E-commerce
What happens if a customer closes the tab after paying?
On a correctly built store, nothing bad — the payment provider webhook creates the order regardless of the browser. On a store that creates orders on the success-page redirect, that customer has been charged and has no order, and you find out when they complain.
The correct order of operations
- Create a pending order row, then send the customer to the payment page
- Customer pays
- The provider POSTs a webhook to your server
- Verify the signature, find the pending order, mark it paid
- Fulfil: provision, email, decrement stock
- The browser redirect only ever DISPLAYS state — it never creates it
Why this is so common
Because it works perfectly in testing. Nobody closes the tab during a test purchase, so the redirect-driven flow ships and the bug appears on the first genuinely busy day.
The question to ask a supplier
Ask them this exact question before hiring. Someone who has shipped real checkouts answers immediately and specifically. Someone who has not says something reassuring and vague.
The longer version
This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, Stripe checkout integration, and the four failure modes nobody tests for covers it in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who answered this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.