What is conversion rate?
Conversion rate is the share of store visitors who complete a purchase, written as a percentage. Divide orders by sessions, then multiply by 100. If 1,000 people visit and 20 buy, the conversion rate is 2%. It is the single number that tells you how well your store turns traffic into sales, separate from how much traffic you have.
Example
Say your store gets 10,000 sessions a month and converts at 1.8%, so 180 orders. You can chase more traffic, which costs money, or lift the rate. Move it from 1.8% to 2.3% on the same 10,000 sessions, and 180 orders becomes 230. That is 50 extra orders from a better store experience. At a $45 average order, $2,250 a month from traffic you already paid for.
That is why rate beats raw traffic for most stores: it compounds on every visitor you already have.
On Shopify stores
On a Shopify store, conversion rate shows in the analytics dashboard. Read it by stage, not as one number. A shopper converts from search, from a collection, from the cart. If carts are filling but checkouts are not, the leak is at checkout, not the product page. The friction hides in plain sight: search that returns nothing for a typo, a collection sorted worst-first, a sold-out bestseller. Fix the leak, not the average.
Related terms
Conversion rate with Sledge
Sledge analytics read conversion by surface, so you see where shoppers drop instead of one blended number. And built-in Growth Intelligence goes past the chart: it names the leak, suggests the fix, estimates the gain in dollars, then measures the result against real sales. Insights that tell you what to do. Not just what happened.
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