III Part Three
When things go wrong
Diagnostic protocols for the failures you will encounter — sooner or later.
For everyone, eventually.
- 01 The Conflict Testing Method The foundational diagnostic technique. Before anything else — before forum posts, before support tickets — do this.
- 02 "It's a WooCommerce Problem" When a third-party plugin developer blames WooCommerce. How to identify the real boundary.
- 03 Cart & Checkout Failures "Can't add to cart." "Variation unavailable." Almost always a conflict.
- 04 Shipping Rates Not Returning The diagnostic sequence for "no shipping options at checkout."
- 05 Tax Showing as $0 When zero tax is correct (and when it's not).
- 06 Email Delivery Failures The step-by-step protocol for "customers aren't getting order emails."
- 07 Duplicate Orders Why orders appear twice — and how to isolate the cause.
- 08 Database Mismatches After Migrations When orders show the wrong customer's data after a migration, restore, or staging sync.
- 09 Fraud & Card Testing Attacks What card testing looks like, the severity spectrum, and how to respond at each level.
- 10 Intermittent & Ghost Issues It happens sometimes. You can't reproduce it. Everything "should" work.
- 11 Performance Problems "WooCommerce is slow." Usually it's not WooCommerce.
- 12 Integrations & the Firewall Problem When Cloudflare, hosting firewalls, or security tools block legitimate connections.