Find your leak first
In your Shopify admin, go to Analytics, then Reports. Click the Category filter, choose Behavior, and open Conversion rate breakdown. A session is one visit to your store. The report shows how many sessions added to cart, how many reached checkout and how many bought.
Now compare your numbers with this table. The typical figures come from Littledata's data on 438 Shopify stores, from August to October 2026. The "worry" column marks the bottom fifth of those stores. Littledata's figures come from Google Analytics and not from Shopify's own reports, so treat them as a rough guide.
| What to check | How to work it out | Typical store | Worry if under | Start with |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Added to cart | Cart sessions divided by all sessions | About 7 in 100 | About 3 in 100 | Product page |
| Finished checkout | Completed checkouts divided by checkouts reached | About 47 in 100 | About 26 in 100 | Checkout |
| Bought at all | Completed checkouts divided by all sessions | About 13 in 1,000 | 5 in 1,000 | Your worst row above |
If plenty of people add to cart but few reach checkout, start with the cart section below. A surprise in the total is the usual reason.
Three things will keep you from panicking over the wrong number:
- Compare with yourself first. What counts as a good Shopify conversion rate depends on what you sell. In the same data, a typical beauty store gets about 26 orders per 1,000 visits and a typical clothing store gets about 10. The average ecommerce conversion rate tells you even less than your own past months do.
- Only compare dates after September 23, 2026. Shopify changed how it counts sessions from September 21 to 23, so your numbers may have moved with nothing else changing.
- Check phones on their own. Ask Sidekick, Shopify's built-in assistant: "Show my conversion rate by device type for the last 30 days." The typical store sells about as well on phones as on computers. If yours sells far less on phones, your phone pages are the first job.
These figures come from established stores with at least 90 orders in three months. A newer store will often sit lower, and that's fine. The checklist still works. Your numbers will just jump around more.
Buy something from your own store
Do this whatever your numbers say. Take your phone, pick your cheapest product and pay with a real card. Then cancel and refund the order. Your payment provider may charge a fee, so call it the cheapest research you'll ever buy.
Notice each moment you sigh. Maybe the shipping cost shows up late. Maybe you had to type your address twice, or the keyboard covered the button. Each sigh goes on your list, because your customers feel it too and they don't have your reasons to keep going.
Here's why this matters, in the words of a founder quoted on Shopify's blog, talking about shoppers on their phones:
"...if they have to fill out a form, we've lost them." Benjamin Sehl, co-founder of Kotn
Checkout checklist
Work through this if too few people finish checkout. These people are one step from paying, so losing them hurts the most. Baymard, a research firm, asked online shoppers why they left a cart. Set aside the people who were only browsing. Of the rest, nearly 1 in 5 left because the site made them create an account.
- Turn off forced sign-in. Go to Settings, then Checkout. Under Customer contact method, untick "Require customers to sign in to their account before checkout." While it's on, Shopify also hides fast options like Apple Pay from the cart.
- Remove boxes you don't need. On the same page, under Customer information, set Company name to "Don't include." Set Address line 2 to "Optional." Set the shipping phone number to "Optional" or "Don't include," unless your courier really needs it.
- Turn on Shop Pay. Go to Settings, then Payments. Click Manage in the Shopify Payments section, tick Shop Pay and save. Shoppers who already use it won't have to type their details.
- Look for payments that failed. Go to Orders, then Abandoned checkouts. A failed payment usually doesn't create an order. It shows up here instead, in the Timeline of that checkout. You may find people who tried to pay you and couldn't.
- Turn on the abandoned checkout email. It reminds people who started checkout and left. Go to Apps, then Messaging, then Automations. Click View templates, choose Abandoned checkout, then Turn on automation. It only goes to email subscribers unless you change the To: field to All customers. If you sell in the EU or UK, check the rules before you change that. Once you switch to this version, you can't go back to the old email.
For the email itself, keep it short and let people answer:
Your [product] is still in your cart. If something stopped you, just reply and I'll help.
The replies will tell you what to fix next.
Cart checklist
Work through this if people add to cart and then disappear. Baymard's biggest reason for leaving was extra costs: about 4 in 10 of those same shoppers blamed shipping, tax or fees. So don't let the cart be the first place they see the real price.
- Put the full cost on the product page. Add one line right under the price. Change this to fit your store: Free shipping over $60, otherwise $6. Arrives in 3 to 5 days. Free returns for 30 days.
- Make the delivery date plain. About 1 in 5 left because delivery was too slow. If shoppers can't find a date, they may assume the worst.
