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: June 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.
June 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 free shipping rate surged to 0.99x in May, a 23-point jump from April. Something changed at scale.
Health & Wellness free shipping rate has been one of the most persistently below-baseline series in this dataset, spending most of the past two years in the 0.52x to 0.86x range. May's reading of 0.99x is essentially baseline -- a level the vertical hasn't been near since the dataset began in June 2024. The 23-point jump from April's 0.76x is not a gradual drift. It's a step change, and it almost certainly reflects a deliberate category-wide shift in how Health & Wellness brands structured their May checkout offers.
The timing points to Memorial Day and late-spring acquisition campaigns. May is when Health & Wellness brands run their most aggressive new-buyer acquisition pushes: summer wellness launches, pre-summer body and fitness promotions, and subscription acquisition offers that often bundle free shipping as a first-order incentive. A synchronized jump of this magnitude across the vertical suggests many brands moved their free shipping threshold lower -- or made it unconditional for first orders -- in the same window.
What to do: If your free shipping rate jumped in May, identify what changed. If it was a deliberate threshold reduction or a first-order free shipping offer tied to a specific campaign, measure the conversion lift and new buyer acquisition rate against the shipping cost absorbed. If the campaign-period conversion improved by more than 3 percentage points and new buyer share increased, the investment is defensible. If neither moved, you absorbed shipping cost on existing buyers who were coming anyway. Restore the threshold before June and use a progress bar to do the basket-stretching work instead.
Shipping revenue fell to 0.69x in May, the lowest reading in the Health & Wellness dataset by a wide margin
The free shipping surge and shipping revenue collapse are the same story from opposite directions. Health & Wellness shipping revenue peaked at 1.56x in March 2025 and has been declining since, but May's 0.69x reading is a sharp acceleration of that trend -- 12 points below April's 0.81x and the lowest the vertical has ever posted. The category went from running shipping revenue well above baseline to running it 31 points below in the span of fourteen months.
The implication for operators is direct: the margin cost of May's free shipping expansion needs to be weighed against what it produced. Health & Wellness buyers have historically shown more tolerance for shipping costs than most verticals -- the category's buyer has been willing to pay for delivery certainty on products they've researched extensively. A vertical that ran shipping revenue above 1.30x for most of 2024 and 2025 did so because brands weren't giving it away. May's reversal suggests the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
What to do: Run a revenue-per-session comparison for May versus March. If revenue per session fell by more than 5%, the free shipping expansion cost more than it recovered in conversion lift. The sustainable position for Health & Wellness shipping is a threshold set above current AOV -- the vertical's buyers have historically converted at above-baseline rates even when paying for shipping. The goal isn't to match the all-industry free shipping rate. It's to set a threshold that stretches the basket while keeping per-session economics intact.
Conversion held at 1.06x for the twenty-fourth consecutive above-baseline month. AOV ticked up to 0.89x.
Health & Wellness CVR at 1.06x in May extends the vertical's above-baseline conversion streak to twenty-four months. The streak is the defining performance characteristic of this vertical, and it held through a month of significant checkout configuration change -- the free shipping surge -- without disruption. That stability is itself informative: Health & Wellness buyers are so committed by the time they reach checkout that even large changes to shipping mechanics don't move their completion rate much in either direction.
AOV ticked up slightly to 0.89x from April's 0.87x, a small improvement but the first upward movement after two consecutive months at the series low. It's too early to call this a recovery -- 0.89x is still well below the November 2025 peak of 1.04x -- but the direction has at least changed. The composition question remains: is the vertical still running disproportionately on single-item replenishment purchases, or is the multi-product routine buying that drove the AOV peak beginning to return?
What to do: If your own Health & Wellness AOV is trending below 0.89x, this is the moment to test a routine-completion prompt at checkout. The vertical's buyers are arriving with high intent and completing reliably. The gap between where they're landing on AOV and where the vertical was twelve months ago is almost entirely compositional -- single-item versus multi-product baskets. A specific, cart-aware "complete your routine" suggestion tied to what's already in the cart is the lever. Not a generic cross-sell. A routine-coherent addition.
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 Health & Wellness checkout behavior has shifted over time, to validate whether seasonal patterns in your own data match the vertical.
June 2026 {{latest}}
Free shipping rate surges to 0.99x, a 23-point jump and highest reading in the dataset; shipping revenue falls to 0.69x, series low; CVR holds at 1.06x for twenty-fourth consecutive above-baseline month.
CVR holds at 1.06x for twenty-third consecutive above-baseline month; AOV stays at 0.87x for second consecutive month at series low; coupon usage dips to 0.88x.
AOV falls to 0.87x, series low; CVR holds at 1.05x; coupon usage at 0.91x, highest since October 2024.
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.
