- The Basics of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- The eCommerce or Shopify CRO Audit Checklist
- How to Conduct eCommerce CRO Audit
- Step 1: Define Your Conversion Action & Goals
- Step 2: Analyze Data and Customer Behavior
- Step 3: Gather Direct Customer Feedback
- Step 4: Highlight the Key Store Pages
- Step 5: Evaluate the CRO Audit Parameters
- Step 6: Create Test Hypotheses
- Step 7: Implement the Required Changes
- Step 8: Measure and Analyze the Post-Audit Performance
- CRO Audit Services for eCommerce Brands
- Final Thoughts on eCommerce CRO Audit
- FAQs about eCommerce CRO Audit
How to Do eCommerce CRO Audit + Checklist [2025]
At every touchpoint of your eCommerce store, there could be an opportunity to increase your sales conversion. You just need to have an eye for it.
A conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit can help you find areas of improvement and opportunities. It helps you make changes and improvements to your site that can lead to more revenue and profits.
So, in this blog post, we’ll take you through a detailed eCommerce CRO audit checklist and a step-by-step guide on how to perform an eCommerce or Shopify CRO audit.
Even if you’re planning to get professional help from a CRO audit service provider, being well-versed in the overall process can help you get the best out of the service provider.
Let’s get started!
The Basics of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Before we jump on to the topic of a CRO audit, let’s briefly understand the two terms: “Conversion rate” and “Conversion rate optimization (CRO)”:
What is the conversion rate?
A website conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that take a certain action as per your business goal. For example, the percentage of visitors that buy from your store is the conversion rate of your eCommerce store.
Here’s the formula and example of website conversion rate:
What is CRO?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the master plan that includes various strategies and tactics to increase the conversion rate. For example, CRO may include the following strategies:
- A/B testing
- UX improvements
- Product page optimization
- Use of landing pages
- Checkout optimization
- Email marketing
Learn more: 15+ eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices
What is a CRO Audit in eCommerce?
An eCommerce CRO audit is the evaluation of your eCommerce store and associated sales and marketing channels that impact the conversion rate of your business and identify the areas of improvement.
The goal is to find the problems that are keeping the conversion rate down and prepare solutions for those problems. The CRO audit is a data-driven approach to increase the conversion rate instead of making random changes to your site based on assumptions.
The eCommerce or Shopify CRO Audit Checklist
This CRO audit checklist will help you ensure you don’t miss out on any important factor.
If you want to understand what factors are evaluated in a CRO audit, you can simply consider all the elements that impact your store’s conversion rate. For example, user experience (UX) is so crucial it can make or break your CRO strategy. So, UX is one of the important factors in our CRO audit checklist.
Here’s the detailed Shopify or Shopify Plus CRO audit checklist:
1. Overall User Experience
- Page load speed: Check if the page load speed meets the benchmark or if there are any areas of improvement.
- Content readability: Review the content readability, i.e., the contrast between the background color and text.
- Accessibility: Make sure your website design follows all the best practices for accessibility.
2. Overall Design Optimization
- Responsiveness: Check if the design is responsive on all device types: Desktop, mobile, and tablet.
- Mobile optimization: Test the website on mobile devices to ensure a seamless experience is provided to mobile users.
- Design layout: Evaluate the design layout to ensure it’s making the website visitors engage or interact easily with the website content.
- Interactive elements: Review the elements such as call-to-action buttons for various pages, forms, and other actions.
3. Homepage Optimization
- Navigation menu or mega menu: Review the navigation menu to ensure it’s helpful to visitors in finding what they’re looking for category-wise. Collections and menus must be organized in a way that makes it easy for customers to shop.
- Search functionality: Make sure it’s easily accessible and effective to find any product or other information on your website.
- Above-the-fold design: Above-the-fold design or hero section is the top part of your website that visitors see before scrolling down. Thus, it must be compelling enough to entice visitors to explore more.
- Copy with the USP and VP: Your brand’s unique selling proposition (USP) and value proposition (VP) must be clearly expressed in the homepage copy. Ideally, the USP should be in the above-the-fold section.
- Exit intent pop-up: Check if the exit intent pop-up is there, and if yes, test the functionality and evaluate the design.
- Display of a featured product(s): Featured product(s) or best sellers must be displayed to avoid customers leaving the website without checking out your best offering.
- Major collections: At least major collections should be displayed on the homepage which could drive customers to explore and buy more.
