What a Shopify CRO Audit Should Include (and What It Costs)

A Shopify CRO audit should tell you what is stopping shoppers from buying, show the evidence, and rank the fixes so you know what to do first. Prices range from a few hundred dollars to well over $10,000, and the cheap and expensive ends often deliver very different things. This guide explains what to expect at each level and what to ask before you pay.

Full disclosure: Configurate sells a Shopify CRO audit for $2,899. I've tried to make this useful whichever one you choose.

What a Shopify CRO audit should include

A useful audit covers more than page design. At minimum, look for these five things:

1. A measurement check. Do Shopify, GA4 and your ad platforms roughly agree on sessions and orders? If they don't, every other number in the audit is suspect. A good audit says which numbers you can trust.
2. A funnel baseline. Conversion from landing page to product view, add to cart, checkout and purchase, split by device and traffic source. Without a baseline, nobody can tell later whether a fix worked.
3. A template-by-template journey review. Homepage, collection, product, cart and checkout on mobile and desktop, with specific findings tied to specific pages.
4. Speed and technical causes. Core Web Vitals for real shoppers, and the apps, scripts and theme code behind slow pages. Many Shopify conversion problems live here, below the page.
5. A ranked roadmap. Each fix scored by impact, effort and risk, in the order to build them, with how to tell whether each one worked.

On Shopify Plus, also expect a review of checkout extensibility and where Shopify Functions could help.

How much does a Shopify CRO audit cost?

Shopify CRO audits typically cost from a few hundred dollars for a marketplace gig to $5,000 or more from an agency. These are rough market ranges, not quotes, and what you get changes a lot between them:

A higher price doesn't guarantee a better audit, and a cheap one isn't worthless. A $300 review that spots a broken variant picker can pay for itself many times over. The question is whether the audit matches your problem. If you suspect your tracking, apps or theme are part of it, a page-only review will miss them.

Signs of a generic audit

Be cautious if an audit:

• Promises a specific conversion lift before anyone has seen your data.
• Lists "best practices" (add trust badges, add urgency, shorten the form) without pointing to evidence from your store.
• Doesn't ask for analytics access, or doesn't mention measurement at all.
• Gives you 80 findings with no order, so your team can't tell what to do first.
• Can only be implemented by the company that sold the audit.

Questions to ask before you buy

• Who does the audit, and will they present the findings themselves?
• What access do you need, and what do you do with our data?
• How do you check that our analytics are right before relying on them?
• How is each recommendation prioritized?
• Can our own developer or agency build from the roadmap?
• What's out of scope?

Audit, retainer or freelancer?

An audit fits when you don't know what to fix first. If you already know, skip it and go straight to building and measuring the fixes, for example through ongoing Shopify CRO.

Agency or individual consultant is mostly a question of scope. An agency brings a team for design, research and testing at once. A senior consultant gives you one person who does the diagnosis and writes the code, with no handoff between strategist and developer. If your main gap is engineering, the second usually goes further for the money.

Before you hire anyone

You can do a first pass yourself. Our guide to Shopify traffic with no sales walks through the same checks an audit starts with. If you work through it and still can't say what to fix first, that's when an audit is worth paying for.