What an hour of broken checkout costs your store

The basic calculation

Take your revenue for the last 30 days and divide by the number of hours your store was open to orders — for most online stores, all 720 of them. That is your average revenue per hour. An hour of fully broken checkout loses roughly that amount, less whatever customers come back and buy later.

Then look at your busiest hours. Evenings, paydays and campaign sends can be several times the average. A failure at 9 p.m. on a Sunday during a newsletter push is not an average hour.

Not every customer comes back

Some customers who hit a broken checkout retry later. Many do not: they buy the same thing from a competitor, and some of them stay there. Paid traffic is the clearest loss — you paid for the click, the visitor was ready to buy, and the store turned them away.

A partial failure hides even better. If only one payment method or one country’s shipping is broken, total orders dip instead of stopping, and it can take days before anyone connects the dip to a cause.

Detection time is the number that matters

Most checkout problems are quick to fix once someone knows about them: roll back a module, restore a setting, clear a cache. The expensive part is the gap between the moment it broke and the moment someone noticed. A failure on Friday evening that is reported by a customer on Monday morning is a whole weekend of lost orders for a ten-minute fix.

That is why checkout monitoring pays for itself in a single incident: it does not make fixes faster, it makes the gap before them short. Related: what to do in the first hour and alerts people actually trust.

Check your own store now, free: the WooCommerce checkout checker or the Magento checkout test walks the checkout in a real browser and shows the step where it stops.