How Shopify Calculates Conversion Rate, and How to Read It

Shopify's online store conversion rate is the number of sessions that ended in an order, divided by the total number of sessions, shown as a percentage. It counts sessions, not people, and it describes the online store only, not every order in your admin. This guide covers what sits on each side of that division, the funnel steps underneath it, why the rate moves with channel and device, and what to measure it against.

What counts as a session?

A session is one visit: a run of activity by one visitor that ends after a stretch of inactivity. One person can produce several in a week.

That has consequences worth keeping in mind:

• A shopper who visits four times before buying creates four sessions and one order. From the store's point of view that person converted, yet three of their four sessions count against the rate.
• Products that people think over for days produce more sessions per order than impulse buys, so two equally healthy stores can show very different rates.

Which orders are included?

Only orders that came from an online store session. Point of sale orders, draft orders created by your team and orders from other sales channels add to your sales but are not part of the online store conversion rate.

So if a wholesale buyer emails you and you raise a draft order, revenue goes up and the conversion rate does not move. It also means that sessions multiplied by conversion rate multiplied by average order value will not rebuild your total sales if you sell on more than one channel.

How do the funnel steps work?

Shopify splits the journey into three counted steps, each expressed as a share of all sessions:

1. Added to cart: sessions in which at least one item went into the cart.
2. Reached checkout: sessions in which the shopper got as far as the checkout.
3. Converted: sessions that ended with a completed order.

The headline rate is the third step. The useful reading is in the ratios between the steps.

Here is an example with made-up round figures. Say a store has 10,000 sessions in a month. In 800 of them something is added to the cart, 400 reach checkout and 200 end in an order. The conversion rate is 200 divided by 10,000, or 2%. Between the steps, 8% of sessions add to cart, half of those carts reach checkout, and half of those checkouts become orders.

Now suppose a broad campaign next month brings 15,000 sessions, and the other three counts stay the same. The rate falls to about 1.3%, although nothing in the store got worse. The extra visitors simply did not add to cart. Reading the steps tells you that; the headline number alone suggests a problem that is not there. For a closer look at the later stages, see our guide to finding where shoppers drop off in the checkout.

Why does conversion rate differ by channel and device?

Because intent differs. The rate you see for the whole store is a weighted average of very different groups of visitors.

• Channel. Someone who clicks through from your own email, or types your brand name into a search engine, already knows you. Someone who taps an ad while browsing a social feed may be seeing you for the first time. The second group converts at a lower rate on the same pages.
• Device. Phones collect a lot of casual browsing, and typing an address on a small screen is more work. Many shoppers also look on a phone and buy later on a laptop. That is two sessions on two devices, and the phone session is recorded as one that did not convert.

The practical point is that the blended rate can change because the mix changed. If paid social grows from a small share of sessions to a large one, the store-wide rate drops even when every channel converts exactly as it did before. Consistent campaign tagging makes this visible; our guide to UTM parameters for Shopify covers how to set that up.

Why do tools disagree about the number?

Mostly because they count sessions differently. Each analytics tool has its own rule for when a session starts and ends, its own bot filtering, and its own handling of visitors who decline analytics in the cookie banner.

Where visitors must agree to tracking, the visits of those who decline are missing from tracked figures. The guide to what Shopify's built-in reports show explains why that makes traffic numbers a sample, and there is a separate piece on why Shopify and Google Analytics numbers do not match. Pick one source for conversion rate and stay with it, so the trend is consistent even if the absolute figure is debatable.

What should you compare your conversion rate against?

Your own history, cut the same way. A universal benchmark is not much use, because the rate depends on price, category, traffic mix and how much of your business is repeat custom, and no outside figure shares all four with your store.

Comparisons that do tell you something:

• The same channel and device against the previous period, and against the same period last year if your trade is seasonal.
• The step ratios over time: sessions to cart, cart to checkout, checkout to order. A fall in one ratio points to one part of the store.
• Conversion rate alongside revenue per session. A price rise can lower the rate and still leave you better off.

This is where a funnel broken down by source helps. Marka Metrics reports traffic sources, landing pages and devices on its free plan, and paid plans add drop-off analysis for every page, the purchase funnel and each checkout step.

A short checklist

1. Remember the formula: converted sessions divided by all sessions, online store only.
2. Read the three steps and the ratios between them, not just the headline.
3. Check whether a change in rate is really a change in traffic mix.
4. Split by channel and by device before drawing a conclusion.
5. Compare against your own past periods, never a generic benchmark.
6. Use one tool as the reference for the rate and keep to it.

A conversion rate is a ratio of two counts, and most surprises come from the bottom one. If you want the funnel, sources and devices side by side in the Shopify admin, Marka Metrics is built for that.