A sudden rise in checkout abandonment often lands on the merchandising desk as an assortment problem. In Hong Kong storefronts we review, the first useful question is whether payment events are still recording at all—especially after a gateway update or a festival campaign with new landing templates.
Start with a short sample of completed orders. Confirm that purchase values, currencies, and order IDs match what finance sees. If completed orders look healthy while the funnel chart collapses at payment, treat the chart as untrusted until tags and thank-you pages are checked.
Only after tracking holds should you inspect merchandising levers: gift-with-purchase rules that inflate cart totals, free-shipping thresholds that strand mid-basket shoppers, and out-of-stock variants still appearing in paid traffic. Those are assortment and promo decisions, not analytics theatre.
Keep a two-column note for the week: tracking exceptions on the left, merchandising hypotheses on the right. Share both with marketing so paid traffic is not paused for a false outage—and so genuine stock or pricing issues are not ignored because someone blamed the tags.