How to increase your Shopify conversion rate: find the leak, price it, fix it

Why tips don’t work (and what does)

Every list of conversion tips is right about something. The trouble is that you can’t do thirty things at once, and most of them won’t touch the part of your store that’s actually losing sales. A store whose phones can’t get past the cart gains nothing from better product photos.

So work in this order:

1. Find the leak. Measure where in the funnel shoppers drop out, separately for phones and computers.
2. Price the leak. Turn each drop-out into a euro figure, so you know which one is worth fixing first.
3. Fix the costliest leak, starting with the causes that have real evidence behind them.
4. Check that it worked, with a test or at least a careful before-and-after.

Step 1: find where shoppers drop out

Shopify already measures your funnel. In Analytics → Reports, open Conversion rate breakdown. It shows four steps: all sessions, sessions with cart additions, sessions that reached checkout, and sessions that completed checkout.

One detail trips almost everyone up: Shopify divides every step by total sessions, not by the step before. The help page says it plainly: the reached-checkout step is “sessions that reached checkout divided by total sessions.” To see where people actually leave, divide each step by the previous one yourself:

Now do it twice: once for mobile, once for desktop, using the session device type to split the report. On many stores most visits now come from phones (check your own split), and a step that works fine on a laptop can fall apart on a small screen.

Two warnings before you trust the numbers. First, Shopify changed how it measures sessions between September 21 and 23, 2026, and says session-based figures “might be different” afterwards without your traffic having changed. Don’t compare a week before that date with a week after it. Second, small numbers are noisy: with a few dozen orders a month, a step can swing a lot from one week to the next by chance. Use a month of data or more. For what counts as normal, see ecommerce conversion rate benchmarks.

Step 2: put a price on each leak

A leak is a step where far fewer shoppers move on than they should. A leak only matters in proportion to the money behind it. The simplest benchmark is one you already have: your own desktop numbers. If computers get through a step and phones don’t, much of that gap is usually your site. Some of it is how people shop (browsing on the phone, buying later on a laptop), so treat the figures below as the most you could win back, not a forecast.

If desktop and mobile look equally weak at a step, use an outside reference instead. For the stretch from cart to order there’s a good one: Baymard Institute’s average cart abandonment rate of 70.22%, across 50 studies, means roughly 3 in 10 carts become orders. Compare that with your sessions that completed checkout divided by your sessions with an add to cart. Here’s how to calculate your cart abandonment rate.

Step 3: fix the costliest leak first

Now go to the step you picked. Here is what most often causes a leak at each step, and the evidence behind it.

When shoppers don’t add to cart

The product page is where the decision is made. Baymard’s product page research rates 51% of ecommerce sites as “mediocre” or worse, and in its testing, 56% of shoppers’ first action on a product page was to look through the images. Older Nielsen Norman Group research found that 20% of failed tasks came down to incomplete or unclear product information.

What to check first:

• Images: several, large, zoomable, including the product in use. (test idea: the product in use)
• The answer to “will it fit?”: sizes, dimensions, compatibility, right next to the size picker. (test idea: size help by the picker)
• Delivery cost and timing under the price, so nobody has to go to checkout to find out. (test idea: delivery under the price)
• The buy button on a phone: visible without scrolling back up. (test idea: a sticky buy button)

When carts don’t reach checkout

This is usually about money and trust. In Baymard’s survey of why shoppers abandon a checkout (leaving aside people who were just browsing), these are the reasons that point at the cart:

• extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees): 40%
• delivery too slow: 20%
• didn’t trust the site with their card: 19%
• couldn’t see the total cost up front: 12%

Show the full total, delivery included, in the cart. If you have a free-delivery threshold, show how far the shopper is from it. Make returns and delivery dates visible before checkout, not after.

When checkouts don’t complete

Here the form itself is the problem. Baymard found the average checkout had 11.3 form fields in 2024, while most sites need only 8. In its abandonment survey, 18% left because the site wanted them to create an account, 17% because the checkout was too long or complicated, and 9% because there weren’t enough payment methods.

• Let people check out as a guest, and make that the obvious option.
• Cut fields you don’t need: a second address line, company name and phone number can usually go or become optional.
• Offer the payment methods your shoppers expect: in the Netherlands that means iDEAL, in Belgium Bancontact, plus express wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay.
• Test your own checkout on a phone, with a real card. 17% of shoppers in Baymard’s survey left because the site had errors or crashed.

Everywhere: speed

Speed is the one fix that helps every step, and it has unusually good evidence. Rakuten 24 ran a month-long A/B test where the only difference was page speed: the faster version converted 33% better and earned 53% more revenue per visitor. Farfetch observed that above 2.5 seconds, each extra 100 milliseconds of loading went with about 1.3% fewer conversions, an observed relationship rather than a test. A Google-commissioned study by Deloitte found that a 0.1-second faster mobile site was associated with 8.4% more conversions in retail, though that one is a correlation, not a test.

On Shopify the usual culprits are apps that each add their own scripts, oversized images and heavy theme sections. Remove apps you don’t use, compress your images, and check your product page in PageSpeed Insights on mobile.

Step 4: check that it worked

A change that feels better isn’t automatically better. You need to know, for two reasons: so you keep the winners, and so you stop spending time on ideas that don’t work.

• On the Grow plan or higher, Shopify has built-in Experiments, part of its Rollouts feature. They split traffic 50/50 by default, end after 90 days unless you change it, and can test changes to your theme, checkout and discounts. Shopify’s help page lists what’s possible.
• With an A/B testing tool, plan the test length before you start and read the result once, at the end. How long a test needs to run depends on your traffic, and this free calculator does the sums.
• With too little traffic to test, fix obvious bugs straight away (a broken button doesn’t need a test), keep a dated log of every change, and compare full weeks before and after. It’s weaker evidence, but far better than none.

Expect most ideas to fail

This is the part nobody puts in a list of tips. Writing about Bing’s thousands of controlled experiments, its head of research and development noted that fewer than a third of ideas move the metrics they were designed to improve, and that at Bing the share is lower still. Bing has more data and more experts than any store, and still most of its ideas didn’t work.

That isn’t a reason to stop. It’s a reason to work on the biggest leak first, so that the ideas that do work are worth something, and to measure, so that the ones that don’t can be dropped quickly.

A one-month plan

• Week 1: pull the Conversion rate breakdown for the last 90 days, split by device. Work out the step-to-step rates and price each leak.
• Week 2: fix the obvious problems on the costliest step: bugs, missing delivery costs, broken layouts on phones. These don’t need a test.
• Weeks 3 and 4: test the main change for that step, for at least two full weeks, and read the result once at the end. Then go back to week 1 with fresh numbers.

If you’d like a head start, a free scan of your store checks the product page, cart and checkout the way a shopper sees them on a phone and a laptop, and lists what it finds, worst first.