Health & Wellness
Conversion, AOV, free shipping behavior, and shipping revenue for H&W brands on Shopify, indexed against a consistent baseline, updated monthly.
Part of the PDQ Checkout Benchmarks: 130M+ checkout sessions across 500+ Shopify merchants, indexed to June 2024 = 1.0x.
Health & Wellness Checkout Performance Index: April 2026
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.
April 2026: Health & Wellness Checkout Insights
Three signals worth acting on this month
Written for Health & Wellness operators. Every observation connects to a decision you can make this week.
Health & Wellness AOV has pulled back to 0.87x, its lowest reading in the dataset. The five-month climb is over.
From October through February, Health & Wellness AOV had been on one of the more consistent upward runs in the dataset, reaching 1.04x in November 2025. March's reading of 0.87x reverses all of that and then some, landing below the previous floor of 0.89x set back in January and February 2025. This is the sharpest single-month AOV decline the vertical has seen.
Understanding what's happening requires separating the Health & Wellness AOV story from the conversion story. CVR came in at 1.05x in March, still comfortably above baseline and consistent with the vertical's long-running conversion strength. Buyers are arriving and completing. What's changed is the size of the basket they're building. That specific combination, strong conversion alongside declining AOV, points to a shift in buyer mix rather than a checkout problem. The vertical may be seeing more single-item or entry-point purchases in March, perhaps from buyers who entered through resolution-related acquisition in January and are now making their first repeat purchase at a lower basket size.
What to do: Before treating this as a checkout optimization problem, check your product mix for March. If a single lower-priced SKU drove a disproportionate share of sessions, the AOV decline is compositional, not structural. If the mix held and basket size genuinely fell, look at your free shipping threshold. At 0.87x AOV, if your threshold is set above where buyers are landing, you may be creating friction that discourages second-item additions rather than motivating them.
Conversion has held above baseline for twenty-two consecutive months. That consistency is the vertical's most valuable checkout asset.
Health & Wellness CVR at 1.05x in March continues a run of above-baseline conversion that is now the longest in this dataset across all verticals. The vertical has not dipped below 1.0x since tracking began. That kind of structural outperformance doesn't happen by accident. It reflects a buyer who arrives at checkout having already made the decision, in a category where the consideration arc includes ingredient research, brand trust evaluation, and often a subscription intent decision before the cart is ever opened.
The practical implication is that conversion in this vertical is a lagging indicator of brand and product health, not a leading indicator of checkout quality. When CVR holds at 1.05x in the same month that AOV falls to 0.87x, the checkout isn't the problem. The checkout is doing its job. The opportunity is in what happens upstream: what's in the cart when the buyer arrives, and whether the checkout experience gives them a reason to add one more item before completing.
What to do: If your conversion is below the vertical's 1.05x benchmark, the audit starts at trust signals, not UX. Pull your checkout funnel drop-off by step and look specifically at where Health & Wellness buyers exit. If it's before shipping reveal, the issue is usually brand trust or ingredient uncertainty that wasn't resolved earlier. If it's at or after shipping reveal, it's almost always threshold positioning or delivery date accuracy.
Coupon usage jumped to 0.91x in March, its highest reading since October 2024. Worth watching but not yet a pattern.
Health & Wellness coupon usage has been running well below baseline for the entire dataset, typically in the 0.70x to 0.83x range. March's reading of 0.91x is a noticeable step up, and it's the highest the vertical has seen in five months. One month doesn't make a trend, but the direction warrants attention.
The most plausible explanation is a seasonal promotional push around Q1 closeout, new product launches, or spring wellness campaigns that ran with code-based mechanics in March. If that's the case, the reading will normalize in April. The less comfortable explanation is that brands in this vertical are responding to AOV softness by reaching for discount tools, which is a reasonable short-term tactic with a long-term cost. Health & Wellness buyers are highly brand-loyal in this category. Conditioning them to expect a code trains a behavior that's hard to walk back.
What to do: If you ran a code-based campaign in March, measure whether it drove incremental sessions or incremental conversion from existing traffic. If the lift came from new buyers, the code earned its cost. If it came from buyers who were already going to convert, you've trained an expectation without a return. The better mechanic for this vertical remains subscription savings and threshold-based free shipping, both of which deliver value without requiring a code.
How does your H&W store's checkout compare?
Checkout Index tells you where your store sits inside this vertical: personalized Health Score, shipping signal analysis, and a revenue impact estimate based on your actual checkout.
Archive
Monthly archive: Health & Wellness
Every monthly dispatch, indexed and preserved. Use the archive to track how H&W checkout behavior has shifted over time, to validate whether seasonal patterns in your own data match the vertical.
April 2026 {{latest}}
Free shipping pulls back from January's peak; conversion holds above all-industry at 1.06x.
AOV hits series high for 5th consecutive month; free shipping rate begins recovery from February pullback.
Data begins June 2024 (baseline). Earlier dispatches available on request.
Methodology
About this dataset
The Health & Wellness dataset within the PDQ Checkout Benchmarks draws from aggregated, anonymized session data across H&W-categorized merchants on Shopify's platform. Merchants are classified using Shopify's standard industry taxonomy and must meet a minimum session threshold for inclusion. The H&W cohort spans supplement, skincare, personal care, and wellness device categories.
All figures are indexed to June 2024 = 1.0x. 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. Absolute conversion rates are not published; all metrics represent relative indexed change against the baseline cohort.
To compare your store's actual performance against this vertical, use Checkout Index.
