The Shipping Charge That Killed Our Conversion Rate

What the campaign data said

The Meta campaign looked fine on every metric available inside the platform. Click-through was strong, cost per click was reasonable, and add-to-cart volume was healthy. Purchases were the outlier.

That shape of data points away from the ad account. Creative and targeting problems suppress clicks and add-to-carts. When people click, browse and add to cart and then stop, the problem is downstream of anything the campaign controls.

Where it was actually breaking

Single-unit orders carried a delivery charge that was not visible until the final checkout step, after the customer had already entered their address. For a low-value single item, that charge was a meaningful share of the order total, and it arrived at the exact moment the customer had invested the most effort.

Multi-unit orders crossed the free delivery threshold and did not carry the charge, which is why the problem was invisible in aggregate. The blended conversion rate looked mediocre rather than broken.

What we changed

• Made delivery cost visible on the product page rather than at the final step
• Set the free shipping threshold just above single-unit value, so adding one item removes the charge
• Showed the gap to free delivery in the cart, stated as what to add rather than what is owed
• Split reporting by order size, so single-unit and multi-unit conversion were never blended again

The general lesson

Unexpected cost at the final step is the most common cause of checkout abandonment, and it is worse in India than the international literature suggests, because order values are lower and a fixed delivery charge is a larger proportion of the total.

The diagnostic habit worth building is to segment conversion rate by order size and by traffic source before concluding anything about a campaign. A blended figure will tell you performance is average while one segment quietly fails.