Definition
A revenue leak is a specific, fixable point on the path to purchase where buying intent is lost. The visitor arrived willing to buy, or moved close to it, and something in the experience converted that intent into an exit instead of an order. The loss is recoverable, which is what separates a leak from ordinary, unavoidable drop-off.
The word "leak" is precise on purpose. It implies a definite location, a measurable flow of value escaping, and the possibility of a repair. A vague "conversion problem" is not a leak. A shipping cost that appears only at the final checkout step, and abandons a knowable share of carts, is.
What makes something a leak
Three properties have to hold. It must be located at an identifiable point in the funnel, from landing page to checkout. It must be fixable, meaning a change you control would reduce the loss. And it must be priceable, meaning the lost revenue can be estimated from real inputs rather than asserted. A friction point that is genuinely outside your control, or that cannot be tied to lost money, is a design observation, not a revenue leak.
A worked example
A store sends paid traffic to a product page that converts well. The cart page, however, shows only the item subtotal. Shipping cost first appears on the checkout screen, after the visitor has committed. A measurable share of those visitors see the new total and leave.
The leak is not the shipping charge. It is the surprise, and its location is the transition from cart to checkout. The fix is to display the all-in cost on the cart page. The price of the leak is the recoverable portion of those abandoned checkouts, calculated from the store's own traffic and average order value.
How a leak is priced
A leak is priced by deterministic arithmetic on first-party inputs: the affected traffic, the store's average order value, and a conservative uplift range for the fix. The reasoning that identifies and classifies the leak never produces the number itself, which keeps the figure reproducible and checkable. The estimate is then validated against connected analytics and, after a fix ships, measured against the pre-change baseline.
Finding leaks systematically, ranking them by the revenue each one costs, and measuring the recovery after a fix is the work of Revenue Intelligence.