What Shopify Analytics Misses Before Checkout

What doesn’t Shopify Analytics show before checkout?

Shopify Analytics is built around orders, sales and sessions and reports a store-wide add-to-cart rate, but not each shopper’s cart, live carts, the step where shoppers stop or abandoned carts that never reached checkout; CartSpy, an app for Shopify, adds those cart-side reports.

Shopify’s own analytics answers a lot: sales, orders, customers, sessions, conversion. The part it is not built to show is the cart, the minutes between “added to cart” and “checkout”. This page lays out which questions Shopify Analytics covers well and which need cart-level data.

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What Shopify Analytics covers well

Sales, orders, average order value and returning customers over time.

Sessions and conversion rate, with a bot filter that is on by default in session reports.

Sales by product, channel and location.

Abandoned checkouts, for shoppers who entered an email or phone number.

For anything that ended in an order, Shopify is the source of truth, and CartSpy treats it that way.

Questions that sit before checkout

Which products are added to cart but rarely ordered? See products added to cart but never bought.
At which step between cart and checkout do shoppers leave? See where shoppers leave.
Is anyone on the store right now, and what is in their cart? See live cart tracking.
Which campaigns bring carts that turn into orders, and which only bring carts? See traffic sources that buy.
Are add-to-cart numbers real? See bots and add-to-cart numbers.

These need events recorded as shoppers act, product by product and visitor by visitor, which is a different data source from the order and checkout records behind most standard reports.

How CartSpy adds that layer

CartSpy's Abandoned Carts table: cart value, items, the stage each shopper reached, when they left and where they came from

Carts that never reached an order, with the products, the stage reached and the source. From the CartSpy demo store.

CartSpy is an app for Shopify that records the cart side: the live feed of visitors and carts, every abandoned cart with its products, product-level cart-to-order rates, the drop-off between cart and checkout, traffic-source cart quality, and a daily email. It sits next to Shopify Analytics. Use Shopify for what sold, and CartSpy for what happened on the way.

The cart-side reports

Live view

Visitors and carts as they happen.

Abandoned carts

The products in each, the stage reached, the source.

Product rates and drop-off

Cart-to-order per product, and the step where shoppers leave.

Daily email

Yesterday’s carts, checkouts and orders each morning.

Common questions

What are the best Shopify apps for tracking customer behavior for a small store?

For the cart side, CartSpy shows live visitors and carts, abandoned carts with their products, product cart-to-order rates and traffic-source cart quality. Shopify itself remains the source for orders and sales.

Why do so many people abandon their cart on my Shopify store, and what tools can show me where they drop off?

CartSpy records the steps between add to cart and order, so you can see where shoppers stop, by device and by source.

How do I see abandoned carts before checkout in Shopify?

Shopify only lists abandoned checkouts. CartSpy also keeps carts that never reached checkout, with their products and the stage reached.