Shopify and Shopify Plus
Shopify marketingthat fixes the leak first
Ninety-four of every hundred people who land on an average Shopify store leave without adding anything to a cart. Buying more of those hundred is the expensive way to grow. This is the channel inside our ecommerce practice that works on the store itself.
★★★★★ 4.9 across 312 client reviews
Where it actually goes wrong
Three stages,and one of them is yours
Shopify already reports the funnel. Open Analytics, expand the conversion card, and you get four numbers: sessions, added to cart, reached checkout, converted. Almost nobody looks past the last one.
That is a mistake, because a conversion rate is a product of three separate rates with three separate causes. A store at 1.5 percent could have a product page problem, a shipping-cost problem, or a checkout problem, and the fix for each one is unrelated to the other two. Comparing yourself to a headline average tells you that something is wrong. It never tells you which thing.
Here is what a healthy chain looks like on published 2026 data.
| Stage | Typical | Strong | What a low number means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Added to cart | 5% to 6% of sessions | 7.5% and above | The product page is not doing its job, or the traffic is colder than you think. Images, shipping clarity, social proof and a mobile layout that does not bury the button. |
| Cart to checkout | Around 70% of carts | 80% and above | Usually cost surprise. Shipping, tax or a threshold appearing at the cart rather than on the product page. Some of it is genuine wishlist behaviour and will not be recovered. |
| Checkout to order | 45% to 55% | 60% to 75% | Friction at the final step. Missing express wallets, too many fields, no visible trust signals. Mobile typically runs 10 to 15 points behind desktop inside the same store. |
Sources: Littledata Shopify benchmark, Dynamic Yield add-to-cart benchmark, a published 2026 panel of 21 Shopify stores covering $417M in combined revenue, and 2026 Shopify checkout-completion benchmark compilations. Define your terms before comparing anything: orders over sessions and orders over checkout starts are both called conversion rate and differ by a factor of twenty.
Free, no email required
Find the stagethat is costing you most
Copy the four numbers off your Shopify Analytics overview card. This works out which stage sits furthest below benchmark and what closing that one gap is worth per month, in contribution rather than revenue.
Your last 30 days
Analytics › Overview › online store conversion rate. Expand the card.
Not sure what an order actually contributes after cost of goods, shipping, fees and returns? The contribution map on the hub works it out in about a minute, then bring the number back here. Using revenue instead will overstate every figure below by roughly three times.
Where it leaks
Updates as you type. Nothing is sent anywhere.
The gap figures assume a stage lift passes straight through to orders, which it partly will not. Lifting add-to-cart usually brings in some lower-intent carts that abandon later. Treat the number as the size of the prize, not a forecast, and note that what you can afford to pay for a customer moves with it.
What we actually change
The six surfacesthat move the number
No redesign for the sake of one. A redesign resets everything you have learned and usually costs a quarter of conversion rate while the new theme settles. We change these, in the order the calculator says to.
-
Surface 01
The product page
The single biggest lever, because this is where 94 of every 100 visitors quit. What we work on:
- Delivery cost and date visible above the fold, not at the cart
- Image sequence that answers scale, use and material before the copy does
- Reviews near the buy box rather than at the bottom of the page
- A sticky add-to-cart on mobile, which carries most of your traffic
-
Surface 02
Cart and cost surprise
Roughly three in ten carts never reach checkout, and the reason is usually a number the shopper did not expect. Shipping thresholds get stated on the product page instead of revealed at the cart, and free-shipping bars are tested rather than assumed.
-
Surface 03
Checkout
About half of checkout starts do not finish. Express wallets first, field count down, account creation optional, trust signals visible in the payment step. On Plus, the checkout extensibility work that most brands never turn on.
-
Surface 04
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Measured on a mid-range phone on cellular, not on your laptop. Most of the damage is third-party scripts and hero media rather than the theme itself, which is why a rebuild rarely fixes it and an audit usually does.
