We shopped 75 Indian Shopify stores before Diwali. Here's what their checkout looks like

JAY — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 01:57:25 +0000

Before Diwali I ran an automated shopper (CartBeam) through 75 independent Indian Shopify stores: open a product, pick a variant, add to cart, check the cart, and open checkout on a phone-sized screen. It stops before address and payment and never places an order. This is a small, one-time sample, not a market survey, and it only covers one product path per store on mobile.

1. What we could test

54 of 75 (72%) passed all five steps.
15 (20%) could not be tested: bot protection, sold-out products, or a layout the checker does not recognise. We report these as "could not check", not as broken.
6 (8%) were flagged by the automated run. I checked them by hand: three simply require a customer login before checkout, two had a removed product, one I could not verify. None was a real checkout failure that I could prove. So the honest count of broken checkouts I can confirm is zero.

2. Which checkout is behind the store

Detected from the page, n = 75.

GoKwik: 32 (43%)
Unknown or custom checkout: 21 (28%)
Native Shopify checkout: 7 (9%)
Shiprocket Checkout (Fastrr): 6 (8%)
Shopflo: 6 (8%)
Razorpay Magic Checkout: 3 (4%)

3. What I got wrong the first time

My first run flagged 17 of 40 stores as broken. I re-ran each and got the same failure twice, then checked eight by hand: all eight were fine. The checker was calling bot challenges, sold-out products and unrecognised layouts "failed". After I gave those their own result, the first 40 became 36 passed, 4 could not be checked, 0 flagged. Reproducing a failure twice is not verification; a person looking once is.

4. What this does not tell you

It does not cover theme-only script breaks, payment authorisation, address and shipping steps, desktop, or any time other than the moment of the check. A pass is one path at one time, not a guarantee.

If you run a Shopify store and want one product path checked on mobile for free, paste a public product link at https://cartbeam.infinityore.com.

How to test your Shopify checkout in 5 minutes (and what automated checks miss)

JAY — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 07:41:58 +0000

Uptime monitors answer one question: does the page load? They do not answer the question that pays your bills: can a shopper still finish a purchase? A theme edit, an app update or a changed script can break add-to-cart or checkout overnight while every monitor stays green.

Here is the five-minute test I run, and what I check after every change.

The 5-minute manual test (do it on a phone-sized window)

Open your store in an incognito window sized like a phone.
Open a product that has variants. Pick a non-default variant, not the pre-selected one.
Press Add to cart. Open the cart (the drawer and the /cart page) and confirm the variant, price and quantity are what you picked.
Press Checkout from both places.
Confirm you land on a checkout page that actually shows shipping and payment options, not a blank or half-loaded page.
Open the browser console (F12) at each step and look for red errors.

Do the same again after any theme edit, app install or update, shipping change or payment change. Three problems turn up again and again:

Variant mismatch: a theme script and an app both write to the variant, so tapping "M" adds a different size or nothing.
A third-party script blocks a button: upsell, countdown, bundle or popup apps on the cart drawer freeze the Checkout button or fail silently after an update.
The hand-off to checkout: custom checkout apps or payment add-ons can work on desktop but break in a phone's in-app browser.

Shopify's own funnel report (sessions, added to cart, reached checkout, completed) is a good early warning if you look at it after each change. A sudden drop between steps is worth investigating the same day.

What automated checks can and cannot do

You can script this flow with a headless browser. It is worth doing, but be honest about the limits:

A script that adds to cart through Shopify's cart endpoints can pass while a broken Add to cart button in your theme's own JavaScript fails real shoppers. Clicking the real button matters.
Bot protection and sold-out products make a run inconclusive, not failed. Treat "could not check" as its own result.
Stopping before payment means you have not proven that a gateway will capture or settle money. Test that with your gateway's own test mode.

Disclosure

I'm a student in Pune and I built a free checker called CartBeam that follows this path and keeps a screenshot of every step. It stops before address and payment and never places an order, and it goes through Shopify's own cart, so the manual test above still matters. You can try it on one public product link at https://cartbeam.infinityore.com. When I first ran it on 40 Indian stores, my initial scan showed 17 false alarms; fixing that classifier taught me more than the stores did.

What failure has bitten you? I would like to hear it.

DEV Community: JAY