A store-wide conversion rate is an average across four very different jobs, and averages hide locations. Before you touch a page, work out which stage is leaking, because a fix for one stage does nothing for another.
The four stages, and what failure looks like at each
Find. Visitors arrive and can't reach the thing they want. Search returns nothing useful, filters are unusable on a phone, category names describe your inventory system rather than shopper intent. Symptom: high exit from category and search pages, many searches with no clicks.
Evaluate. They reach a product and can't answer a question — fit, material, delivery, returns. Symptom: deep product-page views, few add-to-carts.
Commit. They add to cart and stall, almost always because a number changed. Shipping, tax, a threshold, a missing delivery date. Symptom: adds to cart far exceed checkout starts.
Pay. They enter checkout and stop: a forced account, a hostile form, a missing wallet payment, an absent trust cue. Symptom: checkout starts far exceed completions.
Write down the four numbers. The stage with the widest gap is where your money is, and it is frequently not the one you assumed.
The failure that isn't a stage
Sometimes the store is fine and the traffic is wrong. Broad campaigns, discount-hunting audiences, and marketplace shoppers all bounce correctly.
The tell: every stage leaks moderately and uniformly, and the pattern doesn't change no matter what you fix. Before rebuilding pages, check whether you're converting the wrong people.
What to fix first, by stage
Find: make search forgiving of typos, put filters where a thumb can reach them, name categories the way shoppers ask for things.
Evaluate: answer the question your support inbox receives most. Add scale to your photography. Put delivery and returns on the product page, not behind a tab.
Commit: reveal shipping before the cart. State the free-shipping threshold while people are still adding. Show a delivery date.
Pay: offer guest checkout. Delete fields that don't change fulfilment or payment. Put security cues beside the card field. Add a wallet payment method.
Notice how few of these are design changes. Most are decisions about when information appears.
Mobile is not a stage; it's a multiplier
Run the four numbers separately for phones. A large gap at any stage on mobile is interface friction — keyboards, tap targets, filters, autofill — not diminished intent. Same funnel, same shoppers, different obstacles.
Where the four numbers stop being enough
The stage view tells you where to look. It won't tell you which field in your checkout or which filter on your category page did the damage — two stores with identical stage numbers can be failing for entirely different reasons.
Defrixa's free scan reads the structural friction on any page you point it at and names its biggest issue, without you installing anything. The field, the step, and whether your fix worked are what the snippet measures.
Common questions
It varies enormously by category, price point, and traffic source. Comparing your rate to a published average tells you nothing actionable; comparing your four stage numbers against each other tells you where to work.
Rarely. A redesign changes everything at once, which means you learn nothing about what worked, and you risk breaking the stages that were fine.
They mask one. If a store leaks at Commit because shipping surprises people, a discount pays for the surprise instead of removing it — permanently, on every order.