-
Surface 05
The app tax
Every app carries a subscription and a script. We list what each one costs per month, what it loads on the critical path, and what it is measurably returning. The usual outcome is a shorter list and a faster store.
-
Surface 06
Post-purchase
The thank-you page and the first thirty days are the cheapest revenue in the business. Post-purchase offers, a survey that tells you where customers actually came from, and the handoff into email and SMS flows.
Before we touch anything
What a competitor's adstell you about their store
The Meta Ad Library is public and free, and most operators have never opened it. Every advertiser in your category is in there, with every active creative and the date it started running.
We read four things from it, and none of them are about the creative. Where the ad points, because a brand sending paid traffic to a dedicated landing page rather than a product page has usually learned something about their product page. What the offer is, because a competitor who has run the same threshold offer for nine months has tested it against alternatives and kept it. How long each creative has been live, since longevity is the closest public proxy for what is working. And how many variants are running at once, which tells you the production cadence you are being asked to compete with.
Then we take the same walk through their store as a shopper. Where the shipping cost appears, how many fields are in the checkout, which apps are loading, how fast it is on a phone. It is an afternoon of work and it sets the bar for everything in the section above.
You've got questions
We've got
straight answers
What is a good Shopify conversion rate?
The platform average is about 1.4 percent, the top fifth of stores sit above 3.2 percent and the top tenth above 4.7 percent. A mature panel of 21 stores covering $417M in revenue ran a median closer to 2.1 percent, which is probably the fairer target for an established brand.
The average is a poor benchmark for anyone doing real volume, because it includes every new and unoptimised store on the platform. Compare against your category and your device mix, not the platform.
Our conversion rate fell after we scaled ads. Is the store broken?
Usually not. The most common cause of a falling conversion rate is a rising session count, because scaling acquisition brings in colder audiences with lower intent. The store did not get worse, the traffic got broader.
The way to tell the difference is to segment. If conversion rate held steady inside each traffic source and only the blended number moved, that is a mix effect and it may be perfectly profitable. If it fell inside a source, something changed on the site. This gets confused with attribution more often than anything else in ecommerce.
Do we need a redesign, a custom theme, or headless?
Almost certainly none of the three, at least not first. A redesign discards every learning in the current store and typically costs conversion rate for a quarter while it settles. Headless solves a speed and flexibility problem that most brands under $30M do not have, and adds a development dependency that never goes away.
Start with the calculator on this page. If checkout is the weak stage, a new theme would not have helped. If the product page is weak, changing four things on it is a week of work rather than a project.
How many apps is too many?
The count matters less than what each one loads and what it returns. An app that adds 400ms to a mobile product page needs to be earning its keep in measurable orders, and most cannot show that they are.
We audit the stack against three columns: monthly cost, weight on the critical path, and attributable revenue. Anything that fails all three comes off. The saving is usually a few hundred a month and a faster store, which are both worth having.
Do you work on the store only, or the ads as well?
Either. Plenty of brands bring us in for the store while an existing team keeps running media, and that works fine because the conversion rate is a multiplier on whatever they are buying.
Where it works better is together, because the store and the ad account share one constraint: what a customer is allowed to cost. Conversion work raises that ceiling and paid work spends against it. The hub explains how the whole engagement runs.
How long before conversion rate moves?
The obvious fixes ship in the first two to three weeks and often show up immediately, because things like a visible shipping cost or an express wallet are not subtle. Structured testing takes longer, and how much longer depends entirely on your traffic. A store with 60,000 monthly sessions can resolve a meaningful test in two to three weeks. A store with 8,000 cannot, and we will tell you that rather than run tests that never reach significance.
The rest of the system
Store work is one of five
A better conversion rate multiplies every channel pointed at it, which is why we run the whole ecommerce practice against one contribution target rather than five separate scorecards.
Next step
Thirty minutes.
Bring your funnel card.
Screenshot the Shopify Analytics conversion card and your last month of ad spend. We will name the weakest stage on the call and tell you what we would change first, whether or not you hire us.
No obligation · Usually booked 1-2 days out
