Are customers skipping steps, or is our eCommerce measurement incomplete?

If completed purchases in GA4 are higher than your recorded add_to_cart or begin_checkout counts, the measurement is incomplete. A customer cannot buy an item without adding it to an order first; the gap proves that shoppers are using a cart drawer, quick-buy button or express payment route that has not been instrumented in your dataLayer.

Which eCommerce events must be tracked for GA4 shopping funnels to work properly?

To see the full commercial journey from landing to receipt, Google's GA4 eCommerce schema relies on view_item_list (category/search grids), select_item, view_item (product detail), add_to_cart, view_cart, begin_checkout, add_shipping_info, add_payment_info, and purchase (with a unique transaction_id, numeric value, ISO currency and items array).

Once the funnel tracking is fixed, what should we look at next?

Once every step from product view to payment is recording accurately, you can see the real drop-off percentages between product page, basket, delivery and payment. That is the moment to bring in checkout and form optimisation or a CRO audit so your developers fix the step where real shoppers are stalling.

Purchases are recorded. Why are product views and basket additions missing?

GA4 showing completed orders while product views or add-to-cart steps sit at zero? How to separate a real shopping drop-off from missing eCommerce events.

Purchases are recorded. Why are product views and basket additions missing?

One of the oddest sights in an eCommerce GA4 property is a funnel chart that shows hundreds of completed purchases at the right-hand side of the screen, while the steps before it (`view_item`, `add_to_cart` or `begin_checkout`) sit at zero or a tiny fraction of the final order count. Obviously, customers did not buy your products without looking at them or putting them in a basket. What you are looking at is a classic eCommerce tracking split: **your order confirmation page is firing a `purchase` tag on page load, while the interactive shopping steps earlier in the journey are happening without telling Google Tag Manager.** ## Why modern store templates drop the middle of the funnel Ten years ago, adding a product to a basket meant clicking a button that loaded a brand-new `/cart` URL. Basic page-load tracking could follow every step simply by watching the browser address bar change. Modern Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce themes don't work like that. Today, a shopper clicks "Quick View" on a category grid, selects a size inside a modal, clicks "Add to Basket", sees a slide-out AJAX cart drawer open on the right of the screen, and clicks an express checkout button, all without