I sell products on my Shopify store using Facebook Ads. My abandoned checkout rate used to be around 30–40%.
After I installed a post-purchase app, the Clarity app, and made 4–5 test purchases, my abandoned checkout rate jumped to 70–80%.
No other changes were made: shipping terms and delivery times stayed the same, there are no hidden fees, and the checkout page load speed doesn’t seem to have changed significantly.
What could be the reason? Did my test purchases mess up the pixel, is the issue caused by one of the apps, or did Facebook simply start targeting a different audience?
will try to uninstall these apps
30–40% abandoned checkout from Facebook traffic was actually pretty healthy, so your base funnel wasn’t broken.
This feels more like Trust Friction than a pixel issue. When abandonment jumps that hard without pricing or shipping changes, it’s usually a confidence drop right at the payment step. Even small visual changes from apps (extra scripts, widgets, tracking notices) can make checkout look less “official” and more experimental, especially for cold FB traffic.
From the buyer side, checkout is the highest-risk moment. If anything looks new, layered, or slightly off-brand, people hesitate. And hesitation at payment = exit.
I’d focus on one thing: make checkout feel as native and clean as possible again.
-
Remove or temporarily disable the post-purchase app and Clarity for 3–5 days and compare abandonment.
-
Check if any extra banners, badges, or tracking disclosures now appear above or near the payment button.
-
Keep the area around the card fields visually empty and consistent with your brand (no extra colors, no extra boxes).
If the rate drops back, it wasn’t the audience. It was trust at the last step.
The most likely culprit here is one of the new apps you installed, either the post-purchase app or Clarity.
Maybe here’s why: first, many post-purchase upsell apps add extra scripts or redirects that can interfere with the checkout flow or the Facebook Pixel. Second, Clarity (the heatmap/session recording app) is known to sometimes cause performance issues or conflict with tracking pixels if not configured properly.
I think you can check these first:
- Temporarily disable the post-purchase app and the Clarity app for a day or two and see if your abandoned checkout rate goes back down.
- Check your Facebook Pixel in the Events Manager, look for any errors, duplicated events, or “PageView” firing too late because of added scripts.
- Or make sure the test purchases you did were done in a real browser (not incognito or with ad blockers), as test orders can sometimes skew pixel data.
That’s a big jump! Honestly, a 30–40% abandonment rate from Facebook traffic is actually quite healthy, so your original setup was working well. This feels more like a “trust” issue than a problem with your pixel or audience. Even if they don’t slow things down, new apps and tracking scripts can sometimes add extra widgets or visual clutter that makes the checkout look a bit less official or “off-brand.” At the payment step, customers are very sensitive, if anything looks even slightly different or cluttered, they’ll hesitate and leave.
I’d suggest disabling both the post-purchase app and Clarity for 3–5 days to see if your numbers go back to normal. If they do, you’ll know those apps were creating just enough friction to scare people off at the last second.
Hope this helps,
test purchases will absolutely skew your abandoned checkout rate since you’re probably not completing every test purchase through to confirmation. i’d exclude your own IP or email from analytics and recalculate. that said, post-purchase apps and tracking scripts can legitimately slow down checkout which does increase real abandonment.
the other thing to check is whether the Clarity heatmaps show people hesitating or rage-clicking anywhere specific. sometimes the issue isn’t the app itself but that it changed the visual flow of the page. on the topic of reducing abandonment more broadly, product imagery plays a bigger role than most people think. if someone gets to checkout and the product photos weren’t convincing enough to build full confidence, they bail. we use Prodofoto to generate professional lifestyle shots from our product photos because the better the imagery is upfront, the fewer people second-guess themselves at checkout.
Late to this, but the post-purchase app can be ruled out on structure alone, which is worth knowing before uninstalling things one at a time.
An abandoned checkout is a checkout that started and never became an order. The post-purchase page only exists after payment is captured and the order already exists. By the time that app runs, the checkout has already been counted as completed. It cannot move that number in either direction.
Your test purchases are the likelier cause. Five of your own orders won’t shift a rate by themselves, but the sessions around them will: opening checkout to look at it, backing out, reloading, checking it again on your phone. Every one of those is a started checkout that never converted, and five test orders usually means far more than five started checkouts.
Clarity is the other half. Its script doesn’t run inside Shopify’s checkout on a standard plan, so any funnel you read from it stops at the checkout door and makes it look like people vanish there.
Before blaming an app: compare the same date range in Shopify’s own analytics rather than the ad platform’s, and exclude your own IP. If the rate is still 70% once your sessions are out, something changed in the traffic, not in the store.