How to Track Begin Checkout, Shipping and Payment Steps in Shopify
Most stores track purchases and nothing in between, so nobody can see where checkout leaks. Here is how to instrument every checkout step properly.
Most Shopify stores track two things. Someone started checkout, and someone bought.
So when checkout conversion drops, all you know is that it dropped. Not whether people bailed at shipping, choked on the shipping cost, or hit a payment error. You are guessing, and guessing is expensive.
The steps worth tracking
Shopify gives you an event for each stage. Use them.
checkout_started, the customer entered checkout.
checkout_contact_info_submitted, they gave you an email.
checkout_address_info_submitted, they entered shipping details.
payment_info_submitted, they entered payment.
checkout_completed, the order went through.
Five steps, five numbers. Now a drop has a location.
Why this is worth the effort
A real example of the pattern. A store sees checkout conversion fall. With only start and purchase, the conversation is about ad quality and traffic.
With step tracking, you see 90 percent of people submit contact info, 85 percent submit an address, and then 40 percent reach payment. The collapse is at the shipping step. Now you look at shipping options and find a rate that got misconfigured last Tuesday.
Same data, completely different conversation. One takes weeks and blames the ads. The other takes an afternoon.
Image: funnel chart showing the five checkout steps with drop off percentages between each, and the shipping step highlighted as the leak.
Setting it up
All five events come from the Shopify Custom Pixel. You subscribe to each one and forward it.
Send them to GA4 using the standard ecommerce names, because GA4 builds its funnel reports from those. Using your own names means building every report by hand.
The GA4 equivalents are begin_checkout, add_shipping_info, add_payment_info, and purchase. Contact info does not have a standard name, so send it as a custom event if you want it.
If you have not set up a Custom Pixel yet, start with
What to send with each step
Carry the cart contents and the value through every step. It costs nothing and it lets you answer better questions.
With value attached, you can see whether high value carts abandon at a different rate than small ones. That is often where the interesting finding is. Expensive carts frequently stall at shipping, because that is where the total finally appears.
Should these be Google Ads conversions?
Mostly no, and this matters.
Keep purchase as your only primary conversion. You can import begin checkout as a secondary conversion for visibility, but do not let it drive bidding.
The reason is simple. Optimize toward begin checkout and Google will find you people who reliably start checkout and never finish. Those people exist in large numbers and they are cheap to reach.
There is more on choosing primary signals in
the Performance Max tracking guide.
Where the numbers get confusing
Checkout started fires more than once when people navigate back and forth. Count unique sessions, not raw events, when you calculate drop off.
Express checkout skips steps. Shop Pay and Apple Pay jump straight past shipping and payment forms, so those users appear to skip stages. Segment them out or your funnel looks broken.
Abandoned checkout emails bring people back and they re enter the funnel later, which smears your step numbers across days.
None of these are bugs. They just make the raw numbers misleading if you read them literally.
Verify it
Walk through a full checkout yourself, slowly, watching GA4 realtime.
Confirm each of the five events fires once, in order.
Do it again using express checkout and note which events you get.
Check that the value and items are attached at every step.
After a few days, build the funnel report and see whether the numbers only ever go down. If a later step is higher than an earlier one, something is firing more than it should.
Need this built properly?
If your checkout conversion dropped and you cannot tell which step is leaking, step tracking usually finds it within a day. I set up and repair tracking for ecommerce stores and lead generation businesses, so the numbers in your ad accounts match the money in your bank account.
Have a look at what I do, or book a call and we can go through your setup together.
