The Screens Nobody Briefed: How to Write 404s, Failed Payments and Empty Baskets Without Losing the Sale

There's a stretch of your website that no one has ever briefed.

Not the homepage — that's been through four rounds, a workshop and a board meeting. Not the service pages, either, or the About page that took six weeks to sign off. The unclaimed territory sits further out: the 404 that appears when an old link rots, the payment screen that flashes red when a card is declined at half eleven at night, the basket that looks like a freshly mopped floor, the search results page that announces nothing matched and then stops talking.

Those screens are usually written by whoever built them, on a Friday afternoon, and they read like it. Which is a pity, because they arrive at the single most fragile point in the whole relationship: the moment something has already gone wrong.

I look at these pages first in a copy audit. Not because they're glamorous — they aren't — but because they're the only place where a customer is actively stuck, actively annoyed, and actively deciding whether you're the sort of outfit that sorts things out or the sort that shrugs.

The three seconds after something breaks

When a page fails, the reader isn't reading. They're scanning for two things in a hurry: am I the problem, and what do I do now?

Most placeholder copy manages to be unclear on both counts while taking forty words to do it. 'An error has occurred. Please try again later.' Try what again? Later when? Is my money gone?

That's not a wording problem so much as a nerve problem. The screen has flinched and said nothing useful, and the customer is left to imagine the worst — usually the version where they've just been charged twice and no one will answer the phone until Monday.

The copy's job is to close that gap. Not to entertain, not to charm, not to make the brand feel human. Just to say what happened, what it means for the person reading, and what they should do next. Everything else is decoration.

Apologise like an adult, not a butler and not a robot

British brands have two bad habits when something goes wrong. The first is grovelling: 'We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.' That sentence has been copy-and-pasted so many times it's stopped meaning anything. It apologises to nobody in particular, for nothing in particular, and quietly implies the fault is the weather.

The second habit is refusing to apologise at all, in case an admission of fault ends up in front of a solicitor. So we get 'an unexpected issue was encountered' — passive, blameless, bloodless, and somehow more insulting than a shrug.

Somewhere between those two is a short sentence that owns the thing without throwing itself on the floor. 'Sorry — that link doesn't exist any more. We've moved the page.' That's an apology, an explanation and a way out, and none of it will end up in court.

One 'sorry' is plenty. Two starts to sound like a person backing out of a room.

Helpful without being chirpy

Here's where tone of voice guides tend to lead writers astray. The brand voice document says 'warm and playful', so every failure state gets an exclamation mark and a light-hearted aside, and the person whose payment has just bounced is invited to enjoy some banter.

Read the room. If someone's lost their basket, they are not in the market for personality. They're in the market for a working link.

Warmth in a failure state looks like precision with a human edge, not a cheer. It sounds like a competent colleague leaning over: 'That payment didn't go through — your bank declined it. Nothing's been charged. Try a different card or give us a ring on 0117 496 0123.'

That's warm. It's warm because it's specific, it's quick, and it answers the question the customer is too wound up to ask. Exclamation marks are not warmth. They're the audio equivalent of a laugh track.

Never make a joke near someone's money

There is a line, and the line is money.

A funny 404 is a well-worn trope, and a genuinely good one can earn a small smile. Someone's typed the wrong URL, no harm done, you can afford a wink. But the moment a card has been declined, a refund is in limbo, or a direct debit has failed, humour reads as contempt. To the person staring at the screen, it says: we don't know how serious this is for you.

Somebody's payment fails at 11pm and the site makes a wisecrack. They were already embarrassed. Now they're embarrassed and annoyed.

My rule of thumb: if the customer stands to lose money, time or face because of this screen, write it straight. Save the jokes for the 404, where the stakes are roughly zero.

Empty states are a sales page in disguise

An empty basket, a search with no results, a filtered category with nothing in it — these are not dead ends. They're the last room the customer sees before they leave the building.

'No results found' is a door slammed shut. 'Nothing matched "navy linen shirt" — try removing the size filter, or browse the full linen range' is a door held open. Same information, entirely different welcome.

And a basket that says nothing but 'your basket is empty' has wasted a screen. It should be doing what a decent shop assistant does: point at something worth buying, without pressure. One line of suggestion beats three paragraphs of silence.

The three-line repair

Next time you hit a failure state, write it in three lines:

• What happened. Plain, specific, no passive voice. 'We couldn't find that page.'
• What it means for them. Kill the panic before it starts. 'Nothing's been charged.'
• What to do next. One clear action, linked. 'Head back to your basket.'

Three lines, then stop. If you find yourself writing a fourth, it's probably explaining the CMS or apologising a second time, and neither of those helps anybody.

An audit you can run this week

You don't need a project for this. Open your site, break things on purpose, and read what comes back. Search for something absurd. Abandon a basket. Enter a card you know will fail. Try an old URL from a 2021 campaign.

Then ask, for each screen: does this sound like us, and does it help? If the answer is no to either, you've found copy that's quietly costing you trust — often a lot of it, at the exact moment the customer had their wallet out.

These pages didn't get briefed because nobody thought they mattered. That's the opportunity sitting in plain sight.