Glossary · Money
What is a revenue leak?
A revenue leak is a specific, named point in a store where shoppers who meant to buy are lost, such as a size-guide control on a product page that does nothing when tapped. It differs from a metric in that it names a mechanism, and it becomes a priority once the sessions it touches and the orders it plausibly costs can be counted.
- Reviewed 6 October 2026
In more detail
The value of putting a cost on friction is prioritisation. A list of usability observations is a backlog nobody works through. The same list with an estimated cost beside each item is a decision that can be made quickly.
An estimate has to be honest to be useful: it should be measured against the store’s own traffic that did not meet the friction, shown as a range with its inputs, and presented as what is at stake rather than as money already recovered.
Key points
- Names a mechanism and an estimated cost together.
- Estimated against the store’s own traffic, not an industry benchmark.
- An untested estimate states what is at stake, never a saving.
How Liftable relates
Related terms
Guides that go deeper
- Diagnosis · 7 minHow to find which pages lose you the most customersExit rate finds your order confirmation page. Ranking pages by lost revenue finds the money. The calculation, in the order that gets there fastest.Read
- Diagnosis · 5 minTraffic but no sales: how to find out whyHow to diagnose a Shopify store that gets visitors but few orders: the checks to run, from the cheapest to check to the most expensive, and what each one finds.Read
Last reviewed against the product on 6 October 2026.
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