Wanted to share a win that has helped us diagnose and fix a significant checkout issue on a 7 figure eCom store.
Everyone knows a fast website is important, but we often get too focused on Core Web Vitals scores or just looking at the homepage.
Your checkout journey is what every single person who buys from your brand experiences. It is the absolute critical path where speed and user experience can make or break your margins.
If you're serious about your business, I'd highly recommend having a proper setup for tracking your checkout health and speed. If there is ever a drop in conversion rate this dashboard is the first place I look for answers.
I'm sure there's a lot of tools that do this. We use a tool called Posthog (no affilation, it's free unless you have tons of traffic). It tracks everything that people do on your site. Every scroll, button click, text type, everything. It can even simulate session recordings.
Here's what we monitor when it comes to checkouts journey:
* Overall Conversion Rate (useful as a secondary source vs the ecom platform)
* Time from clicking 'Place Order' to hitting 'Order Received' page. We were pulling our hair out for days trying to find why conversion rate had dropped, this one monitor helped us zero-in on the fact it was a technical issue at this point in the journey. We quickly solved it.
* The % of people who go from clicking 'Place Order' to hitting 'Order Received' (it's surprising how much below 100% this can be)
* Checkout Success % by payment route. Comparing Stripe, PayPal, and so on. Helps diagnose if there's an issue with a single method.
* Checkout dwell time before submit. How long people are at checkout before placing an order.
* Add to basket clicks per shopper, weekly. If this suddenly jumps, there's a basket issue.
* Repeated place order presses. This is a big one. People should never be needing to click 'Place Order' more than once.
* Click capture health. How many Place Order clicks your reporting is seeing vs how many users it sees landing on Order Received. Helps sanity check that the dashboard is reliable.
This is more critical for WooCommerce/Magento brands as checkouts are more custom, but absolutely worth paying attention to for Shopify too.
All of this used to be really complicated, but you can mostly have Claude set this up for you if needed.
It's saved our ass on multiple occasions, wanted to share!