"Added to Cart" reported number drops when Side Cart is used

[camsb]

We offer a cart drawer, and some merchants have reached out stating that their "Added to cart" stat plummeted once they enabled the cart drawer.

To be clear, this is while viewing the Online store conversion rate metric of the Analytics dashboard.

Interestingly, their other metrics remained the same, so I don't believe Adblocker is playing a role here. There is a clear line between when they enabled the cart drawer and when the analytics change.

Can someone @ Shopify help me to understand why a side cart might interfere with the analytics here?

Some specific questions:

1. Are these always tracked using the same mechanism (ie. an event sent to the trekkie storefront /produce_batch endpoint)?
2. What might cause the "added to cart" count specifically to drop, despite the storefront's sales numbers and other conversion stats remaining consistent?
   

I'm just trying to better understand so I can determine whether it's happening with every merchant who uses our product, or if certain merchants have specific conditions that might come into play.

Thanks very much. Let me know if you need more information.

[Liam]

Hi Camsb,

Are you able to identify any differences in terms of themes being used that might be affecting these metrics? Some themes handle carts differently which could impact this behaviour.

[camsb]

Hi Liam,

I've not been able to identify anything that stands out.

Some additional context: 

• Base themes being used on affected merchants:
  • Impact by Maestroo
  • Be Yours by RoarTheme

• A colleague who looked into this issue before me found some 404 issues on /cart.js for one merchant, but I've been unable to replicate that (with and without an Adblocker) so I don't know if it's related.
  
  
• Under the Online store conversion over time report, it appears that before our Cart was enabled, the ratio of Added to Cart and Reached Checkout was anywhere between 1.2 - 1.5 -- so ATC was between 20% and 50% higher than reported checkouts.
  
  • Since enabling our Cart, the ratio seems to be more like 0.5 - 0.7 -- so ATC is 30% - 50% lower than reported checkouts.
    
  • In other words, it's not like every Add to Cart action is being blocked, which seems like there is indeed a likely interaction taking place (possibly with Add to Carts from our Cart widget, or possibly elsewhere).

It would be helpful to know exactly how the metrics are collected (ie. which API calls / scripts) so I could pinpoint potential interference between our inline cart code and the theme code.

I'm seeing some info on validating analytics for a Hydrogen app:

Validate that analytics are working

Anchor link to section titled "Validate that analytics are working"

To check that analytics data is being sent to Shopify analytics as expected, inspect your Hydrogen app's requests in your browser's developer tools network tab, and filter for the monorail-edge.shopifysvc.com endpoint.

Requests to this endpoint return an HTTP response status code of 200 OK or 207 Multi-Status.

• A 200 status code means the data upload succeeded as expected.
• A 207 status code means there are errors in the request payload. Any related error messages are returned as part of the response. When running your app in development mode, error messages output to the browser console.

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I'll continue looking into this -- it appears that maybe these merchants are sending fewer requests to the monorail-edge endpoint 🤔