Published · Updated · 5 min read · By the FCAnalytics team
The WooCommerce conversion funnel, stage by stage
A WooCommerce conversion funnel is a count of people at each step between landing on your store and paying. It is the most useful diagnostic tool a store has, because it turns the vague question “why are sales low” into a specific one: “at which step are we losing people”.
This article goes through the five stages most stores use, explains what each one measures, gives commonly cited benchmark ranges so you can tell whether a number is unusual, and lists the fixes that tend to work at each stage.
The five stages
- Sessions. Visits to the store.
- Product views. Sessions in which at least one product page was viewed.
- Add to cart. Sessions in which something was added to the cart.
- Checkout started. Sessions that reached the checkout page.
- Purchase. Completed, paid orders.
Each stage is reported as a count and as a percentage of the previous stage. The percentage between adjacent stages is the step conversion rate, and the overall rate (purchases divided by sessions) is the site conversion rate.
A note on benchmarks
Every benchmark below is a commonly cited range, not a target. Conversion rates vary enormously with product category, price point, traffic source, device mix, and whether the store is new or established. A store selling a $15 consumable to returning customers will convert very differently from one selling $900 furniture to cold traffic. Use the ranges to spot something unusual, then compare your store with its own history, which is the only benchmark that fully applies.
Stage 1: Sessions
Sessions on their own tell you about marketing reach, not about the store. The questions worth asking here are about quality: what share of sessions bounce immediately, what share come from paid versus organic versus direct, and what the device split looks like. A sudden rise in sessions with no rise in product views usually means a campaign is bringing in the wrong people, or a bot.
Stage 2: Product views
The share of sessions that view at least one product page is commonly cited somewhere in the 40 to 60 percent range for stores where most traffic lands on the home page or a category page. Stores whose ads link directly to product pages will be much higher by definition.
What a low number usually means
- The home page does not make it obvious what you sell or where to click.
- Category pages are slow, cluttered, or missing filters.
- Search returns poor results.
- Mobile navigation hides the catalog behind too many taps.
Stage 3: Add to cart
Of sessions that view a product, a commonly cited range for add-to-cart is roughly 5 to 15 percent, with wide variation by category. This is the stage that measures whether the product page does its job.
What to check
- Price and shipping cost are visible before the button, not after.
- The add-to-cart button is above the fold on mobile.
- Photos answer the obvious questions: scale, texture, what is in the box.
- Stock and delivery time are stated plainly.
- Variations (size, color) are easy to pick and do not reset the page.
Stage 4: Checkout started
Of sessions that add to cart, commonly cited figures put the share that proceed to checkout somewhere in the 30 to 50 percent range. The drop here is the cart page itself. People add items to compare, to save, or to see the shipping cost, and many were never going to buy today.
What to check
- The cart shows the full total, including shipping and tax estimates.
- Free-shipping thresholds are shown with a progress message, not just a footnote.
- The checkout button is the most prominent thing on the page.
- Coupon fields do not send people off-site hunting for codes.
Stage 5: Purchase
Of sessions that start checkout, a commonly cited completion range is roughly 40 to 60 percent. The rest are abandoned checkouts, and this is the most expensive leak in the funnel because the shopper had already decided to buy.
What to check
- Guest checkout is available. Forced account creation is a well-known abandonment cause.
- The form asks only for what is needed, and address autocomplete works.
- Payment options match what your customers actually use, including wallets on mobile.
- Errors are shown next to the field, not in a banner at the top.
- Nothing unexpected appears on the final step: no new fee, no surprise delivery date.
- The page is fast. Checkout is where slow themes and heavy plugins do the most damage.
Overall conversion rate
Multiply the step rates together and you get the site conversion rate. Commonly cited ranges for overall ecommerce conversion sit somewhere between 1 and 4 percent, with mobile typically lower than desktop. If your store is at 1 percent, the funnel will tell you whether that is one bad stage or several mediocre ones. The fix is different in each case.
How to read your funnel
Three habits make funnel data useful rather than just interesting.
- Compare periods, not absolutes. This week against last week, this month against the same month last year. A step rate that falls by a third is a signal regardless of where it started.
- Segment by device. A mobile checkout problem can hide behind a healthy desktop number.
- Segment by source. Paid social traffic often converts well at add-to-cart and poorly at purchase. Organic search is usually the reverse. Knowing this stops you from “fixing” a page that is fine.
Getting the data in WooCommerce
WooCommerce records orders and checkout activity on its own, so stages 4 and 5 can be built from order data alone. Stages 1 to 3 (sessions, product views, add to cart) happen in the browser, so they need a small tracking snippet in the store’s head. Without it you get a two-stage funnel, which is still useful for watching checkout completion, but it cannot tell you about the product page or the cart.
FCAnalytics shows the full five-stage funnel once the snippet is installed, and the checkout-to-purchase view without it, with a note saying which one you are looking at. The how it works page covers the setup. Google Analytics can produce the same stages with ecommerce events if you prefer to build it there.
Start with one stage
You do not fix a funnel all at once. Find the step with the biggest gap against its commonly cited range or against your own history, change one thing, and watch it for two weeks. Then move to the next step. Stores that work this way make steady progress; stores that redesign the whole site at once rarely learn what worked.
If you would like to see what a full funnel looks like with real store data behind it, the FCAnalytics demo store is open to anyone, and a 14-day trial on your own store needs no card.
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Written by the FCAnalytics team, the people who build the product. Definitions and formulas in this article are the ones FCAnalytics uses in its dashboards; see how net profit is calculated and the FAQ.