Make sure customers can reach your store and check out.

A store can look fine to you and still lose sales. The certificate might have expired, the checkout might be returning errors, or order emails might be going to spam. Barkme checks for all of these.

Who this is for

Self-hosted stores: WooCommerce, Magento and custom builds. Hosted platforms like Shopify renew certificates for you, so most of this does not apply to them.

If you run the store yourself, you are also the person who finds out when it breaks. Usually that happens through a customer email, a sudden drop in orders, or an ad report showing clicks and no sales. Each of those arrives hours after the problem started. There is a longer list of what tends to go wrong in ecommerce store monitoring.

Monitor the pages that matter

A monitor checks one URL from outside, the way a shopper would open it. Set one up for the homepage, one for a product page and one for the cart or checkout. The Free plan includes three. Anything other than a 2xx or 3xx response counts as down.

Barkme follows redirects and judges the final response. A timeout, a DNS failure or a TLS error counts as down too. Each monitor has its own timeout, from 1 to 120 seconds, so a checkout that hangs for a minute fails the check even though it never returns an error.

The checkout gets its own monitor for a reason. Homepages are often served from a cache, so they keep loading while the database behind them is down. The cart and checkout can't be cached, so they are usually the first pages to fail.

Be clear about what a monitor reads. It looks at the response status. It does not add items to a cart or place a test order, so a checkout page that loads but fails when someone pays will still show as up. On a custom store, a health check endpoint that tests the database and returns a 500 when something is wrong closes part of that gap.

Warnings before things expire

Barkme checks each verified domain's SSL certificate and registration once a day, and warns you 30, 14, 7 and 1 days before either expires. If a certificate expires anyway, your monitors start failing and an incident opens within minutes.

Blocklist checks

If your domain is put on a security filter, some visitors can't open the store. If it is put on a mail blocklist, order confirmations go to spam. Barkme checks both once a day, tells you which list it is on, and tells you again when it is removed.

Setup

You verify your domain by adding one DNS TXT record, which usually takes about two minutes. Alerts on the Free plan go by email. Founder adds Telegram and 30-second checks.

The whole setup, in the order Barkme asks for it:

1. Verify the store's domain. Add the TXT record on the apex with host @ and the barkme-verify= token from your dashboard. One verified apex covers www, shop and any other subdomain, and the daily expiry and blocklist checks start straight away.
2. Add your monitors. Paste in the homepage, a product page and the checkout URL. Pick an interval: every minute on Free, down to every 30 seconds on Founder and Pro. Set the timeout close to what a shopper would put up with.
3. Connect a channel. Email works on every plan. On Founder you can add Slack, and Telegram for the phone you actually look at. Each channel sends a test alert when you connect it.
4. Add a status page if you want one. It shows 90 days of uptime per monitor and never shows the monitor URLs. Free gets a page on a barkme.dev subdomain, and paid plans can use your own domain.

What an outage alert looks like

At 21:14 on a busy evening, a plugin update breaks the payment step, and the checkout starts returning a 503. The homepage is cached and still loads.

The next check on the checkout monitor fails. Barkme tries again two seconds later, and that fails too. One minute on, the following check fails the same way. That is two failed checks in a row, so an incident opens, dated back to 21:14. The email names the monitor (Checkout), the URL, the time it was detected, the error and the phase it failed at. Here it failed at the response, so the DNS, the connection and the certificate were all fine. The problem is in the store itself.

You roll back the plugin. At 21:32 the next check passes, the incident resolves, and a recovery notice gives the total downtime: 18 minutes. Without the checkout monitor, the only sign would have been a quiet evening of orders.

If a firewall or a security plugin on your server rate-limits the checker, you may see a down alert while shoppers are fine. The alert names the probable cause when it looks like this. Whitelisting the Barkme prober IP, shown under Settings then Team, fixes it. More on this in uptime monitoring false alarms.

Which plan fits

A single store on one domain fits the Free plan: three monitors, checks every minute, email alerts, and the daily expiry and blocklist checks. Founder, at $19 a month, suits a store that takes real money every hour. It gives you 30-second checks, Slack and Telegram, up to 30 monitors across five domains, and a status page on your own domain. Pro, at $39 a month, is for agencies looking after many client stores, with unlimited monitors, 50 domains and a signed webhook. See pricing for the details, or web agencies if the stores are your clients'.