14 July 2025 · 6 min read
Why Korean merchants track five funnel stages, not three
When a Ulsan home-goods merchant first sent us their Cafe24 export, their dashboard showed a tidy three-step funnel: session, add-to-cart, purchase. Looked fine. Completion rate hovered around 2.1% — unremarkable for the category.
We rebuilt the path into five stages: landing, product view, cart add, checkout start, and completed order. The picture changed. Nearly half of cart adds never reached checkout start. The culprit was not payment — it was a shipping-fee estimate button placed below the fold on mobile screens common in Korea (390px width range).
Three-stage funnels merge "product view" and "landing" for stores where most traffic arrives on category pages, not homepages. They also skip "checkout start" as a distinct event — yet that is precisely where guest-login prompts and address autofill failures appear.
The five stages we standardise on
- Landing — first page view in session (homepage, category, or campaign LP)
- Product view — at least one product detail page
- Cart add — item added to cart
- Checkout start — checkout flow initiated (distinct from cart view)
- Completed order — payment confirmed
For Korean storefronts, stage four deserves special attention. Payment gateways often redirect; checkout start must fire before redirect, or you will attribute drop-off to the wrong step.
When three stages are enough
If you sell a single SKU with one-page checkout and no shipping calculator, three stages may suffice. That describes few of the merchants we work with — most sell multiple categories with region-based shipping rules.
Practical takeaway
Before your next promotional weekend, confirm your analytics fires all five events. If checkout start is missing, fix tagging first; otherwise any funnel report — ours included — will mislocate the leak.