What Is a Funnel Report? Where Shoppers Drop Off

What a Funnel Report Counts

A funnel report lines up the steps a shopper takes before buying. A typical store has five: a visit, a product view, an add to cart, a checkout start and an order. Beside each step you see how many got there.

The most useful number is the rate between two steps. Divide the count at one step by the count at the step before. That's the share who made it through. Everyone else dropped off right there.

Shopify's Analytics page has a simple version. You'll see sessions that added to cart, reached checkout and completed checkout. A session is one visit, so these count visits, not people.

One Month at a Made-Up Tea Shop

Say a small tea shop gets 10,000 sessions in a month. Here's its funnel report:

Step	Visits	Kept from the step before
Sessions	10,000	—
Viewed a product	7,000	70%
Added to cart	560	8%
Started checkout	280	50%
Placed an order	168	60%

Its conversion rate (the share of visits that end in an order) is 168 ÷ 10,000 = 1.68%. Multiply the step rates and you get the same thing: 70% × 8% × 50% × 60% = 1.68%. The report splits one number into four, so you can see which step drags it down.

Our visitor data from 958 Shopify stores shows the same weak spot. Only 6.72% of product viewers added to cart. Later steps kept far more: 42% of carts went on to checkout, and 57% of checkouts turned into orders. Treat those as averages, not goals. To see how to read each step, see our guide to finding leaks with a Shopify funnel report.

The Biggest Drop Isn't Always the Best Fix

The tea shop's product-to-cart step looks awful. It loses 92 of every 100 viewers, so it's tempting to fix it first. But the steps multiply, so a gain near the end counts just as much.

Same lift, two different steps. Make one step a quarter better and leave the rest alone.

Add to cart goes from 8% to 10%: 7,000 × 10% = 700 carts, then 350 checkouts, then 210 orders.
Checkout to order goes from 60% to 75%: 280 × 75% = 210 orders.

Both give you 42 more orders than the 168 you started with.

So a big drop doesn't tell you where to start. Ask which step is cheapest to improve. The report can't tell you that.

Where a Funnel Report Can Fool You

It's good at spotting a leak. But it has blind spots:

Session-based reports count visits, not people. Shopify's report works this way. A shopper who browses three times and buys on the fourth shows up as four visits and one order. That makes your funnel look leakier than it is.
Steps don't always stack. Some themes let shoppers add to cart right from a collection page. That cart never had a product view, which throws off the step rates.
Small numbers jump around. At 40 checkouts a week, one order moves your checkout-to-order rate by 2.5 points.
Traffic mix moves the rates. A new ad can bring in people who were never close to buying. Your add-to-cart rate drops, even though the product page didn't change. It's one reason why more visitors don't mean more revenue.
It shows where, not why. A checkout drop could be shipping costs, a slow page or window shoppers. A before-and-after change isn't proof either, since other things shift too. An A/B test is the cleaner check.

Funnel Report vs. Funnel Analysis

People mix these two up a lot. The funnel report is the view itself, the steps with their counts and rates. Funnel analysis is what you do with it, like asking why people leave and what to change.

The Funnel Report in Growth Suite

Growth Suite (our app) has a Funnel Report with five stages. It sits in the app's analytics next to the Purchase Insight Report and the Cart Insights Report. The app tracks each visitor's product views, cart activity and checkout events, and it points out where people drop off.

A funnel shows where shoppers leave, but not who was going to buy anyway. Growth Suite also predicts purchase intent. It shows its time-limited offers only to visitors who look less likely to buy, so likely buyers don't see them. We explain that split in dedicated buyers vs. walk-away customers.