It comes down to one of four reasons: the measurement changed, your visitors changed, your offer changed, or your site has a problem.
That's the order of likelihood, and the order to check them in. Most of the drops brands ask to have fixed never happened on the site.
The benchmark
Two numbers are enough to sort the causes. If your orders are steady and your sessions are up, the rate is falling because of the denominator: look at measurement and traffic. If your orders are falling on comparable traffic, look at the offer and the site.
The shape of the curve is the second filter. Chart the daily rate over 120 days. A step down, a drop over one or two days, points to measurement or tech: something was published that day.
A steady slope over several weeks points to seasonality, competition or the final price shoppers pay. A step has a date, and you can find that date in your logbook.
The rule
Don't start any work on the site until you've ruled out the other three causes. Redesigning a product page won't fix a stockout.
The steps
- Measurement. A change in how Shopify counts, bots, a modified consent banner, a subdomain dropped from tracking. At one sports brand, 63,000 sessions on the account area were measured in 2025, and zero in 2026: cross-domain tracking broke during the migration, and nobody noticed.
- Visitors. A new campaign, a new source, more mobile, a new country.
- Offer. Price, size availability, the end of a promotion, a competitor running a sale.
- Site. A recent release, a newly added app, a payment error, slow load times.
- The date. For each lead, find the start date, then list everything that was published that day.
- The line for management:
"The rate has been dropping since the 14th. Here's what changed on the 14th."
The trap
The wrong comparison. November's rate compared with October's tells you nothing; the rate for the same week a year earlier tells you something.
If your reference period included a promotion, you're comparing a celebration to an ordinary day.
And since September 21, 2026, any Shopify rate compared with an earlier one compares two different calculation rules. Before you look for why the rate is dropping, ask yourself whether it's really dropping.
