My checkout was dead for 9 hours — the sales page looked perfect (3-line fix)

My Checkout Was Dead for 9 Hours. The Sales Page Looked Perfect.

A 200 status code is not a sale. My store returned HTTP 200 all night while the buy button pointed at a broken checkout — and I found out the way everyone does: by checking sales and finding zero.

Here is the fix that costs nothing and works whether you sell on Gumroad, Shopify, or a hand-rolled Stripe link.

Monitor the Funnel, Not the Page

Three checks, run every 5 minutes from cron:

# 1. Is the page alive AND does it contain the buy link?
curl -s https://yourstore.com | grep -c "gumroad.com/l" || echo "BUY LINK MISSING"

# 2. Does the checkout itself load?
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://gumroad.com/l/your-product

# 3. Write every result to an append-only ledger
echo "$(date -u) page=$P1 checkout=$P2" >> funnel_ledger.txt

That third line is the one people skip. When the checkout died at 2 AM, I reconstructed exactly when from the ledger in 60 seconds. Without it I'd be guessing.

The Verdict Rule

A monitor that doesn't state a verdict is a screenshot, not a monitor. My script ends with one line: VERDICT: OK or VERDICT: BROKEN — checkout=000. Pagerduty-style noise, zero cost, zero dependencies.

Why Every Solo Seller Needs This

I run a small automation store and lost a full night of traffic to a silent funnel break. The exact scripts I now run — funnel sensor, ledger, verdict logic, plus the wider 24/7 agent-ops runbook — are packaged as:

• Ops Starter Kit — the sensor/ledger/healer loop
• Agent Ops 24/7 — the runbook for AI agents that run your business unattended

Everything here: HIVE80LAB — https://hive80lab.gumroad.com

Steal the 3-line cron even if you buy nothing. It would have saved me 9 hours.