When a customer says the card form won't load at checkout
Card details on your website are collected by Stripe, our payment provider. The card fields are loaded from Stripe directly into the checkout page rather than being part of your website, which keeps card numbers away from your site and ours.
That also means the customer's browser has to be able to reach Stripe. For a small number of customers it can't, and the card form never appears.
What the customer sees
The card section shows a loading spinner instead of the card fields. If it still hasn't loaded after a few seconds, the website tries once more on its own — the customer doesn't need to do anything, and most of the time it works on the second try.
If the second attempt also fails, they see a message like:
We couldn't load the card form. Please try again.
This is usually caused by an ad blocker, a privacy extension, or a restricted network. Try pausing blockers for this site, or switch to another network or browser.
There's a Try Again button underneath.
What to tell the customer
Ask them to try these in order — the first two fix the large majority of cases.
- Pause any ad blocker or privacy extension for your website, then reload the page. uBlock Origin, AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, Privacy Badger and the built-in blockers in some browsers can block Stripe.
- Try a different network. If they're on office, school, hotel or public Wi-Fi, ask them to switch to mobile data. Some managed networks block payment providers.
- Try a different browser, or the same browser without private/incognito mode.
- Check the date and time on their device are correct. A badly wrong clock breaks the secure connection to Stripe.
Note: If none of that works, the customer can still place the order. If you accept cash, they can switch to Cash Payment on the same checkout page. Otherwise, take the order by phone.
Is it a problem with my website?
Almost always no. This is specific to the individual customer's browser or network — the checkout page itself is working, and other customers are ordering normally.
The one way to tell quickly: open your own website on your phone using mobile data and try to reach the card step. If the card form loads for you, your site is fine and the issue is on the customer's side.
Contact support if:
- Several unrelated customers report it in the same day. That's worth investigating.
- You can reproduce it yourself on a normal connection with no blockers.
We monitor how often the card form fails to load, so genuine site-wide problems are picked up without you needing to report them.
Why can't this be fixed permanently?
The card form has to be loaded from Stripe for your website to handle card payments securely — there's no way to serve it from your own site instead. When a customer's browser or network blocks that connection, the block is happening before the request reaches us, so it can't be worked around from our side. Retrying automatically and telling the customer what to change is the most that can be done.
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