops
Newsletter offers, discount wheels and upsell slides often open on a timer, on the first scroll or right after a product goes into the cart. A shopper sees the offer, closes it and carries on. An agent sees that the button it meant to press is now under something else, and has to decide what that something is before it can do anything.
Some agents close it, some wait for it to go away, and some give up and report that the button never became clickable. The same popups were reported as stalls before our own agent learned to close them, and an AI agent taking over the step did not always close them either. A popup with no clear close control, or one drawn in a frame, is the hardest.
How often we see this
Not stated here. A frequency means nothing without the cohort it was counted over, and this page is about one stall rather than one category. Where a category has enough stores measured at every stage, the share of them showing this stall is published on its benchmark page, with the methodology beside it.
See it for yourself
- Open a product page in a private window, add the product to the cart and open the cart.
- Watch for anything that opens over the add to cart or checkout button while you do.
- Try to close it using only the keyboard: Tab to its close control and press Enter. If you cannot find one, an agent cannot either.
What to change
- Do not open popups over the add to cart or checkout button, and do not open them right after an add to cart.
- If an offer has to appear there, give it a close button with an accessible name, such as aria-label="Close", that a keyboard can reach.
- Let a shopper carry on without answering the offer: closing it should never be the only way to the button underneath.
What Ottom looks at
The journey agent presses the add to cart and checkout buttons the way a shopper would. When a click at the button would land on a popup instead, it looks inside that popup for a control that closes it or declines its offer, never one that accepts, signs up or pays, and presses it. This is raised when the step then goes on, once a walk.
Questions
Why is a popup the agent closed a finding at all?
Because not every agent closes it. Ours did and the purchase went through, so the store passes. The finding is there so you can move the popup out of the way of the agents that would have stopped at it.
Does a popup the agent closed lower my score?
No. Checkout is scored by how far the walk got, and it got all the way, so this is reported beside a pass and benchmarks do not count it as a stall.