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: May 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.
May 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 conversion held at 1.06x for the twenty-third consecutive above-baseline month. The streak is the story.
CVR at 1.06x in April is an unremarkable number in isolation. What makes it significant is the context: Health & Wellness has not posted a below-baseline conversion reading in twenty-three months. No other vertical in this dataset has maintained this consistency. Apparel dips below baseline regularly. Consumer Goods had a below-baseline month in December 2024. Food & Beverages broke its streak in March. Health & Wellness has held.
The structural reason is the same one that has always explained it: Health & Wellness buyers arrive at checkout having already resolved their purchase decision. The consideration arc in this category is long -- ingredient research, brand trust evaluation, subscription economics -- and it happens before the cart opens. Checkout is the transaction confirmation, not the persuasion moment. What will stop a Health & Wellness buyer is trust erosion at the payment step: an unexpected shipping cost, an ambiguous delivery window, or a subscription term that isn't clear.
What to do: Twenty-three months of above-baseline conversion is a benchmark worth measuring your own store against. Pull your checkout step-by-step funnel and compare your drop-off rate at each step to your overall conversion performance. If you're below the vertical's 1.06x, the gap is almost certainly at shipping reveal or the final payment step. The fix in this category is never a redesign. It's a single piece of missing information delivered at the right moment.
AOV held at 0.87x for the second consecutive month, the lowest reading in the dataset. The pattern deserves a structural response.
Health & Wellness AOV has now been at 0.87x for two months in a row, tying its own series low both months. The vertical's AOV peaked at 1.04x in November 2025 and has been below baseline since December. Six consecutive months below baseline, two at the series floor, is no longer a seasonal fluctuation. It's a structural signal.
The conversion data provides an important clue. CVR has been consistently above baseline throughout this AOV decline -- 1.06x in April, 1.05x in March. Buyers are arriving and completing. What's changed is what they're putting in the cart. The combination of stable conversion and compressed AOV points specifically to a shift in purchase composition: more single-item replenishment purchases, fewer multi-product routine builds. The buyers who drove the November AOV high were stacking supplement routines and skincare regimens. The buyers in March and April appear to be restocking a single product.
What to do: Pull your April orders and segment by unique item count. If single-item orders increased as a share of total orders relative to November, the AOV decline is compositional. The checkout optimization priority is pre-payment cross-sell, not friction reduction. Test a routine-building prompt tied specifically to the product in cart -- not a generic "you may also like" module, but a specific "buyers who bought this also added X" recommendation with a clear routine rationale. In Health & Wellness, that framing converts.
Coupon usage dipped slightly to 0.88x, continuing its long-run below-baseline pattern
Health & Wellness coupon usage has been running below baseline for the entirety of this dataset, typically between 0.70x and 0.91x. April's reading of 0.88x, down slightly from March's 0.91x, sits comfortably within that range and requires no special interpretation. The vertical's buyers are simply not code-driven, and that hasn't changed.
What's worth noting is the context: coupon usage at 0.88x alongside AOV at 0.87x means Health & Wellness brands are not reaching for discount mechanics to offset basket-size pressure. The natural response to six months of below-baseline AOV would be to introduce promotions that encourage larger orders. The category hasn't done that, which is correct behavior. A buyer who is replenishing a single supplement product is not going to build a larger basket in response to a discount code. They'll take the discount on the item they were already buying.
What to do: If you're tempted to run a coupon campaign in May to address AOV softness, model the expected outcome before activating it. In Health & Wellness, the lever for AOV growth is product bundling and routine completion prompts, not discounting. A "buy two, save" offer on complementary products will do more for basket size than a percentage-off code, and it doesn't train the buyer to expect a discount on their next single-item replenishment.
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.
May 2026 {{latest}}
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.
AOV at 0.91x continues post-November softening; CVR holds at 1.06x; free shipping rate pulls back to 0.76x.
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.
