How we approach conversion problems on Shopify
A short guide to the thinking behind the audit, useful even if you plan to run one yourself.
Start with the numbers, then go and look
Every audit begins with your own data, because a store’s conversion rate on its own says very little. We break the journey into stages and compare them: how many sessions reach a product page, how many of those add to cart, how many carts reach checkout and how many checkouts become orders. The stage with the largest relative drop is where a fix is worth the most.
Numbers tell us where to look, never why. So once the weak stage is clear, we go and shop that part of the store ourselves, on the devices your customers use, and watch recordings of real sessions. A sharp fall between product view and add to cart might turn out to be a variant picker that resets on mobile, a missing delivery date or a price that looks different from the ad that brought the visitor in.
Benchmarks matter less than your own baseline
Merchants often ask what a good conversion rate is. The honest answer is that it depends on category, price point, traffic mix and how ready visitors are to buy, so a generic figure can mislead you in either direction. A high-ticket furniture store and a low-cost accessories brand should never be judged by the same number.
What helps is comparing your store with itself. Gaps between phone and desktop, between traffic sources, or between your best and worst landing pages are far more useful than an industry average. They point at specific templates and journeys, and they give you a baseline to measure every fix against once it ships.
Fix, test or leave alone
Not every finding deserves an A/B test. If a checkout button is hidden behind a chat bubble on mobile, you fix it. If you are unsure whether a bundle offer will lift order value or cannibalize full-price sales, that is a real question worth testing. We label each finding so your team knows which path it belongs on.
Formal testing needs enough orders to reach a trustworthy result, and many smaller stores do not have that volume for every idea. In that case we recommend shipping clear fixes directly, watching the before and after carefully and saving tests for the decisions where being wrong would be expensive.
- Fix: clear friction with low risk, shipped directly
- Test: changes with an uncertain outcome and enough traffic to measure
- Leave: ideas that sound good but have no evidence behind them yet
Why cart abandonment is rarely about price alone
Abandoned carts are the most visible symptom in most stores, and the cause is usually more specific than shoppers finding the product too expensive. Shipping costs revealed late, no delivery estimate, a forced account step, a discount field that sends people off to search for codes, missing payment options or a slow cart drawer all show up regularly in recordings.
Shopify already gives you a strong checkout, with Shop Pay and other accelerated options available, so most of the friction we find sits before it: in the cart, in the product page messaging and in the promises made on the way in. Recovery emails through a tool such as Klaviyo help, but they work far better once the reasons people leave have been reduced.
Reading the product page as a buyer would
Product pages carry most of the persuasion in a store, so they get the longest review. We read them in the order a hesitant buyer does: does the first image show the product clearly, is the price easy to find, does the variant picker make availability obvious, and is there a direct answer to the question that usually blocks the sale, whether that is fit, compatibility, materials or delivery time.
Many of the answers already exist somewhere in the store, just not where they are needed. A delivery estimate on the shipping policy page does nothing for a shopper deciding on a product page. Reviews loaded at the very bottom are invisible to someone who never scrolls that far. Often the fix is moving existing content, using product metafields and theme blocks, rather than writing anything new.
