Why “Place order” can be a dangerous button on a website

Embedding a “place order” button on your site requires just a few lines of code, but don’t be fooled by the simplicity: behind the simple icon is the opportunity for lots of clickable chaos.

Initiating an online purchase sets off a chain of interactions, including tasks as diverse as asset management, forecasting, payment processing, delivery, and fraud protection. The button also adds to a company’s set of responsibilities.

“Do you understand it changes the nature of your business? Do you understand inventory and logistics management?” Aaron Hutten, CTO at digital commerce consultancy Studio Science, said. “Do you understand that you have to grow year over year and that your site or your app is going to be a living and breathing entity the second [the button is] turned on?”

Hutten and other site pros talk about how to become a trusted authority when you feel ready to take some ecommerce orders, including how to deal with some common mistakes.

Testing for bad. With the click of a button, an ecommerce platform initiates multiple connected services: reserving a spot in the inventory, calculating pricing, authorizing payment, and preparing an item for shipping, to name a few.

Given those connected processes, Hutten likes to test the entire transaction for failure states. He uses scripts and a quality assurance (QA) team that even occasionally includes his mother, he said. “She’s going to find something that no one under 50 is ever going to find.”

These tests include actions that could lead to errors, like a customer hitting the order button twice quickly, payment timeouts, and attempts to split a payment between two available methods.

Each payment option may have its own API, authorization methods, and contract requirements requiring a deeper look and individual evaluation, Hutten said.

Hutten sees advanced large language models as a helpful starting point for testing. Here’s an example of a prompt he considers helpful:

This is the website I’m going to do. This is the payment processor and how I’m going to do it. Find risk, find mistakes. Don’t be lazy. Don’t take shortcuts. If you have questions, ask me and then put them into Google Drive so we can work on them together.

From there, a team can refine the output and turn findings into processes that humans can actually test.

“[The model] is going to find things for you,” Hutten said. “It’s going to say, ‘Well, what about promotions?’ ‘What about split payments?’ It’s going to start coming up with outliers, and then it will slowly refine. And you use it just like you would if you had an intern or a team of people.”

Bala Subramaniam, founder of food-delivery marketplace Bites (and former head of product fulfillment at Instacart), recommends platform builders review how quickly inventory updates after an order, how soon the database decrements, and when the site reflects the change.

“You don’t want to tell a customer that this item is out of stock after they have paid for it,” Subramaniam said.

Know your customer. Companies in a rush for revenue may skip important steps when inserting that “place order” button. Hutten noted the importance of understanding a state’s specific compliance requirements; ecommerce platforms selling in California, for example, may need to follow Prop 65’s rules for disclosure of products that expose people to certain chemicals.

Hitee Chandra Jha, principal product manager at customer-service platform Zendesk, warned designers to understand the full customer experience before adding a button. Pulling from her former experience as lead product manager at Live Nation Entertainment, Jha shared how ticket buyers need to know what they’re in for and have clear expectations so they can make an informed decision; they don’t want to be surprised by a countdown to complete a sale, for example, or a fee. “You want to communicate all of that early before you make a decision to place the button,” Jha said. “Your customer should never wonder, ‘Was I charged?’ ‘Does my order exist?’ ‘Is my information safe?’”

Setting expectations also means meeting with customers to understand their experience, especially their challenges and any constraints unique to their service, whether it’s timers for Ticketmaster or trial periods for Zendesk. Jha advises IT pros to start not with the button, but with the checkout problem you’re trying to solve.

“We always want to build the right thing before building the thing right,” Jha said.

On top of that, every second matters in a purchasing decision, according to Jha, and site architects need to understand decisions that might bog down the order. Once architecture obstacles are understood, teams can make risk-based considerations.

For example, perhaps fraud prevention doesn’t need to be required for every field. To save seconds, a site designer may have to consider caching inventory and pricing and tax calculations, rather than running them in real time, which could slow down the payment. In addition to talking with customers, IT pros must coordinate with multiple teams: user-experience, fraud, billing, product, design, and inventory, Jha told us.

A button, after all, isn’t just the effort of one coder. “It is always a shared responsibility,” Jha said.