Most Shopify stores are leaving most of their revenue on the table
The average Shopify store converts somewhere between 1.4% and 1.8% of visitors into buyers, according to Red Stag Fulfillment's 2024-2025 benchmark data. The top 10% of stores convert above 4.7%. That gap is not explained by product quality or ad spend. It is almost entirely explained by checkout friction.
A 2024 study found that 70.19% of all shopping carts are abandoned before purchase. That is not a rounding error. That is your funnel telling you something is wrong at the point of commitment.
This audit walks through the specific friction points that cause abandonment, attaches numbers to each one, and tells you what to fix in order of impact.
What checkout friction actually means
Friction is anything that adds cognitive load, introduces doubt, or creates a technical obstacle between the buyer's decision to purchase and the confirmation page. It is not always obvious. A required phone number field is friction. A layout shift that moves the "Place Order" button mid-tap is friction. A JavaScript error that silently breaks the shipping address validator is friction, and you probably do not know it is happening.
The most expensive friction points share a common trait: they occur when buyer intent is already high. Someone who has added a product to their cart and opened checkout is not browsing. They are trying to give you money. Every obstacle at that stage has a real cost.
The form field problem
Baymard's 2024 checkout benchmark found the average checkout flow contains 11.3 form fields across more than five steps. Most of those fields are unnecessary for the majority of orders. Address line 2, company name, and a separate phone number field are the most common offenders.
Every additional field you ask for reduces the probability of completion. Baymard's same research found that 18% of shoppers cite checkout complexity as the direct reason they abandoned. That is nearly one in five people who got to checkout and decided it was too much effort.
The fix is mechanical: audit every field in your checkout and remove any that are not required to fulfil the order. If you are on Shopify Plus, you can customise the checkout template directly. On standard Shopify, the native one-page checkout introduced in 2023 already removes several unnecessary steps, make sure you are using it.
The mobile conversion gap no one is fixing
Mobile accounts for roughly 79% of total Shopify traffic. Mobile converts at around 3.0%, versus 4.4% on desktop, according to Brenton Way's analysis of April 2023 to April 2024 Shopify data. The gap is 1.4 percentage points on a channel that handles most of your visitors.
Mobile ecommerce also carries the highest cart abandonment rate at 85.65%, versus 73.76% on desktop. That means mobile visitors are both your largest audience and your least likely to convert.
Mobile friction is different from desktop friction. Tap targets that are too small, forms that do not trigger the correct keyboard type (numeric for card numbers, email for the email field), and layout shifts that displace buttons mid-interaction all cost conversions on mobile in ways that do not show up on a desktop test. If your QA process involves someone checking the checkout on a laptop, you are missing the majority of your actual user experience.
Shop Pay and the accelerated checkout case
Merchants using Shop Pay see conversion rates up to 50% higher than guest checkout. On mobile, the improvement reaches 91%. Shop Pay usage grew 58% year-over-year during BFCM 2024, which suggests merchants are catching on.
The mechanism is straightforward. Shop Pay stores address, payment, and shipping details. Returning buyers skip most of the form entirely. On mobile, where typing out a 16-digit card number on a small keyboard is the friction point most likely to cause abandonment, removing that step almost doubles conversion.
If you are not offering Shop Pay as the default accelerated checkout option, enable it today. It costs nothing and the data on impact is consistent.
Hidden costs and the trust collapse
More than 60% of shoppers say they will not consider buying from a retailer that does not offer free shipping. That number is about expectation-setting as much as it is about cost. When a buyer adds a product to their cart expecting a total of £45, then sees £52.50 at checkout after shipping, they do not just weigh up whether £7.50 is worth it. They feel misled. Trust collapses faster than it was built.
The fix is not necessarily offering free shipping. It is surfacing the real total earlier. Show estimated shipping on the product page. Show it in the cart. If you charge for shipping, make that clear before someone opens checkout. Buyers who see the full cost early and still proceed are more committed than buyers who discover it at the last step.
JavaScript errors and silent failures in checkout
This is the friction point most merchants never look for. A JavaScript error in your checkout does not typically produce a visible error message. It usually produces nothing. An address validator stops working. A discount code field accepts input but never applies. The payment button stops responding to clicks on a specific browser version.
These errors are invisible unless you are actively monitoring for them. The buyer experiences a broken checkout, assumes something is wrong, and leaves. You see an abandonment event in your analytics and attribute it to price sensitivity or distraction. The actual cause was a TypeError in a third-party loyalty script that no one noticed.
The average Shopify store runs 15 to 25 third-party scripts. Each one is a potential source of checkout failures. Monitoring tools like Bloodhound track JavaScript errors and failed network requests in real time across the full purchase funnel, from add-to-cart through payment submit, using Shopify's Web Pixel integration, so you can see exactly where technical failures are causing drop-off rather than guessing.
A prioritised checkout friction checklist
Work through this in order. The items at the top have the largest and most consistent impact across store types.
- Enable Shop Pay as your primary accelerated checkout option. No configuration required.
- Audit your form fields. Remove address line 2, company name, and phone number unless your fulfilment genuinely requires them.
- Switch to Shopify's one-page checkout if you are not already using it. The default multi-step flow adds unnecessary steps.
- Surface shipping costs before checkout. Add estimated shipping to your product pages and cart drawer.
- Test checkout on an actual mobile device, not a browser emulator. Tap through the full flow on iOS Safari and Android Chrome.
- Check your keyboard types. Card number fields should trigger a numeric keypad. Email fields should trigger an email keyboard.
- Monitor for JavaScript errors in checkout. Set up real-time alerts so you know within minutes if a script failure is breaking the payment flow.
- Audit your third-party scripts. If a loyalty app, review widget, or chat tool is loading on your checkout page and you do not know why, remove it.
Where to focus first
The 1.4% to 4.7% conversion gap between average and top-performing stores is not explained by any single fix. It is the cumulative result of removing friction at each stage of the checkout flow, then monitoring to catch regressions when new apps or theme updates introduce it again.
Start with Shop Pay and form field reduction. Both are low-effort, high-impact, and reversible if they do not perform as expected in your store's context. Then work down the checklist, measuring the impact of each change before moving to the next.
The stores converting above 4% are not doing anything exotic. They are shipping fewer friction points, watching their checkout for technical failures, and fixing problems before they compound into months of lost revenue.
Sources
- Shopify (shopify.com) — "Baymard's 2024 checkout benchmark shows the average flow has 11.3 form fields and is over five steps long."
- Shopify (shopify.com) — "Mobile ecommerce has the highest rate of cart abandonment at 85.65% (desktop is 73.76% and tablet is 80.74%)."
- Brenton Way (brentonway.com) — "Shop Pay increases conversion by up to 50% compared to guest checkout. On mobile devices, the improvement is even greater at 91%."
- Red Stag Fulfillment (redstagfulfillment.com) — "The average Shopify store converts approximately 1.4% to 1.8% of its visitors into customers as of 2024-2025."
- Shopify (shopify.com) — "A 2024 study found that 70.19% of all shopping carts are abandoned."
- Shopify Enterprise (shopify.com) — "More than 60% of shoppers won't consider buying from a retailer that doesn't offer free shipping."