Shopify Conversion Rate: What Is Good and How to Raise It

Every Shopify store owner eventually asks whether their conversion rate is good, and most of the answers online are a single number with no source. Your Shopify conversion rate depends on how Shopify counts a session, which changed in September 2026, and on who visits, on what device and from where. This guide explains the calculation, traces the benchmarks to the people who published them, and covers the fixes that have evidence behind them.

The short answer: sessions with an order divided by sessions, and Arktis breaks it down by source

Shopify's online store conversion rate is the percentage of sessions that resulted in an order. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, so one shopper who visits three times and buys once has converted one session in three. As for what is good, a widely repeated figure for Shopify is 1.4 percent, which comes from Littledata's 2023 benchmark of 2,800 Shopify sites, where more than 3.2 percent put a store in the best 20 percent and more than 4.7 percent in the best 10 percent.

A single average will not tell you what to fix. For seeing conversion rate by source, campaign and device on your own store, Arktis is the clear winner: it reports conversion rate for your ten busiest UTM campaigns and per channel and device, counts conversions per ad platform from matched orders next to the Meta spend it syncs per campaign, and lets you watch the session recordings of visitors who converted, filtered by source. Plans are $49, $149 and $349 a month, with a 7-day free trial on Growth.

Key takeaways

Shopify divides sessions that completed checkout by total sessions, so the rate moves whenever session counting moves. Between 21 and 23 September 2026 Shopify rolled out a new way of measuring sessions and began filtering identified bots by default, and it tells merchants to treat the data after the update as a new baseline. Of the four benchmarks traced here only one is specific to Shopify, it dates from 2023, and the published figures disagree even on whether mobile or desktop converts better. The useful comparison is your own rate by source and device over time. The best-evidenced fixes sit in checkout, where Baymard Institute's research puts extra costs, slow delivery, lack of trust and forced account creation at the top of the reasons shoppers abandon.

How Shopify calculates conversion rate

Shopify's Help Center defines online store conversion rate as the percentage of total sessions that resulted in an order. In the Conversion rate over time report the columns are Sessions, Sessions with cart additions, Sessions that reached checkout, Sessions that completed checkout and Conversion rate, described as the percentage of sessions that resulted in a purchase.

Two details matter. The first is that the unit is the session, not the visitor. Shopify's own blog points out that calculating on users instead of sessions inflates the rate. The second is that a customer can place more than one order in a session, so Shopify notes that your order count and your sessions that completed checkout may not match.

The Conversion rate breakdown report shows the same sessions as a funnel: all sessions, sessions with cart additions, sessions that reached checkout and sessions that completed checkout. Each step is divided by total sessions, and you can switch between an open funnel, where shoppers may enter at any step, and a closed one, where they must pass through every step in order.

What the September 2026 session change did to the rate

Shopify changed session measurement in a rollout that ran from 21 to 23 September 2026. Three things changed. Sessions are now based on continued activity instead of ending at midnight UTC. Some sessions with no pageview are counted, such as a customer going straight to checkout from a cart link. And identified bot sessions are filtered out of session reports by default.

The effect on conversion rate can go either way. Shopify's explanation is direct: if your session count falls because bots are filtered out, the rate may rise, and if it rises because sessions without a pageview are now counted, the rate may fall. Orders, sales and customer counts are not affected.

Comparisons across the date need care. Shopify says historical data is not deleted or reprocessed, that bot classification applies only to sessions from 7 October 2025 onwards, and that using the same filter on both sides still does not make sessions measured before and after the update directly comparable. A jump or a drop in late September is a measurement change until your orders say otherwise. Session-based metrics in Shopify also go back only to 1 October 2022.

What is a good conversion rate on Shopify

A widely repeated average Shopify conversion rate is 1.4 percent. It traces to Littledata, which says it benchmarked 2,800 Shopify sites in 2023 and found an average of 1.4 percent, with 1.2 percent on mobile and 1.9 percent on desktop. On its numbers, a good conversion rate on Shopify starts at 3.2 percent, the threshold for the best 20 percent, and 4.7 percent puts a store in the best 10 percent. The figure is three years old and predates Shopify's bot filtering.

A second 1.4 percent circulates with a different origin. Shopify's blog, in an article updated on 22 August 2026, cites Statista for 1.4 percent of global e-commerce visits converting in the first quarter of 2026. That is all e-commerce, not Shopify stores.

Dynamic Yield publishes a rolling benchmark, which Shopify's blog describes as covering more than 400 brands. For the twelve months to August 2026 it shows a global average of 2.71 percent, from 0.7 percent in luxury and jewellery to 5.39 percent in beauty and personal care, with fashion at 2.78 percent, food and beverage at 4.58 percent and home and furniture at 1.23 percent. Shopify's article quotes the same benchmark at 2.66 percent, most likely from a different month of the rolling data. Its formula divides purchases by users rather than sessions, which is not how Shopify counts.

Shopify itself is the most candid source. The same blog article calls the idea of a universal benchmark a fallacy and says the averages are better as a rough baseline than as a target.

Why averages mislead

Device is the first reason. Littledata has desktop ahead of mobile, and Contentsquare's retail data has desktop at 3.7 percent against 2 percent on mobile. Dynamic Yield's sample shows the opposite, with mobile at 2.88 percent and desktop at 2.31 percent. Benchmarks drawn from different stores do not even agree on the direction.

