Questions · Buy

Why is an intermittent checkout error rated critical?

Because when it occurs, no purchase is possible at all. Severity here describes how completely a failure blocks a sale, not how many sales it touches. Intermittency changes the second and not the first, and an intermittent checkout error is still a checkout error for everybody who meets it. It is also the class of fault least likely to be reported by a customer, because somebody who cannot pay usually leaves rather than emailing.

Why it happens

Checkout errors cluster around conditions your own testing rarely reproduces: an empty or unusual session, a cart built by a direct request rather than through the interface, a missing optional field, a third party service that timed out.

Agents hit those conditions constantly, because an agent journey is a plain path through the store with no cookies, no history and no tolerance for a retry that a person would perform without noticing.

Run a free scan and find out which of these your store actually hits.