4. Product Page Optimization
- Visual elements: Evaluate the visual elements, mainly product images, to see if they are of good quality and appealing.
- Product page copy: This copy is incredibly important. Make sure it’s highlighting benefits and not just listing features.
- Urgency & scarcity elements: Check if the urgency and scarcity elements are used appropriately as needed.
- Add to cart and Buy now CTAs: Check if the design and color of CTA buttons stand out from the rest of the page.
- Social proof placement: Make sure the social proof is displayed not too below.
5. Cart Page Optimization
- Progress bar: Check if the progress bar needs improvement, or if it’s placed on the cart page in the first place.
- Cart page copy: Check if the copy is enticing enough for customers to proceed to checkout or direct customers to shop more.
- Multiple payment options: Review the payment options provided on the cart page to see if customers might be looking for more or specific options.
- Discount strategy: Evaluate how the discount promotion appears on the cart page.
- Urgency & scarcity elements: Check if the urgency and scarcity elements are used appropriately as needed.
- Note: We already covered this on the product page, but it should be repeated for the cart page as well.
- Gift personalization option: Check if this field is needed and used appropriately from a conversion standpoint.
- Note: If you’re selling products that are often used as a gift item, this could be applicable. If not, you can mark it as an “NA” (not applicable) parameter in the audit.
6. Checkout Page Optimization
- Guest checkout: Check if the guest checkout option is available.
- Multiple payment options: Just like the cart page, your checkout page would also display the payment options. So, you need to repeat this check in the audit.
- Discount strategy: Evaluate how the discount promotion appears on the checkout page.
- Trust badges: Check if the trust badges for secure payment are displayed on the checkout page.
- Form fields: Review how many form fields are given to the customers and if you need to reduce those fields for a quicker checkout.
- Upselling & cross-selling: Check if you’re making the most out of the checkout page through upselling and cross-selling promotions.
7. Miscellaneous Evaluations
- Pricing strategy: Review the pricing strategy to see if any enhancement is required.
- Live chat option: Evaluate the live chat function and any area of improvement to enhance the customer experience.
- Store policies: Review if the store policies are easily accessible to the visitors, especially return and refund policies, and are placed at multiple touchpoints, i.e., footer, product page, checkout page.
- FAQs section: The FAQs section may be required in multiple places. Check if it’s available where needed and covers the important questions.
- Ads optimization: Check if the ad copy is addressing the key pain points and motivating factors that could lead to action
Pro tip: For complete design optimization, from the homepage to the checkout page, you can use GemPages — a CRO-focused page builder for Shopify. GemPages helps you ensure that your entire store design is optimized, responsive, and mobile-friendly right from the get-go. GemPages offers you a conversion-focused page builder with professionally designed templates and many eCommerce elements.
How to Conduct eCommerce CRO Audit
So, we have the checklist ready to perform the CRO audit. But there’s a lot more in the process than just ticking the checkboxes. You need to prepare even before you start the actual audit.
Let’s go through the step-by-step guide on running an eCommerce or Shopify CRO audit:
Step 1: Define Your Conversion Action & Goals
A conversion could mean different to different businesses. Even within your own business, you may have different targets to hit.
For example, here are some of the conversion actions for an eCommerce business:
- The percentage of visitors that buy your product/service
- The percentage of visitors that subscribe to your newsletter
- The percentage of visitors that subscribe to your monthly offer
- The percentage of visitors that join your loyalty program
- The percentage of visitors that join your online community
So, first, you need to define what sort of conversion action you’re aiming at.
Once you’ve defined the conversion action, you need to define the goal. E.g., you went with the first one — the percentage of visitors that buy your product/service. So, you need to set a goal.
For example, let’s say your current conversion rate is 3%, meaning, 3 customers are buying your product from 100 visitors. Your goal could be to enhance this conversion rate to 4%. Even a 1% increase in the conversion rate can make a huge difference.
Step 2: Analyze Data and Customer Behavior
Review the past data to see what’s been a trend over the years. If you’re conducting a CRO audit, you should avoid selecting a timeframe falling within a peak season.
For example, you should avoid comparing the conversion rate data of October with November because November will have huge shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Check out Google Analytics 4 (GA4) data. It will help you with a lot of great insights about your store’s traffic and the behavior of the website visitors.
Apart from the statistics, you should check customer interactions with your brand in the recent past. To do this, you can use a heatmap or session recording tool. Here are some popular Shopify apps that you can consider checking out for this purpose:
Check out which page is most visited by website visitors, where do they interact the most, and identify causes that might be leading to them bouncing off your website.
