Strange conversion funnel (Cart>Checkout>Order) metrics...website issue or tracking change?

Shopify Plus

Topic summary

Checkout-to-order conversion has fallen since mid-June from a steady 80–90% to ~74% on average, with daily dips below 60%. Cart-to-checkout has risen somewhat, making overall orders/sessions impact unclear due to seasonality and ongoing marketing.

Cause is uncertain: customer experience vs tracking/measurement change.

Investigations to date:

  • Switched between Shopify’s checkout extensibility (new customizable framework) and legacy checkout.liquid; no conversion behavior change.
  • Shopify Abandoned Checkouts list does not show the expected rise in abandons implied by the metric drop.
  • Hired a CRO (conversion rate optimization) developer: no checkout technical issues found; one JavaScript error fixed without effect; hundreds of Microsoft Clarity session recordings reviewed with no clear culprit.
  • Segmentation by region/time/device/browser is inconclusive; decline is broad, though more pronounced in some states (some of which also saw increased checkouts).
  • Very few customer complaints (<0.05%); no baseline tracking for comparison.

Open items: whether Shopify changed how “entered checkout” is counted; additional diagnostic ideas welcome.

Status: Unresolved and ongoing; no definitive technical or UX cause identified.

Summarized with AI on January 17. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Since mid-June, our checkout-to-order conversion rate has gone from a rock-steady 80-90% to an average of 74% with daily downward spikes below 60%. We’ve seen some offsetting increases in the cart-to-checkout conversion rate, and overall it’s difficult to say for sure how much our overall conversion rate (orders / sessions) is affected (we’re not halting all marketing activities and our business is seasonal so there are a lot of moving pieces).

I am struggling to understand if this single change in the conversion funnel means anything (i.e. is a customer experience issue), or if it’s possibly a result of a change in measurement or some other technical issue and not customer experience. We’ve done quite a bit of analysis (including hiring a CRO dev) to dig into this, and are still coming up empty. Here’s everything we’ve tried:

  • We moved to checkout extensibility, then reverted back to checkout.liquid, and then back to extensibility. None of these changes appear correlated with any change in checkout behavior
  • The abandoned checkouts list (Orders > Abandoned Checkouts) is not capturing the increase in abandoned checkouts that the conversion rate changes imply (i.e. there aren’t 2x as many abandoned checkouts being reported)
  • We hired a developer to analyze the site and he found no technical issues in our checkout. He did identify a javascript error but it didn’t appear to be causing a checkout issue (we fixed it and the conversion rate didn’t improve); he reviewed hundreds of MS Clarity recordings and did not find a smoking gun
  • So far I’ve been unable to identify a particular region, time of day, browser, device type, etc. where the conversion rate drop is clearly originating. The checkout-to-order rate does seem lower in certain states, and in SOME of those states, it’s clear that there was actually an INCREASE in checkouts, but there’s not a lot of consistency and the decline is occurring across the board (it’s just more pronounced in a few places)
  • We’ve gotten a literal handful of complaints of checkout issues over the past few months (complaint rate <0.05%). We don’t track CS complaints so I don’t know if this is more than normal

I am totally at a loss here. I’m kind of hoping someone will say “Oh yeah, Shopify changed how they count whether someone has entered checkout or not”. Other than that, I’m all ears re: what else we could be looking at.