Merchant Brain Checkout Monitor

Description

Standard uptime monitors only check whether your server responds with HTTP 200. They cannot tell if your WooCommerce “Place Order” button is frozen, if a third-party plugin crashed during checkout, or if a payment gateway AJAX call timed out.

Merchant Brain Checkout Monitor watches real shopper checkout attempts on your store in real time. It catches silent failures that scheduled bot monitors miss, logs diagnostic context locally in your WordPress database, and sends email alerts so you can resolve checkout issues quickly.

Key Features (100% Free Forever)

• Real Shopper Watchdog: Monitors checkout submissions and detects frozen spinners, unhandled JavaScript errors, and failed gateway responses.
• Local Diagnostic Logging: Captures error types, browser user-agent, culprit script identification, and cart total in a dedicated custom table.
• Email Alerts: Notifies store administrators when checkout failures occur, with failure summaries and links to the local incident log.
• Alert Throttling: Batches alerts with cooldown periods to prevent inbox flooding during high-traffic surges.
• Privacy-First: Technical error logging only. Never collects, transmits, or stores credit card numbers, CVVs, passwords, or customer PII. Query parameters are automatically stripped from logged URLs.
• Zero External Dependencies: 100% self-hosted. Runs entirely within your WordPress environment with no external SaaS requirements.

Checkout Compatibility

• Classic Checkout: Full support for standard WooCommerce shortcode checkout ([woocommerce_checkout]).
• Checkout Blocks: Full support for the WooCommerce Checkout Block via native Store API and Block checkout listeners.

Optional Integrations

• Signed Webhooks: POST a signed JSON incident payload to Zapier, Make, n8n, Slack, or a custom endpoint.
• WhatsApp Alerts: Optional direct push notifications via the Meta WhatsApp Cloud API.
• Public Status Page: An optional token-protected, read-only status dashboard you can share with clients.

These integrations are opt-in and remain disabled until you configure them.

Optional Pro Add-on

For merchants seeking advanced automated recovery (such as automatic gateway fallback switching, in-place shopper retry prompts, and Slack/Telegram notifications), an optional commercial add-on is available separately from Merchant Brain.

External services

Merchant Brain Checkout Monitor operates primarily on your own server, storing checkout incident logs locally in your WordPress database. Outgoing requests to external services are entirely optional and only occur when you explicitly configure and enable them in the plugin settings.

The plugin can optionally connect to the following external third-party services:

1. Meta WhatsApp Cloud API (Graph API)

* What it is and what it is used for: Dispatches instant checkout failure alert notifications directly to the store administrator’s WhatsApp phone number.
* What data is sent and when: Sent only when a checkout failure occurs AND the administrator has explicitly enabled WhatsApp alerts by configuring a WhatsApp Phone ID, recipient phone number, and API Bearer Token under WooCommerce -> Settings -> Checkout Monitor. The data sent includes the incident error type, store name, site URL, and cart total amount. No customer personal data (PII) or credit card details are ever transmitted.
* Service Provider: Meta Platforms, Inc.
* Terms of Service: https://www.facebook.com/terms.php and https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/business-terms/
* Privacy Policy: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy/ and https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/privacy-policy/

1. User-Configured Webhook Service

* What it is and what it is used for: Sends real-time JSON incident payloads to an external automation workflow, logging service, or messaging platform (such as Zapier, Make, n8n, Slack, or a merchant API endpoint).
* What data is sent and when: Sent only when a checkout failure is detected AND the administrator has explicitly entered a destination Webhook URL in settings. The payload contains diagnostic failure metadata: event type, log ID, cart total, sanitized page URL (with all query parameters stripped), browser name, culprit plugin slug, and timestamp. Payloads are signed with HMAC-SHA256 in the X-MBCM-Signature header when a dedicated shared secret is configured.
* Service Provider: The service is provided by the third-party endpoint provider chosen and configured by the site administrator. Please review the terms of service and privacy policies of your configured service provider (e.g. Zapier terms at https://zapier.com/terms and privacy at https://zapier.com/privacy; Make terms at https://www.make.com/en/terms-and-conditions and privacy at https://www.make.com/en/privacy-notice; Slack terms at https://slack.com/terms-of-service and privacy at https://slack.com/trust/privacy/privacy-policy).