Tips for your store

How do I improve my Shopify store's conversion rate?

You have visitors, but they don't buy. Before spending more on ads, look at your own store: where do they drop off? Each step has different causes, and many can be fixed without a budget.

5 min read · September 28, 2026

Product page with tiers right below the price, and below that shipping costs, a delivery date and the return window

1 Find the leak before you change anything

Shopify counts conversion rate as the share of sessions that end in a purchase. The Conversion rate breakdown report shows the steps in between: added to cart, reached checkout, completed the purchase.

A low add-to-cart rate points to the product page. A drop between reaching and completing checkout points to costs, payment methods or trust. Only once you know where it leaks do you know what to fix.

Example funnel: 10,000 sessions, 620 with a cart, 310 at checkout, 190 purchases, so 1.9 percent conversion — Example numbers. Compare each step with your previous months and between phone and desktop. Start where a step differs most.

2 Benchmark against your own numbers, not industry averages

The figures floating around as a "good conversion rate" measure different things. Littledata, a vendor of analytics apps, found an average of 1.4% across 2,800 Shopify stores in 2023. Dynamic Yield reports 2.71% across industries and counts any desired action, including ones that aren't purchases. Shopify itself calls a universal benchmark a fallacy.

Important for your own comparisons: from September 21 to 23, 2026, Shopify changed how sessions are counted. Identified bots are now filtered out, and sessions without a pageview now count. Your conversion rate may have shifted without any change in orders. Treat the period after the change as your new baseline.

3 Check the store on a phone first

Phones carry a large share of online shopping: in the US, smartphones accounted for 56.4% of online transactions in the 2025 holiday season, according to Adobe. At the same time, Baymard rates 62% of large stores' mobile product pages as mediocre or worse.

Look at the Sessions by device report to compare phone and desktop. Then buy something in your own store on a real phone, all the way through payment.

4 Make the store faster

In an analysis by Google and Deloitte across 37 large brands, a mobile site 0.1 seconds faster went along with 8.4% more conversions for retailers. That's a correlation among large brands, not a promise for every store.

Shopify measures your real visitors' three Core Web Vitals and shows them on the Themes page. Good means: largest element visible within 2.5 seconds, response to input within 200 milliseconds, hardly any layout shift. Shopify lists too many apps, too many sections on a page and unused tags in the tag manager as common slowdowns.

5 Show the savings next to the price

A deal the shopper only notices at checkout can't have influenced which product they chose. Baymard recommends showing a discount right at the price, as an amount and as a percentage. For multi-unit offers, the price per unit belongs there too, which 81% of stores don't show according to Baymard's 2026 benchmark.

Shopify shows unit prices automatically in Online Store 2.0 themes, once you enter the product's total amount and base measure. A tier table with the price per quantity for consumers isn't something Shopify can do natively; real quantity price breaks exist there only for B2B.

6 Make trust visible

Whether a store feels safe is mostly a gut decision based on how it looks, according to Baymard. Among US shoppers who had abandoned a checkout, 19% said they didn't trust the site with their card details.

What helps: a clearly separated payment area, the return policy linked from the product page, reviews including critical ones, and a real address and contact option.

7 Turn on express checkouts and don't force accounts

Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal save typing. Shopify shows them as buttons on the product page and at the top of checkout. There's a trap in the settings: if you require customers to sign in before checkout, Shopify hides the express buttons in the cart.

In Baymard's survey, 18% of shoppers who abandoned checkout blamed being forced to create an account. Keep sign-in optional.

8 Test one change at a time

Don't apply a whole list of tips at once. If things get better or worse afterward, you won't know why. On the Grow plan and higher, Shopify's Rollouts let you test theme changes as an experiment, split 50/50 by default and ending after 90 days.

Run each test for full weeks, so every day of the week and ideally a payday end up in the result.

Sources

Common questions

What is a good conversion rate for a Shopify store?

There's no universal figure. Littledata found an average of 1.4% for Shopify stores in 2023, Dynamic Yield reports about 2.7% across industries, each with its own method. Compare your conversion rate with your own previous months.

Why did my conversion rate change at the end of September 2026?

From September 21 to 23, 2026, Shopify changed how sessions are counted. Identified bots are filtered out, sessions without a pageview count, and sessions no longer end at midnight UTC. Your conversion rate can shift without any change in orders.

Where in Shopify can I see the step where shoppers drop off?

Under Analytics > Reports, in the Conversion rate breakdown report. It shows how many sessions added to cart, reached checkout and completed a purchase.