Performance Index:

March 2026

Monthly measurement of eCommerce checkout performance across Shopify merchants.

Checkout Performance  by Vertical — February 2026

⚠ May 2024 — Food & Beverages: Sharp dip due to a large-volume merchant integration anomaly. All other months reflect normal network activity.

Source: PDQ Checkout Monitor · checkout session data from PDQ's platform · Jun 2024–Feb 2026 · indexed to Jun 2024 = 1.0x

An index of 1.15x means that metric is 15% above baseline. 0.92x means it's 8% below. We publish relative change rather than absolute numbers because absolute rates vary too much by merchant size and category to be meaningful as cross-merchant benchmarks.

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March 2026 Highlights

Consumer Goods AOV hits a series high

Consumer Goods posted an AOV index of 1.64x baseline in February, the highest reading in this vertical since we started tracking, up 17.8% from January's 1.39x. The trajectory matters more than the single number: this index sat at 1.82x in October, climbed through the holiday period, and has continued rising into Q1. That kind of sustained movement isn't a promotional artifact: something structural appears to be shifting in how buyers in this category spend at checkout. If you're in Consumer Goods and your AOV isn't moving in the same direction, that gap is worth investigating.

Health & Wellness: free shipping pulls back from January's peak

Free shipping rate in Health & Wellness came in at 0.8x baseline in February, down from 0.86x in January. An 11% pullback after hitting the highest reading the vertical has seen. One month of softening doesn't reverse a trend that's been building since mid-2025, but it's worth watching to see whether January was a ceiling or a temporary spike. The underlying dynamic hasn't changed: brands in this category have been structurally increasing free shipping coverage, and that has real implications for margin modeling if you're competing here.

Apparel conversion holds near flat

Apparel checkout conversion came in at 0.99x baseline, down slightly from 1x in January but within the same band it's been in since December. The post-holiday consolidation has now stretched into its third month with no meaningful breakout in either direction. Whether Q2 demand shifts is the question to watch. Nothing alarming, but nothing building momentum either.

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What Each Metric Measures

These definitions matter because small differences in how conversion is counted can make benchmarks meaningless. Here's exactly what we're measuring.

Conversion Rate

Completed orders divided by checkout sessions that reached shipping selection. This captures drop-off after a customer has already started checkout, not upstream traffic quality or add-to-cart rates. A merchant with excellent top-of-funnel traffic but a friction-heavy checkout will show up here.

AOV (Average Order Value)

Product revenue per completed order, excluding shipping. Useful for understanding basket size independent of shipping strategy.

ARPC (Average Revenue Per Checkout)

Shipping revenue added back in, divided by all checkout sessions including abandoned ones. A fuller picture of checkout revenue efficiency than AOV alone, it penalizes high abandonment and rewards shipping revenue capture.

Average Shipping Revenue

Shipping collected per checkout session, across both completed and abandoned checkouts. Tracks how much revenue merchants are generating from shipping as a line item.

Free Shipping Rate

Share of completed orders where the customer paid $0 in shipping. Rising free shipping rates can indicate promotional strategy, category norms shifting, or margin compression, context matters.

Coupon Usage Rate

Share of checkout sessions with an applied discount code. Useful for understanding how discount-dependent a vertical's conversion is, and whether promotional activity is inflating other metrics.

Methodology

The PDQ Checkout Monitor draws on aggregated, anonymized session data from 500+ Shopify merchants using PDQ's platform, covering 130 million checkout sessions and 97 million completed orders from December 2023 through February 2026. Merchants are grouped by vertical using Shopify's standard industry taxonomy. Data represented here is a large but incomplete sample of PDQ's data.
All figures exclude bot traffic, draft orders, and point-of-sale transactions. Data refreshes monthly, typically in the first week, reflecting the prior month's activity.
We publish index values rather than absolute rates. An index of 1.15x means that metric is 15% above baseline; 0.92x means it's 8% below. Absolute rates vary too much by merchant size and category to be meaningful as cross-merchant benchmarks. If you want to compare your actual numbers against your vertical, that's what Checkout Index is for.

About PDQ

PrettyDamnQuick provides checkout optimization, A/B testing, and conversion intelligence for eCommerce merchants on Shopify. Our platform combines real-time analytics, automated experimentation, and strategic recommendations to help merchants maximize revenue at checkout.

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