- Offer free shipping over a set amount. Go to Discounts, click Create discount, then choose Free shipping. Under Method, pick Automatic discount. Under Minimum purchase requirements, enter an amount a bit above your typical order. Shoppers see the title you give it, so call it something clear like "Free shipping over $60." Check the sum against your profit first.
- Say the same thing everywhere. Your product page, shipping policy and returns policy should all match. Nervous first-time buyers do check.
Product page checklist
Work through this if too few people add to cart. Do one page first. In the Behavior reports, open Sessions by landing page and pick the product page with the most visits.
- Run the five-second test. Show the first screen to a friend on a phone for five seconds, then take the phone away. Ask what it is, who it's for and what it costs. If they can't say, fix that before anything else.
- Say what it does for them. "Soy wax, 8 oz" describes a candle. "Burns for 40 hours and won't blacken the jar" gives someone a reason to want it.
- Say who it's for. "For dry, sensitive skin" helps the right person. It also politely sends away the wrong one, and that saves you a return.
- Put answers in the photos. Many shoppers swipe through the photos before they read a word. The founder of the spice company Diaspora Co. told Shopify that more visitors bought right after she moved key details into the main photos. Her list for those photos includes size guides, recipes and real customer reviews.
- Get your first five reviews. Northwestern's Spiegel Research Center found shoppers were far more likely to buy a product with five reviews than one with none, and that the gain slows down fast after that. So get five on your best sellers before you chase 50 on one. Ask a week or so after delivery. Don't buy fake reviews or write your own. US government rules ban both.
- Keep the price and button on the first screen. Open the page on your phone and check. If a giant banner pushes them down, the banner loses.
Help people find the right thing
Some people never reach the product they came for. They're easy to spot and cheap to help.
- Fix searches that find nothing. In the Behavior reports, open Searches with no results. If shoppers type "couch" and you call it a "sofa," add their word to the product title or description. If they keep asking for something you don't sell, you've just been handed free product research.
- Put best sellers first. Open each main collection on your phone. The first four products should be the ones most likely to sell.
- Use plain menu names. "Sofas" beats "The Living Collection."
Speed checklist
Go to Online Store in your admin. On the Themes page, Shopify rates your store as Good, Moderate or Poor on three things. They are how fast it loads, how fast it reacts to a tap, and whether the page jumps around while loading.
If you see Good, move on. You have better things to do.
If you see Moderate or Poor, go to Analytics, then Reports, and search for "contentful" to open the loading speed report. The Over Time version of that report shows numbered tags for changes such as app installs and theme updates. Hover over one to see what changed around the time your speed dropped.
Then open your list of installed apps. Somewhere in there is one you added for a sale two Novembers ago, and it's been charging you rent ever since. Remove what you don't use, then check again in a couple of days, since this data can run up to 36 hours behind.
You can skip shrinking every photo by hand. Shopify prepares store images on its own and advises uploading good originals.
Check who's visiting before you blame the store
Sometimes the store is fine and the visitors were never going to buy. Go to Analytics, then Reports, click Category and choose Marketing. Open Performance by marketing channel. It shows visits, orders and conversion rate for each place your traffic comes from.
Say your email visitors buy well and your social visitors hardly ever do. Your store is the same for both groups, so the store probably isn't the problem. Someone who tapped a reel was watching videos a minute ago. Before you rewrite your pages, look at where your ad money is going.
Then check Sessions by location, under the Acquisition category. If lots of visits come from a country you don't ship to, those people could never have bought.
Ask the people who are leaving
Everything above is a good guess about strangers. The people about to leave know exactly what's stopping them, so ask. Put one question on your busiest product page, shown after someone has been there a while:
What's stopping you from buying today?
Give short answers to tap, since few people want to type on a phone: the price or shipping, not sure it's right for me, need it sooner, not sure I trust this store, just looking, something else. Baymard found about 4 in 10 US shoppers had left a cart because they were only browsing, so expect plenty of "just looking." Then act on the pattern. Price answers send you to the cart section. Trust answers send you to reviews and policies.
"Not sure it's right for me" is the hard one, because every shopper's doubt is a bit different and a page can only say one thing. That's the problem we built Possible to solve. It's our own product, so take this with a pinch of salt. Possible is an AI built on real sales psychology. It asks each visitor the right question at the right moment, remembers the answers and guides them to a sale. It's free to start, and you can read about our AI sales assistant for online stores. If you sell three products and the choice is obvious, finish the checklists first.