Step 3: Gather Direct Customer Feedback
While analyzing the existing data and customer behavior is insightful, direct customer feedback has its own importance. You can make your data-driven approach more solid using customer feedback as an additional layer of validation.
You can gather feedback from live website visitors using a feedback widget app from the Shopify App Store. Ask questions related to their user experience and if they’re able to find what they’re looking for.
Conduct customer interviews after they complete a purchase. Ask customers if they are facing any challenges or if they’d like to improve something. Also, you can use a Shopify app (post-purchase survey app) to collect feedback from your customers.
Learn more: Post-Purchase Surveys: Guide, Examples, and Questions
Step 4: Highlight the Key Store Pages
Every page on your store is important; however, from a conversion standpoint, some pages may carry more weight than others. You need to identify which are those pages for your store.
For example, your homepage, product page, landing page, and checkout page play an incredibly important role in your store’s conversion rates. You can even utilize the data and analysis to decide on the critical pages that need improvements.
Step 5: Evaluate the CRO Audit Parameters
Now, it’s time to perform a detailed audit on all the parameters we listed in the CRO audit checklist above. Note down all the numbers, wherever applicable, and identify the areas of improvement.
For example, when evaluating the overall user experience, “page load speed” is one of the parameters. So, you can check the performance of your store pages using PageSpeed Insights.
Let's assume you found the performance score of the homepage to be 75 for mobile. Meaning, it’s an indication of a huge area of improvement. Note down all the scores so that you can compare and see how much improvement is done after the changes/improvements.
Remember — all audit observations don’t have to be just numbers or straight Yes, No, or NA answers. You can also cover detailed descriptions of possible causes (of issues), solutions, and suggestions.
When evaluating all the audit parameters, prepare a list of action items that need to be worked on after the audit.
Step 6: Create Test Hypotheses
Based on the data analysis and audit observations, create different test hypotheses for areas where improvements are needed.
Here’s a real-life example of a hypothesis shared by PurpleFire where they helped the brand increase the conversion rate by adding social proof through reviews and icons:
Similarly, you can create a hypothesis for any problem statement you identify through your data and audit. Let’s take this hypothetical example: let’s say your cart page is one of the areas of concern. Customers have already negative feedback about it. Your audit observations also found areas of improvement.
Then, you need to create a test hypothesis for the cart page defining the problem and solution.
Step 7: Implement the Required Changes
Based on the audit outcome, work on all the areas of improvement and make changes/improvements. Before finalizing changes, you can also use the A/B testing strategy to make sure the changes are effective.
But you may ask — how do I perform these A/B tests for my Shopify store?
Well, we’re here to help you with just that — introducing GemX: CRO & A/B Testing app.
GemX is our new Shopify app that’s created to help you optimize landing pages, templates, and content. You can connect this app with major landing page builders and use advanced features such as custom traffic routing and funnel analytics.
Alt-text: GemX - CRO and A/B testing app for Shopify
Step 8: Measure and Analyze the Post-Audit Performance
After the changes are implemented on your website, keep monitoring your store’s conversion rate regularly. Analyze and evaluate the conversion rate — comparing old data with the new data. Identify the success rate and if any additional improvements are required.
CRO Audit Services for eCommerce Brands
1. PurpleFire
PurpleFire is a fully-managed CRO Agency led by Daniel Chabert — a conversion rate expert.
Clutch Reviews: Total Reviews: 74 | Average Referral Rating: 4.9/5
2. Thrive Internet Marketing Agency
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency offers various types of digital marketing services including the CRO audit service.
Clutch Reviews: Total Reviews: 92 | Average Referral Rating: 4.6/5
3. Inflow
Inflow is a Tampa-based digital marketing agency that offers the CRO audit service.
Clutch Reviews: Total Reviews: 11 | Average Referral Rating: 4.9/5
Learn more: 10 Best CRO Experts to Follow
Final Thoughts on eCommerce CRO Audit
In the eCommerce world, you need to continuously keep your game up with the latest trends, updates, and new launches. Thus, it also requires continuous updates in your website design as well.
While you want to stay relevant and updated with all the changes, you also need to take care of your conversions. Having conversion-focused tools like GemPages and GemX not only help you create conversion-optimized design but also conduct CRO audits when needed.
To learn more about eCommerce marketing strategies and best practices, check out more resources on GemPages Blog. Join the GemPages Facebook community to network and learn from like-minded entrepreneurs and experts.