Track Shopify checkout abandonment at every step (not just the final step)

If your only checkout funnel event is checkout_started, you have one number: percentage of visitors who entered checkout. You don't know where they dropped off inside it. The Shopify checkout has at least four distinct steps, and each one has a different leading cause of abandonment.

The four checkout steps to instrument

1. Information step: customer enters email, shipping address, contact info. Top abandonment cause: forced account creation. Capture the event when the customer reaches this step but before submitting.
2. Shipping step: customer selects shipping option. Top abandonment cause: shipping cost reveals exceed expectations. Capture as a separate event with the cart total at this point.
3. Payment step: customer enters payment info. Top abandonment cause: trust friction (no Apple Pay, no Shop Pay, no PayPal). Capture with payment_method_options visible to the customer.
4. Review step: customer reviews and clicks Pay. Top abandonment cause: last-second tax / shipping changes, total too high vs expectation set on PDP. Capture with the final total.

How to instrument each step

Shopify Customer Events fires page-view events at each step automatically. You can subscribe to checkout_step_viewed in your custom pixel and capture the step ID. Then send a custom event to Klaviyo (e.g. Checkout Step 2 Viewed) with the current cart total and selected options.

On Plus stores you can use checkout extensions to fire events at finer granularity (e.g. when a specific form field is focused). Non-Plus stores have to rely on Customer Events page-level granularity, which is still enough to identify the bottleneck step.

What the data tells you

After two weeks of step-level data, the drop-off pattern usually points at one specific fix:

• Big drop at step 1: enable Shop Pay or guest checkout, you're losing customers who don't want to create an account.
• Big drop at step 2: your shipping costs are over the customer's expectation. Either reduce shipping or telegraph the cost on the PDP.
• Big drop at step 3: add more payment methods (Apple Pay, Shop Pay, Klarna, PayPal).
• Big drop at step 4: your total is higher than expected. Usually a tax or duty surprise. Add a tax estimator on the cart.