How to tell if a fix worked
Change one thing at a time and write down the date. Open Conversion rate over time in the Behavior reports and compare the two weeks before with the two weeks after. Use the same days of the week, and watch the step that fix should move. A checkout fix should show up in finished checkouts first. That habit, one change and one measured step at a time, is what conversion rate optimization really comes down to.
Expect the numbers to bounce around. With 40 orders a month, a good week can simply be a good week. Judge over a month, and listen to what customers tell you.
Can you run a proper A/B test?
An A/B test shows two versions of a page to two groups of visitors at the same time. Shopify has one built in called Rollouts, and you need the Grow plan or higher to run a test. Go to Markets, then Rollouts, click Create rollout and choose Experiment. Visitors split 50/50 by default, and every test needs an end date. It reports add to cart rate, checkout rate and conversion rate. Older "vintage" themes can't use it.
The catch is visits. Say your store gets 13 orders per 1,000 visits, and a new page would really bring you 20% more orders. By my sums, you'd need about 60,000 visits in all before a test could reliably show that. At 5,000 visits a month, that takes a year. By then you'll have forgotten what B was.
So here's a simple rule:
| Visits a month | What to do |
|---|---|
| Under 10,000 | Fix what's clearly broken and compare before and after |
| 10,000 to 50,000 | Test only big changes, like a new page layout. A change that brings 50% more orders takes about 10,000 visits in all to show up |
| Over 50,000 | Test one change at a time, and set the end date before you start |
Whatever you test, don't stop early because the chart looks good on day three. Charts look good on day three all the time.
If you don't have the traffic, Shopify's SimGym tool sends AI shoppers through your store and has no traffic minimum. Those are simulated shoppers, so use what they say as ideas to check and not as proof.
What to skip for now
- A new theme. Unless the store looks broken, a redesign rarely fixes the step your report points to. It also makes your before and after numbers useless.
- Another app. Each one adds a monthly bill and more code. Add one when it fixes a problem you've measured.
- Button colors. You'd need a huge store to measure the difference, and shoppers buying a candle don't care about your shade of green.
- Fake countdowns. A timer that resets every time someone visits gets noticed, and the trust you lose costs more than the sale you gain.
- Sitewide discounts. They train people to wait, and they won't help a shopper who doesn't trust you yet.
If you only have one afternoon
- Open Conversion rate breakdown and find your worst row. (5 minutes)
- Buy from your own store on your phone. (10 minutes)
- Turn off forced sign-in, remove extra checkout boxes and turn on Shop Pay. (20 minutes)
- Check Abandoned checkouts for failed payments. (10 minutes)
- Add the cost and delivery line under the price on your busiest product. (30 minutes)
- Run the five-second test on that page and rewrite the first screen. (1 hour)
- Write down today's date and your numbers, so you can compare in two weeks.
Everything here uses Shopify's own menus, but the thinking carries over to ecommerce conversion rate optimization on any platform.
Questions about Shopify conversion rate optimization
What's a good conversion rate for a Shopify store?
In Littledata's data, the typical store gets about 13 orders per 1,000 visits (1.3%). The top fifth get 27 or more (2.7%), and the top tenth get 36 or more (3.6%). It varies a lot by what you sell, so your own past months are the fairest comparison.
How do I improve my Shopify conversion rate?
Find the step where people drop off in Conversion rate breakdown, then fix that step first. Good places to start are removing forced sign-in, showing the full cost before the cart, and rewriting the first phone screen of your busiest product page.
Is a 7% conversion rate good?
For a Shopify store, it's about double where the top tenth begins, so yes. Before you celebrate, check where the visits come from. A store selling mostly to its own email list can score that high, and the number can fall once you bring in strangers.
Is 20% a good conversion rate?
For orders on an ordinary online store, that's so unusual that I'd check the counting first. Look for a tracking error or a very small number of visits. If it's for something free, like an email sign-up, it can be perfectly real.
How long does Shopify conversion rate optimization take?
Most of the checkout and cart fixes take minutes to an afternoon. Give each one two weeks before you judge it, or a month if you get few orders. It never really ends, but the first few fixes are often the easiest.
Does Shopify have A/B testing built in?
Yes. Rollouts can run tests on your live store if you're on the Grow plan or higher. It needs a lot of visits to give you a reliable answer, so smaller stores do better comparing before and after.
Do I need an agency or an app to do this?
Not to start. Most of the checkout, cart and product page checklists can be done with Shopify's own settings. Think about outside help once you've run out of obvious fixes and have enough visits to test properly.
Go deeper on conversion tactics.