Shopify conversion-rate optimization audit: a merchant checklist

Diagnose the revenue constraint before choosing a tactic

Build a funnel for each major traffic source and product family. Inspect landing-page relevance, product-view depth, variant interaction, add-to-cart, checkout start, payment completion, refund rate, and contribution margin. Review recordings or observed sessions only under an appropriate privacy basis, and pair behavioral data with support tickets, onsite search, return reasons, and explicit shopper requests.

Treat profitable sales as a system: qualified traffic multiplied by conversion, order value, repeat behavior, and contribution margin. A tactic that raises one number while damaging another is not durable growth. Segment the evidence by product, variant, device, market, new versus returning customer, and purchase stage before deciding what to change.

A practical merchant playbook

Walk the highest-volume paths on small and large screens, slow networks, logged-out and returning states, different markets, and realistic carts. Turn findings into hypotheses rather than cosmetic opinions. Each proposed change should name the friction it removes and the event that would prove or disprove the mechanism.

• Verify page speed, navigation, search, variants, and error recovery.
• Check product claims, imagery, sizing, compatibility, price, and returns.
• Inspect shipping cost, delivery timing, payment, and trust disclosures.
• Capture unresolved conditions before the shopper leaves the product page.
• Prioritize with impact, evidence, effort, and risk—not trendiness.

Where BuyWhen fits—and where it does not

BuyWhen adds a diagnostic surface to CRO: it asks what must change before purchase and preserves the answer with exact product context. Repeated price, stock, delivery, question, bundle, or quote patterns can justify a targeted experiment without guessing from exit behavior alone.

BuyWhen is most relevant when a shopper has purchase intent but one explicit condition is unresolved: price, stock or variant, delivery date, product question, bundle, or custom quote. It does not replace acquisition, storefront quality, checkout, customer service, or a sound product. Use it as the structured demand and decision layer between those systems.

Measure the change without overstating the result

Choose a primary paid-order or net-sales metric and guardrails for margin, refunds, support load, speed, and direct purchase. Track the request funnel separately. When traffic permits, use randomized tests; otherwise use a documented time-series comparison and avoid causal language.

Record the full path from eligible shopper to request, qualification, merchant decision, offer, checkout, paid order, refund, and cancellation. Report potential demand, attributed paid sales, net sales, and experimentally estimated lift as separate measures. Document the window and exclusions so a useful signal never becomes an unsupported revenue claim.