Funnel — sessions to orders
How to read Ordinary's 5-step conversion funnel and spot where customers drop off between landing and purchase.
Written by The Ordinary Team · Updated Funnel — sessions to orders
The conversion funnel shows how visitors progress from “landed on your store” to “placed an order.” It lives on Reports → Attribution as the primary chart.
The five steps
From top of funnel to bottom:
- Sessions — unique pixel-observed sessions in the date range. A session = one visitor’s browsing run on the storefront.
- Product views — sessions that viewed at least one product detail page. Answers “what fraction of visitors got to a product?”
- Add to cart — sessions that added at least one product to cart. Answers “what fraction were interested enough to commit to cart?”
- Checkout started — sessions that reached the checkout page (past cart). The classic abandoned-cart boundary.
- Orders — sessions that completed a purchase.
Drop-off rates
Hover any bar to see the drop-off rate from the step above. For example, a Sessions → Product view rate of 45% means less than half of visitors view a product — a sign your landing pages might need better hierarchy, faster load, or stronger hero hook.
Typical DTC benchmarks to compare against:
| Step | Good | Excellent |
|---|---|---|
| Sessions → Product view | 40-55% | 60%+ |
| Product view → ATC | 8-15% | 20%+ |
| ATC → Checkout | 40-60% | 70%+ |
| Checkout → Orders | 50-75% | 85%+ |
Your numbers will swing with promotions, traffic mix, and device split. Use the trend over time (compare today vs. last week) more than the absolute number.
Pixel vs. Shopify-inferred counts
Some bars have a two-tone split: the darker shade is what the pixel directly observed, the lighter shade is what Shopify’s order data implies. When pixel coverage is low (e.g. mobile buyers who disabled JavaScript, or the first day after install), this lets you see what’s “real” vs. “floor-clamped.”
The floor-clamp guarantees: if you had 100 orders today, the funnel never shows fewer than 100 checkouts, 100 ATCs, or 100 product views — because each order had to have passed through every step.
Subscription reorders
If you run a Recharge subscription, recurring renewal orders are split out as a lighter-blue segment on the Checkout and Orders bars (Starter and higher). This is critical because renewal orders don’t have a customer-facing funnel — the customer isn’t clicking through your store again; Recharge just bills them.
The number under the bar shows the total including subscription reorders, with the sub count called out next to it. For example, “23 (4 subs)” means the store had 23 total orders in this step, 4 of which were subscription renewals. The 4 render as the light-blue segment at the top of the bar.
Subscription reorders are intentionally excluded from the step-to-step conversion-rate math (the Add to Cart → Checkout percentage), because they bypass the browser flow entirely and including them would falsely inflate your conversion rate.
On Free, reorders are counted with regular orders. Upgrade to Starter to see the split.
What “session” really means
A session is a distinct pixel-observed visit. It has:
- A start time (first event on this visit)
- An end time (last event, or an idle timeout)
- A set of events (page views, product views, ATCs, etc.)
One human might generate multiple sessions — a morning visit, a lunchtime visit, a purchase from mobile that evening. All three are counted as separate sessions, and the funnel recognizes them as coming from the same visitor’s browser so the journey stays linked.
What’s next
- Attribution reports — per-channel revenue once you’ve understood the funnel shape.
- Why do I see “partial data”? — if your funnel looks suspiciously truncated.