The rest of the funnel seems fine, but huge drop-offs after initiate checkout. Help?

[pinacepins]

Right now I'm pushing out a Tik Tok campign for exactly one of my products, available at www.pin-ace.com/products/custompride. I was getting very different results last weekend vs this weekend, and the difference in results seems to be in the checkout. The only change I made between then and now in the checkout process was that I removed the Canada Post and USPS calculated shipping options to simplify the checkout process since no one was using it.

I offer free shipping on amounts below the cost of this item, so everyone should be seeing free shipping at checkout.

Here are screenshots between Sept 18 and between Sept 25 for comparison:

Sept 18:

Sept 25:

What could possibly be the issue and how do I restore this step in the funnel?

[Hilary]

Hi, @pinacepins 

Thanks for sharing the information about your recent decrease in conversions. I noticed you're offering a lot of discounts on your store right now, would this be enough to decrease the price of the product so that it no longer qualifies for free shipping? I want to confirm that this isn't the cause for the decrease in conversions at checkout. After confirming this, I'd still suggest adding the product to your cart, and testing different shipping addresses to ensure there are no breaks in the checkout process. 

Further, we have a great article on conversion rate optimization that I'd recommend running through for suggestions. My main suggestion to find out where you're losing your customers is to download a heatmap app from the Shopify App store, for example Lucky Orange. This app allows you to watch screen recording replays, which lets you watch visitors navigate your website and checkout. As well, it has a live view option, which lets you see visitor activity in real-time.

Have you recently made any other changes that you can think of that may have caused this decrease? 

[pinacepins]

Hi Hillary,

Thank you so much for the help! I've been watching replays from my customer's orders through Mouseflow, which has been very helpful in determining pain points. I think the reason the first two steps of my funnel are performing that well is because of the lessons I learned from doing so. For example, I have yet to find a case where a customer has entered the checkout flow without being able to qualify for free shipping, even after scoring a 20% discount.

The problem with these tracking solutions is that Shopify doesnt allow them to show me how my customers are moving through the checkout flow. In fact, I notice I have very little control over the checkout flow at all, which is really unfortunate because that's where my funnel is performing so poorly. That really needs to be a feature that Shopify downgrades from being Plus-exclusive. Just require tracking apps to not record keystrokes during the checkout process :).

Any other insights?

[Hilary]

Thanks for the reply here and further context.

I understand wanting to customize the checkout, however since the Checkout is a secured page, the source code is not made available for security reasons. This helps to ensure that the information for both our merchants and their customers remains safe at all times. As you mentioned, there are some limited changes that merchants on Shopify Plus can make. I'd be happy to submit some feedback on your behalf regarding wanting to be able to make those same changes outside of Shopify Plus. 

That's great that you've been tracking your customers through Mouseflow and have been able to make some impactful improvements, great work. As for finding the issue in your checkout, we do have a detailed blog article on analyzing your conversion funnels that may have some new suggestions for you to look into. Perhaps try reaching out to customers to see if you can gather some information, and make sure you're utilizing abandoned cart emails. 

As you've determined, it's difficult to pin point why you might be losing your customers at the checkout. Working through your checkout flow and making sure there are no hiccups is a great step. From there, it may be the audience you're targeting in your TikTok ads. We do have a blog article on how to market on TikTok, which includes a large section regarding defining your audience. This is very important in any marketing strategy.

Aside from these thoughts, hopefully some other Community users will have some suggestions for you on why you might be losing customers at the checkout. If the trend continues in the same direction, and you aren't finding any answers, it may be worth hiring a Shopify Expert to assist you in looking into this further. 

[PaulNewton]

Make sure to go through the flow yourself with an order.

About the only things you can control on the checkout are things like billing address and shipping address being the same, modifying text using theme translations, and the limited style options in theme settings. 

May want your checkout style settings to reflect your brand if it doesn't already.

Generally without high volume traffic and not being on PLUS you'd want to only ever change 1 substantial checkout setting a time making it a painfully slow testing process.

See if any dropoffs share similar IPs in which case they may be bots (typical effect when merchants buy a "traffic" service).

For the ones that are abandoned carts with emails just ask the potential customer if they had a problem.

There's other factors that can vary wildly even dependent on what the merchandise is.