What Is a Sales Funnel? Marketing vs. Store Funnel

Why a Sales Funnel Gets Narrower at Every Step

Each step in your store loses a few people. Stack the counts (visits, product views, carts, orders) and you get the shape: wide at the top, narrow at the bottom.

A funnel breaks one big number into smaller ones. Your conversion rate might say 2 in 100 visits end in an order. The funnel shows you where the other 98 left.

In our visitor data from 958 Shopify stores, about 8 in 100 sessions reached the cart. Of those carts, 42% moved on to checkout, and 57% of checkouts became orders. That's roughly 2 orders per 100 sessions. They're averages across very different stores, not targets. For your own numbers stage by stage, see where your Shopify sales funnel loses customers.

One Word, Two Funnels

“Funnel” gets used two ways.

The marketing funnel starts before anyone's heard of your brand, with stages like awareness, interest, decision and purchase. “Top of funnel” is people who barely know you. “Bottom of funnel” is the ones close to buying.
The store funnel is only what happens on your site, from visit to order. You can count those steps, so this is the funnel conversion rate optimization works on.

Page builders also call a chain of landing pages a “funnel,” but that's something you build, not measure. An upsell funnel is something else again, a run of extra offers usually shown right after payment.

Seeing Your Sales Funnel on Shopify

Shopify's own analytics show a short version of the store funnel: sessions that added to cart, reached checkout and completed checkout. A session is one visit, so you're counting visits, not people.

Our app, Growth Suite, tracks product views, cart activity and checkout events, and its five-stage Funnel Report shows the stages where shoppers drop off.

Myth: Shoppers Go Down the Funnel in One Visit

The drawing makes it look like one smooth trip down. Real shoppers wander in and out.

Example: Say Jen (she's made up) wants a rain jacket. Monday, she taps an ad on her phone, looks at one jacket and leaves. By Wednesday she's on her laptop, finds the store through Google, puts the jacket in her cart and leaves again. She's back on the laptop Friday and buys it.

Your funnel sees three sessions, and two look like drop-offs (one at the product page, one at the cart). All three were the same buyer.

So a step that looks leaky isn't always lost sales. Some of those people come back later. Use the funnel to pick where to look first, then work out why people leave there.