The Checkout Leakage Audit We Run Before Touching a Store

The Number Almost Nobody Watches

Every founder we onboard can tell us their conversion rate. Almost none of them can tell us their add-to-cart to purchase rate.

That number is the game. Overall CVR is a distraction. It compounds two very different problems into one score. Whether people are getting to the cart in the first place. Whether the people who got to the cart made it out with a receipt. Those are separate diagnoses with separate fixes. Reporting them as one number is why founders spend twelve months A/B testing hero images while the checkout bleeds out below them.

Add-to-cart to purchase rate, healthy: 45 to 55% on desktop, 30 to 40% on mobile. That is what we see across well-built stores in the AU and US markets.

Add-to-cart to purchase rate, most stores we audit: 25 to 35% on desktop, 15 to 22% on mobile.

Somewhere between the ATC button and the thank-you page, 60 to 70% of buyers who declared purchase intent are walking. The money is on the floor.

We run a 90-minute audit as part of our forensic CRO engagement before we touch a single line of code on any client store. This is what is in it.

Step One: The Cart Page Audit

Seven items. All of them cheap. Most stores fail at least three.

Cart is a page, not a drawer. For AOVs above $80, dedicated cart page beats side drawer for CVR. The drawer looks slick. It also hides the details buyers want to reread before spending. If you sell above $80 and use a drawer, you are trading polish for margin.

Shipping cost is visible before checkout. The single most common reason buyers abandon at the cart step is discovering the shipping cost later. Show it here. Estimate by postcode if you have to. Baymard’s research on checkout abandonment consistently points to unexpected shipping as the leading cause of drop-off, and the Baymard Institute checkout usability data has documented this for years.

Discount code field is collapsed or removed. An open discount field is an invitation to leave the flow and go hunting Google for a code. Collapse it behind a link. Better, remove it and trigger discounts automatically for the segments that qualify.

Trust signals are on the page, not the theme footer. Return policy summary, delivery estimate, secure checkout badge. Above the checkout button. Not scrolled past.

Cross-sells are relevant, not aggressive. One or two curated cross-sells lift AOV. Six random cross-sells lift bounce rate. If your “you might also like” module is populated by the Shopify default, delete it and start over.

Sold-out items in cart flow trigger a stop. A US DTC wellness brand we audited was routing add-to-cart clicks to sold-out inventory 47% of the time. The customer got to the cart, saw “sold out,” and left. Every fixable dollar lost. Check this today. Watch a session recording of five buyers who abandoned.

Mobile cart uses full-width sticky CTAs. Mobile buyers should never have to hunt for the checkout button. If the CTA scrolls out of view, add sticky footer positioning. This is a two-minute fix that shows up in the numbers within a week.

Step Two: The Checkout Information Page Audit

Shopify’s checkout is largely locked at the standard tier. Shopify Plus stores can customise with checkout extensions. Standard stores cannot. That constraint changes the audit. Fewer levers. Higher leverage on the ones that remain.

Eleven items.

Guest checkout is the default. Force-required accounts cost 10 to 20% of orders. If you are on Shopify Plus and have made account creation mandatory, this is the single easiest revenue you will ever recover.

Email field autocompletes. Not asking for autocomplete-friendly attributes on the email field costs mobile buyers seconds of typing and, cumulatively, orders.

Address autocomplete is enabled. Shopify’s Google Places autocomplete on the shipping address field. Turn it on. Standard Shopify feature. Half the stores we audit have it off.

Phone number is optional or clearly justified. Required phone fields without a stated reason cost conversion. If it is required for delivery, say so at the field. If it is not required, remove it.

Order summary is visible on mobile. Shopify’s default mobile checkout collapses the order summary behind a tap. Buyers want to see what they are buying while they enter their card details. Configure the theme to keep the order summary visible on mobile.

Shipping options are visually clean. Three options is the max before choice paralysis kicks in. Standard, express, free-with-threshold. Any more than three is friction dressed as choice.

Delivery date estimate is present per shipping option. “Standard shipping, $9.95” is worse than “Standard shipping, $9.95, arrives Thursday July 30.” The specificity converts.

