A browser can preserve exactly the wrong thing: an old checkout link. In a photo-to-video product, that is especially confusing because the customer may already have spent time choosing a scene and preparing a photograph.

I build and maintain Marigold Bridge AI , an adult-portrait remembrance tool. Its main example is a twelve-second flower-bridge story. This post focuses on an actual inherited checkout defect and the recovery rules we added. AI assisted the writing; the behavior was checked against our implementation and tests.

The failure that a refresh did not fix

The inherited client stored a checkout request key by plan and provider in session storage. It removed the key only after payment. On the server, repeating that key returned the original checkout URL without evaluating whether it was still useful.

That combination can trap someone in one browser tab: choose a plan, leave without paying, return later, choose it again, receive the old link. Reloading preserves session storage.…