Checkouts
How many times shoppers reached the till and started paying.
What it means
Checkouts is the number of times shoppers began the checkout process in the period, counted per event rather than per person. It's a raw count, not a rate, and it says nothing about payment — the same shopper can begin twice, and plenty who begin never pay. It's the last step you can measure before money changes hands.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Nothing is divided. The count goes up once each time a begin-checkout event fires, so a shopper who starts, backs out to change a size and starts again contributes two.
Worked example. A month records 1,400 Checkouts and 900 orders. That's 64% of started checkouts finishing, and 500 that didn't. At an average order of €70, roughly €35,000 stopped at the payment step.
Compare that with the step above it: 2,300 baskets produced those 1,400 checkout starts. Both steps leak, but the people at the till already chose the product, entered an address and committed time — they're the cheaper group to win back, which is why this step is worth fixing first.
It answers the question
How many shoppers reached the payment step, and how many of them actually paid? The gap between the two is the most recoverable money in the funnel.
Why it matters
Everyone in this count has decided. They picked a product, filled a basket and started handing over details, so a shopper lost here is lost to friction rather than to doubt — a broken field, an unexpected delivery charge, a payment method you don't accept.
It's a count, so it rises and falls with traffic on its own. What tells you something is the ratio to TransactionsTransactionsPair with sessions to sanity-check conversion and spot tracking gaps. beside it, which holds steadier through traffic changes and moves mainly when the checkout itself does.
What good looks like
There's no universal number here — it's a count, so what's good depends on the size of the store and how much traffic you bought that month. Judge the level against your own last 30 days.
Judge the health of the step by the share that finishes: track started checkouts against orders over several months and watch for that ratio slipping, because a slip is a real fault while the raw count moving is usually only traffic. Compare it by device too, since the phone number and the desktop number often tell different stories about the same checkout.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Put an express checkout button in the cart drawer | Offer a wallet payment next to the basket so shoppers skip the cart page entirely | More checkout starts, and fewer lost between basket and till | 1–2 weeks | Shoppers bypass the cart page, where cross-sells and delivery-threshold nudges live, so average order size can slip. |
| Fast Recover the baskets you already lost | Turn on the abandoned-basket flow and check it sends within an hour, not the next day | Returning shoppers add checkout starts you'd already written off | 1 week | Every recovery send competes with a campaign send for the same inbox. Unsubscribes come out of the list all your other flows depend on. |
| Slow Take the surprises out of the basket page | Show delivery cost, tax and the returns policy before the checkout button, not after it | More of the baskets that reach the till stay there | 3–5 weeks | Shoppers who'd have started checkout now rule themselves out earlier, so this count can dip in the first weeks even as orders rise. |
| Slow Rebuild checkout for the phone | Fewer fields, real address autocomplete, wallet payments first, no forced account | The mobile finish rate closes on the desktop one | 1 quarter | A quarter of engineering that isn't going into acquisition or the product pages, and dropping the account step slows email list growth. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Started and finished are the two counts either side of payment. Read alone, each one mostly tracks traffic; read together, they isolate the checkout.
The till is doing its job
More shoppers reaching payment and more of them finishing. The step held under extra volume, which is where checkouts usually start to break.
They reach the till and walk
The worst corner on the page. People who already decided are being stopped by something mechanical — a declined method, a validation error, a delivery charge revealed at the last screen.
Fewer starts, same finishes
Often good news: shoppers going straight through on a wallet button, which can skip the start event entirely. Confirm the tag before reading it as improved intent.
Thinner from further up
Both fell together, which points at traffic or product pages rather than payment. The checkout is rarely the culprit when the step above it shrank too.
The pair exposes the basket-to-till step, which no single figure shows. A wide and widening gap means shoppers are filling baskets and abandoning them before payment even starts — usually a cost or a policy they meet on the cart page, not anything inside checkout.
Read together they show who is carrying the delivery bill and what it's doing to you. A low shipping share alongside a wide checkout-to-order gap usually means the customer is paying for delivery and refusing at the last screen — you've moved the cost off the P&L and into the abandonment rate.
Common misreads
It means people who started. Plenty of them never finish, so reading this as sales overstates the month and hides the exact leak the number exists to expose.
Express and wallet payments often bypass the begin-checkout event completely. Turn one on and this count drops overnight while orders hold steady. Check what changed in the payment options before diagnosing demand.
They never are. Baskets are used as wish lists, price comparisons and reminders, so a large gap is normal for every store. What matters is the direction of that gap over time, not its size on any one day.
Also called
Begin checkout · checkout starts · initiated checkouts
See yoursYour Checkouts for the selected range, next to the basket count above it and the orders below it.
Open Google Analytics Overview →