Smoke Run answers

How do I catch a broken checkout before my customers do?

The short answer

Buy from your own checkout on a schedule, before your customers try. A broken checkout rarely throws an error you can see, so the only reliable signal is a real purchase that either completes or does not. Smoke Run runs that purchase for you, from a free outside teardown that stops short of a real charge to a connected watch that completes the full path daily and tells you, in dollars, the moment it breaks.

Almost every broken checkout is found the same way, by the customer who could not pay and simply left. The goal is to be the one who finds it first.

Why broken checkouts hide so well

A checkout breaks quietly because it usually works for you. You are logged in, on your own device, on the browser you built it in. The failure lives in the case you never test, a phone, a different card, a cold session, the exact path a stranger takes.

It also breaks without a deploy. A payment provider changes a rule, a third-party script fails to load, a tax or address check starts rejecting. Your code did not change, so nothing alerts, and the first sign is a sales number that drifts down for reasons you blame on the season.

The signals that arrive too late

By the time these reach you, days of sales are already gone.

A slow drop in orders you attribute to a quiet week.
One customer who emails to say the button did nothing, for every fifty who just left.
An ad campaign that suddenly stops converting, when the ads are fine and the checkout is not.
A refund spike from duplicate charges on a retry loop.

How to test it like a buyer

You can do this by hand. Open a private window on a phone, go through the entire purchase as a stranger would, and use a real card or a test card in a safe environment. Then repeat on the browsers and devices your customers actually use, and do it again after every deploy.

None of that is hard to do once. Doing it every day, on every browser, on every funnel, is what nobody keeps up with, and that gap is the whole reason Smoke Run exists.

How Smoke Run runs the purchase for you

The free teardown walks your checkout from the outside, up to the point of a real charge, and flags dead buttons and forms that do not send. The connected Watch goes further. It completes the full money path on a schedule using a private marker, across the cases you would never sit and test by hand.

When a step fails, the alert names the step and gives a conservative dollar estimate of the leak, so you know what it is costing while it stays broken. Connections are read-only, the count of changes we made to your systems stays at zero, and agencies can put every client checkout on one board.

Common questions

What usually breaks a checkout without any error?

Common causes are a mobile layout that hides the pay button, a third-party script that fails to load, a price or tax rule that rejects silently, a test key left in production, or a card field stuck in a validation loop. None of these throw an error you would see in your logs.

How often should I test my checkout?

After every deploy, and at least once a day. A deploy is not the only thing that breaks a checkout, because third-party changes do it with no deploy of yours. Testing on that cadence by hand is impractical, which is the gap a scheduled synthetic purchase fills.

Does the free teardown complete a real purchase?

No. The teardown checks the checkout is reachable up to, but not through, a real charge, so it never spends money. The connected Watch can complete the full path safely using test markers once you connect your systems.

Can an agency watch many client checkouts at once?

Yes. The agency plan puts every client funnel on one board, each with its own status, the step that broke, and the dollar estimate, so you catch a client break before the client calls you.

Find a broken checkout before a customer does

Run a free teardown on your live site. A synthetic customer walks your checkout from the outside and sizes the leak in real dollars. No login, no access to your systems, nothing stored.

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