One of the biggest problems a WooCommerce store owner can encounter is when the checkout fails. There are a lot of different types of issues that could happen during checkout, but these can be fixed easily if you can identify what is causing the problem. However, finding out the cause is not always easy for the average user. In this post, we will teach you how to fix the common checkout problems in WooCommerce.

The information in this post may or may not help with the specific problem that you are experiencing with your checkout. You may have a similar problem but the source could be different, hence the solutions mentioned here may not work for everyone. It is best to have a developer adept in both WordPress and WooCommerce make the suggested fixes for you. We also recommend that you create a staging/development site and do your debugging there rather than on the live site.

Most Common WooCommerce Checkout Issues

Here at Wooassist, a lot of new clients come to us with problems on their checkout. Having issues on the checkout page can be daunting as it can be difficult to figure out the cause. The checkout page is crucial because it is the last page of the “user shopping experience”. A simple error that could be fixed in a few minutes can hurt your business if it is not addressed swiftly. You could end up losing business opportunities and customers. To fix the problem, we need to figure out what the error is first.

Below are some common issues we encounter that you could be experiencing right now on your WooCommerce store.

Checkout Page Isn’t Available and is Just Redirecting Back to an Empty Cart

While there are many reasons why checkout would redirect to an empty cart, it’s usually because your hosting is not totally compatible with WooCommerce.

The issue is most common with stores that enabled “force https on checkout”. In this case, the issue could be caused by a PHP security module called Suhosin. WooCommerce already has an official fix posted for this.

Simply paste the code below in your server’s PHP settings.

suhosin.session.cryptdocroot = Off

Review Order Section is Stuck on Loading

When a customer enters their shipping/billing information, this triggers a script to reload the review order data. When there is an error in the script, it will just get stuck without an error shown that would’ve helped you understand what’s happening.

This usually happens when the returned data is not what WooCommerce expects. This is caused by either a plugin or template conflict. To fix this, you will need to check compatibility with all plugins installed and update any outdated WooCommerce templates.

Payment Option is Not Working

Some popular payments options are PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net and eWay. These are the services that you’ve installed in your store to handle the payment process between you and your customers. This is the page where users enter their credit card information and hit the “place order” button.

Here are some scenarios where the payment option does not work:

Payment option is not available on checkout

You are sure that you have completely configured your payment option but it’s not showing up on the checkout page. This usually happens with stores that don’t have an SSL certificate installed and the payment option requires one. You can learn more about SSL in this post.

Authentication error pops up

When an authentication error pops up, this means there is something wrong between the connection of your store and your payment option service provider. To fix this, check that the credentials you entered in the payment option’s settings are correct.

Unknown error pops up

Unknown error popping up could mean that a PHP script in WooCommerce isn’t working properly. There are many things that could cause this. It may be due to a plugin conflict, or your hosting doesn’t support the custom AJAX endpoints utilized by WooCommerce. To fix this you will need to check each plugin installed. Try disabling the plugins one at a time and see if that fixes your problem. Another test that you can do is to downgrade your WooCommerce back to the last 2.3 version of WooCommerce, which is before the custom AJAX points were implemented.

Nothing happens after clicking “Place order” button

If nothing happens when you click the place order button, then most likely there is a JavaScript conflict in the checkout page. The best way to fix this is to check your browser’s console to see which scripts are in conflict. You’ll want a developer to do this for you though.

Did any of these help solve your checkout page problem? If you have any other problems with checkout on your WooCommerce store, you can hit the comments or contact us and we’ll see what we can do for you.