Reached Checkout is higher (2X) than Add to Bag

Shopify Discussion
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Hello, our Shopify site has been online for roughly 5 years, we do several million dollars in sales each month and our traffic is, on average 1M visits per month. I’m sharing this so you are aware of the large sample size.

Recently we’ve been seeing an anomaly in our metrics where the Conversion Rate has dropped dramatically without any changes to the site, it seems to coincide with a sudden increase in the ‘Reached Checkout’ in fact, that value has slowly become 2X higher than the add to bag value. This means for every person who adds to the bag, reaches checkout twice. It makes no sense, we do not have a ‘buy it now button’ or anything set up to bypass the cart page, and I can’t find anyone else talking about or experiencing this issue. Bounce rate has also increased dramatically in the saming timing up to almost 95% (record highs for our site, usually 60% or less)

It began roughly in the beginning of January 2024 after having normal metrics for the prior 5 years of business with ‘reached checkout’ always being lower than add to bag.

If anyone here has any insight as to what could be causing this it would be greatly appreciated. I should note, we are recording user sessions using Hotjar but unfortunately, the recordings stop automatically before the checkout page so we are unable to monitor users on that page to troubleshoot. However we have not been able to replicate any issues whatsoever with the checkout flow or user journey on our numerous devices and browsers.

I’ve attached a video showing the progression of these metric anomalies. Not sure why Shopify doesn’t allow screenshots.

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“This means for every person who adds to the bag, reaches checkout twice”

No. I would be thinking about those metrics more like where they are in the journey. If your add to bag stat is higher than reaching checkout, then it means less folk are making it to the next milestone. If more have entered checkout then you should expect a higher count of folk at that stage (since they leave that previous stage and are not double counted) vs those still sitting in the one previous.

Perhaps you now have more folk heading to checkout than you did before. Since they are entering checkout what does the abandoned cart counts look like in comparison to any shifts in data you’re seeing?

Based on your volumes I can assume what plan you’re on so it likely makes sense to reach out to the support team to raise and not just here.

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Thanks for taking the time to respond. I did raise this concern with Shopify Plus Support back on the 16th of January when we first noticed it and couldn’t figure it out on our own. I did some additional digging and found that Checkout Landing Pages are counting 2-4 sessions for every one visitor as well, which is hurting our conversion rate since it’s based on Sessions to Sessions Converted.

Still waiting a resolution or explanation from Shopify Plus Support ticket opened on the 16th.

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@BillyAdventure The Only Reason is comming in my mind is people are landing with direct sourse on checkout page or there is some issue with add to cart counter. Support can help in this regard or you can simply check source of traffic in session via GA4.

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Hi,

Did you get any answer about this issue?

It seems that something has changed on the 1st of March as on our shop we see a big drop in “reached checkout”, while before we had almost the same number of add to cart and reached checkout.

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Hi Jason,

You said:

“If your add to bag stat is higher than reaching checkout, then it means less folk are making it to the next milestone.”

That is the normal behavior, is it not? One would always have a higher number of Add to Cart’s than Reached Checkout’s. It makes no sense to have more people reach the checkout, when the only way to reach it is through clicking the Add To Cart button … since in this case there is no BUY NOW button on the product pages that takes you straight to the checkout. (although I don’t understand why this would not record an “Add to Cart” event when they are, in fact, adding a product to their cart)

I’ve been seeing the same issue as well and I have no definite answer yet from Shopify as well. Been going back and forth with support and I just got directed to this post from their last reply.

@BillyAdventure I work in a CRO agency and manage and overlook multiple stores … and the closest explanation that I can come up with, based on my personal analysis, is stores that use Zipify landing pages have this issue only on the traffic in that funnel (Zipify landing page > Checkout > Purchase). I noticed this on 2 different stores. And further still … this seems to only apply if the Zipify landing page’s “Add to Cart” is taking people straight to the checkout. I believe this is where Shopify fails to register an “Add to Cart” event, but does register a “Reached Checkout” event.

And this month I am doing a test on one of the 2 stores … of a Zipify landing page where instead of taking people straight to the checkout from a Zipify page, I am taking them to the store’s cart page … and the initial results show promise with the “Reached Checkout” number is—as expected—lower than the “Add to cart” number.

HOWEVER … on the other store, I currently run a Zipify landing page split-test (created natively in Zipify), where one of the landers takes people straight to checkout, and the other one takes them to the store’s cart page, and then checkout … and this entire month of March, both pages have lower “Reached Checkout” than “Add to Cart.” So the issue—at least with Zipify—seems to have somehow been fixed.

I see normal funnel KPIs (Add To Cart > Reached Checkout > Sessions Converted) for the month of March for both of those stores.

I hope that helps and hopefully, the issue is resolved on your end as well.

P.S. A request for Shopify’s team … I know you guys are super buys, however, it would be greatly appreciated if we can get more definite answers on these analytics issues, even if there’s no fix for it yet. I can accept and respect a platform’s limitation and I can work with it … as long as the limitation has been recognized, acknowledged and communicated to us. But seemingly ignoring the issue and not communicating it to us—your clients—is just causing frustration, and wasted energy on our part by trying to figure out something that should not even be a problem in the first place … instead of focus on growing our businesses. Humble thanks.

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Hello, I am a person who starts Shopify in Korea.

I want to get a lot of advice from you. If you can help me, I can also introduce many products in Korea.

instr: taehe_woo

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I am seeing this on a store for which I do development and my current working theory is that Shopify’s analytics are not picking up “Add to Cart” actions happening on the collections page.

In a nutshell (still, just a theory)

100 sessions and 40 people add to cart from PDP, 10 from collections page
Sessions with Cart additions: 40
Sessions that reach checkout: 50

That’s the best I can figure at the moment. It would be interesting to see if this anomaly only seems to be happening on stores that have add-t-cart from collections pages.

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Same exact issue but having it this past week where checkouts are 5x higher than active carts but then no orders come at all from those checkouts and we are always consistently at the same metrics. Is this a shopify issue with bots? Meta issue? Or an app issue? We need to know so we can stop the decline of our sales.