Discount and gift card fields are collapsed by default. Same reason as the cart. Do not send buyers off to hunt for codes.

Shop Pay is offered at the top of the payment section. For repeat Shopify buyers this is a one-tap checkout. It converts at reported lift rates higher than any other payment method. Even discounting Shopify’s own marketing, independent operators peg the lift meaningfully. Turn it on. Do not bury it.

PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay are present. These accelerators exist for a reason. Mobile buyers with a Wallet card set up will complete a checkout in three taps. Not offering the accelerators costs you the buyers who came ready to spend but not ready to type.

Progress indicator is visible. Shopify’s default three-step progress bar tells the buyer where they are in the flow. Themes that hide it cost trust.

Step Three: The Shipping and Payment Page Audit

Six items. Small surface. High-leverage.

Payment error messages are helpful. “Your card was declined” without a reason costs orders. If the issuer returned a reason code, surface it. If it did not, offer next steps: try a different card, contact your bank, try Shop Pay.

Card field uses proper input types. Numeric keyboards on mobile for card number and expiry fields. If your theme is forcing a full keyboard, that is a fixable code change worth doing tomorrow.

Billing address defaults to shipping. With a clear toggle if they differ. Forcing re-entry of the billing address is a common cause of drop-off at the last step.

Order note field is optional and unobtrusive. Some stores need it. Most do not. If yours does not, remove it.

Terms and conditions checkbox is unchecked by default only if legally required. Otherwise pre-check it or remove it. Every additional required interaction is a friction point.

Confirmation and thank-you page loads under two seconds. A slow thank-you page is a lost opportunity for a post-purchase upsell and a slightly worse repeat-purchase rate. Not the highest leverage, but worth timing.

The Setting That Killed 47% of Orders

The single most impactful finding we made in a checkout audit was in the AU market. A US DTC wellness brand converting at 0.9%. Ads performing. Traffic qualified. Store looked fine on desktop.

The finding was on the mobile cart flow. Their inventory feed was updating with a delay. Add-to-cart buttons on out-of-stock variants were still clickable. Buyers were tapping ATC on items that had sold out minutes earlier, arriving at the cart to see “sold out” messaging, and leaving. 47% of ATC sessions were hitting sold-out inventory.

The fix was a real-time inventory check on the variant selector, disabling ATC for out-of-stock variants before the buyer tapped. Two days of dev work. That single fix, along with ten other issues from the same audit, moved the store from 0.9% to 2.4% CVR. Same traffic. Same ads. +167%. Full teardown in our case studies.

That is what a checkout leakage audit finds. Not button colours. Not hero images. Settings that are silently destroying orders.

The Priority Question: What To Fix First

Every audit produces a list. The list is useless without priority. Here is how we rank findings.

Fix first: settings that are actively breaking orders. Sold-out inventory in ATC flow. Payment methods that error silently. Required fields that fail on mobile. These cost money every day they exist. Fix them before you do anything else.

Fix second: friction that adds seconds to mobile checkout. Missing accelerators, no address autocomplete, wrong keyboard on card fields. Each of these is a percentage point or two of mobile conversion. Cumulatively they are the difference between a mobile CVR of 1.1% and 1.8%.

Fix third: trust signals and clarity. Shipping cost visibility, delivery date estimates, order summary visibility. These change the quality of the decision the buyer is making. Slower to move the number, but they compound with the other fixes.

Fix later or never: cosmetic changes. Button colour. Font choice. Hero image. These are the changes most agencies pitch first. They are the changes we test last, if at all. On most stores they do not move the number in a defensible way, and they consume dev time that could have gone to the settings above.

The whole audit takes 90 minutes if you know what you are looking at. Two to three days if you are learning it on your own store. Both are worth the time. Not one of the seven-figure Shopify founders we work with runs their store without this checklist in the drawer.

The money is on the floor. Go pick it up. Or book a 30 min diagnostic and we’ll do the audit with you.

If you’re an AU or US Shopify founder stuck at the CVR plateau this post describes, we run a free 30 minute diagnostic call. No pitch. No email gate. Just a look at what’s actually breaking in your funnel. Book here.