The E-Commerce Conversion Audit Checklist We Use With Clients

Before recommending any redesign or new feature, a proper e-commerce conversion audit checks a specific, ordered list of things — because most conversion problems trace back to a small number of common issues, and fixing them is usually cheaper and faster than a full redesign.

Start with the cart-to-checkout transition. Check whether the cart clearly shows total cost including estimated shipping before checkout begins, since unexpected costs revealed only at the final step are the single most commonly cited reason for cart abandonment. If shipping cost is not visible until the last step, that is very often the first and highest-impact fix available.

Audit the checkout flow step count and required fields. Every additional step and every non-essential form field measurably increases abandonment. Check specifically whether guest checkout is offered and prominent, whether address autocomplete is implemented, and whether the flow can realistically be completed on a phone without excessive zooming or scrolling.

Check page speed on mobile specifically, not desktop. A meaningful share of e-commerce traffic is mobile, and slow mobile load times disproportionately hurt conversion compared to desktop — run the actual product and checkout pages, not just the homepage, through a real mobile speed test.

Review trust signals at the point of decision, not just on an about page. Security badges, clear return policy, and visible customer reviews should appear near the add-to-cart button and at checkout, where doubt actually occurs, not buried on a separate policies page nobody visits before deciding to buy.

Check payment method coverage against what your specific customers expect. Missing a payment method your audience commonly uses — digital wallets, buy-now-pay-later options relevant to your market — is a silent conversion loss that never shows up as an error, just as an abandoned cart.

Finally, check post-purchase and abandoned-cart follow-up. A cart-abandonment email sequence, triggered within the first hour and following up over the next two days, recovers a meaningful share of otherwise-lost sales and is one of the highest-return, lowest-effort fixes available to almost any e-commerce store, yet is frequently missing or poorly configured even on otherwise well-built stores.

Running through these checks in order, rather than jumping straight to a full redesign, consistently identifies the highest-impact, lowest-cost fixes first — which is exactly the order a conversion audit should prioritise.