Mix is the second. Take a store with 10,000 sessions, 7,000 on mobile converting at 1 percent and 3,000 on desktop converting at 3 percent. That is 70 plus 90 orders, a blended rate of 1.6 percent. If a social campaign shifts the mix to 8,500 mobile sessions and 1,500 desktop, the same store takes 85 plus 45 orders and the blended rate falls to 1.3 percent. Nothing on the site got worse.

Price point and source are the third. Dynamic Yield's spread from 0.7 percent to 5.39 percent follows what is being sold, and Shopify's blog makes the same point about price. A visitor from an email list already knows the store, while a visitor from a cold ad does not, so a month with more prospecting spend will show a lower rate even when the ads are working.

How to find your own rate by source

Inside Shopify, open the Growth page and the traffic insights. The Top traffic sources report lists conversion rate, orders, order value and sessions for each traffic source, and the Channel performance report includes conversion rate per marketing channel. Under Analytics > Reports, Sessions by device and Sessions by landing page cover the other two cuts, and Sidekick accepts a prompt such as Show my conversion rate by device type for the last 30 days.

Keep the comparison clean. Use periods that both fall after the September update, keep the Human or bot session filter on the same setting, and look at orders alongside the rate.

Our free conversion rate benchmark tool does the arithmetic if you want a quick read. You enter visitors, conversions, a category and an average order value, and it returns your rate, a comparison with fixed reference figures for that category, and the orders and revenue you would gain at the top-quartile figure. Enter sessions rather than visitors to match Shopify's definition, and treat the verdict as orientation, as with any benchmark.

In Arktis, the Ads Analytics dashboard shows conversion rate for the ten UTM campaigns with the most sessions, with sessions and conversions beside it, and a channel by device table of conversion rates. A session is marked as converted by a matched Shopify order, a Stripe payment, a tracker convert event or a URL goal, and matched orders are counted per ad platform, next to the Meta spend synced per campaign.

How to increase Shopify conversion rate, with evidence

Start at checkout, because that is where the research is. Baymard Institute averages 50 studies to a cart abandonment rate of 70.22 percent. Setting aside shoppers who were just browsing, its survey of US shoppers found 40 percent abandoned because extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees were too high, 20 percent because delivery was too slow, 19 percent because they did not trust the site with their card details, 18 percent because the site wanted them to create an account, and 17 percent because checkout was too long or complicated.

Each of those is a specific change. Show shipping costs and delivery times before checkout, offer guest checkout, cut fields, and display the payment methods shoppers recognise. Baymard estimates that the average large e-commerce site can gain a 35.26 percent increase in conversion rate through better checkout design, and that an ideal flow can be as short as 12 to 14 form elements. Our guides to checkout funnel optimisation and optimising your e-commerce checkout go through the steps.

Then check speed with data Shopify already gives you. Its web performance reports track the three Core Web Vitals, Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift, by page and over time.

Finally, watch what converting shoppers did. On Growth and above, Arktis lets you watch the session recordings of visitors who converted, filtered by source, which shows the path that works for a channel before you redesign anything for the visitors who left.

Where Arktis does not fit

Shopify's number is the reference for the headline rate, and Arktis will not reproduce it. Arktis counts its own sessions, visitors who send Global Privacy Control are counted with a tab-only identifier, and an order it cannot match to a visitor is stored unattributed, so its per-source rates can understate sources that are hard to match.

Arktis is also not a testing tool. It has no A/B testing, no on-site surveys and no heatmaps, so if your next step is to test two versions of a product page you need a dedicated experimentation tool alongside it. And for a store with little paid traffic, Shopify's own reports by source and device are free and sufficient.

Next steps

To see conversion rate by campaign and device against matched orders, start the 7-day Growth trial or compare plans on the pricing page. For related reading, see Shopify analytics beyond the default dashboard, average order value vs conversion rate and Shopify Thank you page tracking.

Sources

Shopify Help Center: behavior reports, Conversion rate over time and Conversion rate breakdown, the 1 October 2022 limit, web performance reports, accessed 1 October 2026

Shopify Help Center: changes to sessions and conversion rate in Shopify Analytics, the 21 to 23 September 2026 rollout, what changed, bot classification from 7 October 2025, accessed 1 October 2026

Shopify Help Center: measuring marketing performance, the definition of online store conversion rate, Top traffic sources and Channel performance reports, accessed 1 October 2026

Littledata: average ecommerce conversion rate, 2,800 Shopify sites benchmarked in 2023, average, mobile, desktop and top-decile figures, accessed 1 October 2026

Dynamic Yield: eCommerce conversion rate benchmarks, twelve months to August 2026, by industry and device, the formula, accessed 1 October 2026

Shopify blog: ecommerce conversion rate benchmarks and tips, updated 22 August 2026, the Statista figure, the 400 brands and 2.66 percent quoted for Dynamic Yield, sessions versus users, the benchmark caveat

Contentsquare: 2026 Digital Experience Benchmark, engagement, retail conversion by device, accessed 1 October 2026

Baymard Institute: cart abandonment rate statistics, the 70.22 percent average, reasons for abandonment, the 35.26 percent estimate, accessed 1 October 2026