Your Checkout Redirect Is Silently Broken (And Costing You Sales)

You run an ad. A prospect clicks it. They land on your page. They click the buy button. And then nothing happens. Or they land on the wrong page. Or a page that no longer exists. You never see it in your ad stats because the click happened. Your analytics shows traffic. Your CRM shows a form submission. But the payment page either never loaded, redirected to the wrong URL, or disappeared weeks ago when you moved your checkout to a new platform. The revenue leak sits there unnoticed because you're looking at top-of-funnel metrics while your money is leaking out the bottom.

Why Checkout Redirects Break

This happens more often than you think. You upgrade from Stripe to Shopify. You migrate from one email platform to another. You reorganize your product pages. Someone on your team moves a file. A third-party service changes their API. UTM parameters get stripped. HTTPS protocols get mixed up. Session cookies fail. A redirect rule gets written wrong and nobody tests it end-to-end because it looked right in staging. The customer clicks, the page loads, they see a 404 or a timeout, and they leave. Your traffic and leads look normal. Your revenue is quietly lower than it should be.

How to Check Your Own Redirect Right Now

• Go to your landing page. Click the buy button exactly as a customer would. Watch where it takes you. Does it go to the payment page you expect?
• Check the URL that loads. Is it the right checkout domain? Does it have all the parameters it should (affiliate ID, UTM tags, custom fields)?
• Wait 3 seconds. Does the page fully load or does it hang?
• Try it on mobile. Try it in private browsing mode. Try it from a different browser. The redirect might work in Chrome but fail in Safari.
• Check your payment gateway logs. Go to Stripe, PayPal, or whatever platform hosts your checkout. Are payments coming through, or is the checkout page not even being reached?
• If you use Zapier, Make, or any automation to send someone to checkout, trace that workflow. Did the URL in that automation change when you moved platforms? Is it still pointing to the old domain?

What a Broken Redirect Actually Costs

If you get 100 qualified clicks a week and your checkout redirect is broken for even one of those visitors, that is one lost sale per week. That is 52 sales a year at zero marginal cost to acquire them. If your average order value is $300, that is $15,600 in annual revenue from a single broken link. Now multiply that by every redirect in your funnel: upsell pages, payment plan options, affiliate links, email sequences that send people to checkout. One broken redirect is silent. Ten broken redirects is a revenue hemorrhage you will not see until you trace it.

The One Question That Catches This Fast

Ask yourself: when was the last time I actually clicked through my entire funnel as a customer and watched where I ended up? If the answer is more than 30 days ago, or never, you have blind spots. Platform changes, hosting migrations, and automation rewrites happen regularly. Testing needs to happen just as regularly. A broken redirect does not announce itself. It just sits there, swallowing sales.

A working funnel that nobody checks is just a broken funnel you have not discovered yet.