Hi @KatherineB, 

My understanding is it’s a total count of any event is independent of other events.  In other words, when you run those custom reports, they are giving you the aggregation of raw events regardless of which event you select. 

So yes, technically everyone who “Placed Order” most likely also invoked a “Started Checkout” unless you have purchases that can occur outside of the standard online order process that are added into your ecommerce platform (e.g. Brick and Mortar POS systems, Subscription Platforms, etc).  

Thank you @retention! I find it confusing when I have more placed order events than started checkout events. What could account for that, do you think?

@KatherineB -

If you’re on Shopify, other items then the ones I mentioned already (Subscriptions, POS, etc) that can occur are “Draft Invoices” - these are purchases placed that are started internally (for example, through an inbound sales person) and completed.  Sometimes external sales people can “make a purchase” for clients by logging into the admin of Shopify and then placing the order internally.

Also check to see if you have any “checkout replacement” solutions like Bolt, Carthook - basically any tools that take people through a different checkout system that don’t follow the typical end-user online checkout flow.

Finally, there are a lot of ERP or reporting tools that “inject orders into Shopify” such as Netsuite or other ERPs that do this to maintain record consistency or to properly account for orders within Klaviyo.  Check to see if you have any private apps that may also do this too!

Outside of that, you can do a careful audit of a limited time scope (say 1-day, 3 days, or 7 days) to keep the data size manageable and just go through each order to see where they originate from.  Shopify typically tells you where the order came from if you look at each orders’ detail page.

Hope this helps!

Hey @KatherineB,

In addition to the examples mentioned by @retention that can cause a non-standard order process - which can account for more Placed Order events than Started Checkout events; I’ve seen this occur when orders have been made manually by the seller within their ecommerce back-end. 

Typically seeing a larger number of Placed Order events versus the number of Started Checkout events can mostly be accounted for by subscription services that your site is using as @retention had mentioned. A notable one i’m aware of is ReCharge. When subscriptions are renewed automatically, they only trigger a Placed Order event rather than a started Checkout event as it does it is all automated within your ecommerce’s backend - bypassing a standard checkout process. 

David