WooCommerce shops, checkout and conversion
Traffic is the expensive lever and it is the one everybody pulls first. On a physical goods shop the cheaper money is usually sitting in the delivery cost nobody sees until checkout, and a form that asks for a county in 2026.
Digital and subscription shops fail in quieter ways: a checkout that demands a postal address to sell a download, a renewal that dies on an expired card, and no plan for the customer between the first payment and the cancellation.
Three minutes, twelve questions, no email needed to see or copy your result.
What we run on WooCommerce
Judged against your own order records, not against the plugin's dashboard.
Where we come in
Shops rarely fail loudly. They leak, in three or four places, for years. Usually it is one of these.
Digital shops leak in places nobody checks, because there is no warehouse to make the problem visible. Usually it is one of these.
People fill a basket, reach the second screen of checkout and discover the postage. Nothing else in ecommerce reliably loses this many ready buyers, and nothing is cheaper to fix. Putting the number on the product page costs nothing and some of those people come back.
Company name, second address line, county and a phone number, on a phone, from somebody buying a fourteen pound candle. Every field is a decision point, most of them collect something nobody will ever read, and the shop is paying for all of them.
Woo says one thing, the ads account says another, analytics says a third, and the accountant's figure matches none of them. Until the orders in the shop are the number everybody argues from, no decision about spend can be made honestly.
Full billing address, phone number, delivery notes and an account, to send somebody a PDF. Every one of those fields exists because the shop was set up from a physical goods template and nobody went back through it afterwards.
Nobody cancelled. The card simply expired, the retry failed once, and the subscription lapsed without a single email that a human wrote. Recovering those is the highest return work available on a subscription shop and almost nobody does it.
The customer buys, receives a receipt, and then hears from you when the renewal fails. Churn is decided in the first fortnight, and the fix is a sequence of useful messages rather than a discount offered on the way out.
The checkout lab
Set the five controls to match the checkout you have now, then change them one at a time. The field count and the fold line are drawn from your choices, so this is an argument about friction rather than a measurement of your shop.
Five decisions. Every one of them is a setting or a plugin rather than a redesign.
Buying without an account
Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal
The full price including delivery
What the form asks for
Returns, contact and security
Nothing here is stored, sent to TWV Media or used to look up your shop. It runs entirely in your browser.
Free returns within 30 days · Questions? 01438 000 000
An illustrative mobile checkout. Field counts follow the WooCommerce defaults; yours may differ if somebody has already been at them.
The WooCommerce scorecard
It scores the shop as a machine rather than a design: whether the numbers are trustworthy, whether the product pages answer the real questions, whether the checkout gets out of the way, and whether anybody comes back. Your answers stay in this browser.
What we actually do
You can bring us in for the whole shop or the one section currently losing money. Either way, one senior person stays responsible for it rather than a rota.
Orders, tracking, consent, tax and the reports that never agree. Until the shop's own order records are the number everybody argues from, no decision about spend can be made honestly.
The photographs, the specifics, the delivery cost, the returns answer and the reviews. Most abandoned baskets began on a page that failed to answer one ordinary question.
Guest buying, express payment before the form, fields cut to what fulfilment genuinely needs, sensible validation and the reassurance placed where the doubt actually happens.
Rates that make sense to a customer and to your margin, VAT handled properly, and the plumbing between Woo and whoever actually packs the boxes.
Abandoned baskets, failed payments, expiring cards, post-purchase sequences and the messages that turn a first order into a second. Written by people, sent by machines.
A shop carries more weight than a brochure site and forgives less. Caching that respects the basket, images sorted, plugins reduced, and updates tested before they reach a live till.
Where the next pound comes from
This is the only argument that matters when the budget is decided, and it is settled with four numbers you already have. It will sometimes tell you that the checkout is not your problem and that you simply need more people.
Both figures are monthly and shown as revenue. At your margin, one point of conversion is worth £0 a month in gross profit, which is the number to compare against what the work would cost. A point is a large move when you are starting low. It is the standard unit because it compares across shops, not because it is easy to win.
Traffic is rented and conversion is owned. The second one compounds, costs less to improve and nobody can outbid you for it.
How it runs
Every stage produces something you own and could hand to somebody else. Nothing is held hostage and there is no long contract behind it.
Orders, tracking, consent and tax reconciled against your own records, so the following three stages can be judged rather than believed.
The cheapest and fastest gain on almost every shop, and the one that needs no new traffic and no new photography.
Delivery cost, returns, specifics and photography, on the pages where the decision is actually made rather than where it is recorded.
Recovery for the ones who nearly bought, lifecycle for the ones who did, and a monthly review that starts at gross profit.
For a shop that is getting traffic and not enough orders, and wants a straight answer about why.
We fix what is worth fixing and rebuild only the parts that cannot be saved.
For shops that want the thing run with them, without hiring an ecommerce team.
Before you ask
It depends on how much of your business is unusual. WooCommerce earns its place when you need control: odd product types, complex shipping, subscriptions on your own terms, deep content alongside the shop, or an unwillingness to pay a percentage of every order forever. Shopify earns its place when you would rather rent the maintenance. We have moved shops in both directions and will tell you honestly which way yours points.
A shop is heavier than a brochure site by nature, and a badly maintained Woo shop is genuinely slow. A well-built one on proper hosting is not. The usual causes are the same three every time: too many plugins, a page builder doing the theme's job, and caching that has been switched off because it broke the basket. All three have proper fixes.
Usually, yes, and it is the cheapest thing on the list to test. Every field is a small decision point, and a phone keyboard makes each one worse. The point is not minimalism for its own sake: it is that a shop should collect what fulfilment needs and nothing else. If you never read the company name or the second address line, stop asking for them.
It depends on whether the subscription is the product or a payment schedule attached to one. Renewals, upgrades, pauses and dunning are shop logic, so they usually belong in Woo with the payment handled by Stripe underneath. We will map it out before anybody buys a licence.
They never will exactly, and anybody promising otherwise is selling something. Attribution windows, consent, blocked scripts, cross-device journeys and returns all pull the figures apart. What matters is picking one source of truth, which should be your own order records, and understanding the size and direction of the gap in the others rather than arguing about it every month.
Yes. One helpful message soon after, one useful reminder later, and then leave them alone. The discount is a last resort rather than an opener, because a shop that trains people to abandon a basket for ten per cent off has bought itself an expensive habit.
Carefully, and with your accountant rather than instead of them. Rates, thresholds, digital goods rules and how prices display for different countries are configuration decisions with real consequences. We set them up, document what was decided and why, and hand you something you can check.
Yes, and usually it is the same job. The speed, security and maintenance arguments apply to the whole site, and there is a separate page covering that side with its own load lab and site scorecard.
No. The checkout lab, scorecard and conversion calculator run in your browser. Nothing is sent to us, nothing looks up your shop, and everything disappears when the tab closes. If you copy your score, that copy goes to your own clipboard. Our privacy notice covers the rest of the site.
Plugin, payment and platform specifics on this page were last reviewed in September 2026. WooCommerce and its payment gateways change often, so if something here no longer matches what you are seeing, tell us and we will correct it rather than soften it.
Also worth a look
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Send us your shop address before the call and we will have put something in a basket and walked the checkout on a phone. You get the first thing we would change and why, whether or not you ever hire us.
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