E-commerce Conversion Audit: 14 Things You're Getting Wrong
The audit that started this list
Over the past year, we audited 60 Shopify stores for clients and prospects. The same issues appeared in nearly every store. Not obscure technical problems — basic conversion killers that are easy to fix once you know what to look for.
This checklist is what our team uses internally. Every new e-commerce client gets an audit against these 14 points before we touch anything else.
Product pages (the big 5)
Product pages are where the money is. These five issues showed up in 80%+ of the stores we reviewed:
- No urgency signals — no stock indicators, no shipping deadlines, no limited offers
- Too many clicks to purchase — the add-to-cart button is below the fold on mobile
- No social proof above the fold — reviews exist but they're hidden at the bottom
- Poor image quality — blurry photos, no lifestyle shots, no zoom functionality
- Missing product details — size charts, materials, and care instructions require extra clicks
Checkout flow (the silent killers)
Cart abandonment averages 70% across e-commerce. Most of it happens in checkout. The fixes are straightforward:
- No guest checkout option — forcing account creation kills 24% of potential purchases
- Surprise shipping costs — show shipping before checkout or offer free shipping thresholds
- No trust badges — SSL, payment logos, and money-back guarantees should be visible at every step
- Too many form fields — name, email, address, payment. That's it. Everything else is optional
Site-wide issues
These affect every page, not just product or checkout:
- Slow load times — every 1-second delay reduces conversions by 7%. Compress images, lazy load, use a CDN
- No mobile optimization — 68% of e-commerce traffic is mobile, but most stores are still designed desktop-first
- Weak search functionality — if you sell 50+ products, your search bar is your highest-intent conversion tool
- No exit-intent offers — a 10% discount popup when someone's about to leave recovers 5–8% of abandonments
- Missing abandoned cart emails — a 3-email sequence recovers 8–15% of abandoned carts automatically
How to prioritize
Don't fix everything at once. Start with the checkout flow (biggest revenue impact with the least effort), then product pages (highest traffic pages), then site-wide issues. Run the fixes sequentially so you can measure the impact of each change.
We typically see a 20–40% conversion rate improvement within 30 days of implementing the top 5 fixes from this list. The remaining fixes compound over the following 90 days.