Sessions up, sales down. Shopify not taking accountability.

[brandwise--owl]

Bear with me as this is long, but this is necessary as I'm speaking for MANY store owners.

Since around March 2023, there has been an influx of store owners seeing higher sessions but lower conversions with no answers from Shopify. I have dug into everything from GA4 migration issues, store performance, social media session changes, Google search appearance changes, potential issues on certain devices, checkout troubleshooting, I could go on. I have scoured the internet for answers, talked to developers, talked to support for countless hours, still no answers.

I doesn't take more than low level common sense to conclude that higher sessions and a sudden drop in conversions with no other store changes and consistent sales for years, points to a Shopify backend error. Correct me if I'm wrong...because that would be good news...

As small business owners, we all work very hard every day, and we worked even harder to get to this point. It is incredibly ironic that a hosting platform like Shopify who is here to help is not doing more. Instead they are quite literally ignoring us. Isn't the purpose of Shopify to help business owners?

I have helped many store owners resolve issues that have been popping up since earlier this year, but these issues only seem to scratch the surface of what's really going on. Of course none of us have proof, but I think there's enough evidence to point to Shopify being the source of many of these issues. I don't think all of us are experiencing a sudden drop in conversions by some stars aligning...

I urge those of you having these issues, move to another hosting platform and do it fast. I understand it takes a LOT of work to do this, but at least you'll have something to fall back on sooner than later. 

I don't want this to just be a rant, I'm really hoping to gather more of your stories and experiences so we can all work together to get this resolved. This is our income...this is life changing stuff and it's not to be taken lightly like Shopify has been doing.

Please, share your stories, rant in the comments. I want to do something about this.

Thank you for reading.

[Skye]

Hi, @brandwise--owl 

Greetings, and thank you for posting your concerns to the Shopify Community!

I definitely understand how a drop in conversions is concerning. Can you provide more specific information on what role you believe the platform is taking in this drop? For example, do you think there are unseen bugs? Or, do you think it is something you believe to be purposeful? 

To put your mind at ease, please know that Shopify only succeeds if our merchants succeed. The profit our company sees is directly related to the sales you make as a business. If you don't make money, we don't make money. 

To be specific, Shopify charges a transaction fee, or a processing fee, on every sale made through our platform. The fee varies depending on the subscription plan and the payment gateway used by the merchant. For example, merchants on the Basic Shopify plan pay a 2.9% + 30¢ fee for every transaction made through Shopify Payments, or a 2.0% fee for transactions made through third-party payment gateways.

If you believe the lack of conversions is due to platform issues we encourage you to bring this to our attention. If an independent developer reports a bug or vulnerability that is eligible for a reward under Shopify's bug bounty program, they may be eligible to receive a reward for their discovery. 

Overall, Shopify values the contributions of independent developers and encourages them to report any bugs or vulnerabilities they discover, so that they can be addressed and resolved as quickly as possible.

Thank you again, and look forward to your response!

[brandwise--owl]

The role I believe the platform has is an issue with the checkout process. I pulled some data on checkout sessions vs conversions. The number of customers going to checkout has increased but the number then proceeding to complete the transaction has dropped. This leads me to believe there are checkout issues; i have heard this complaint from other store owners as well.

My conversion rate has been above 2% for over a year, but ever since Feb/Mar it's been around 1%, lower than I've ever seen.

[Skye]

Thanks for that context @brandwise--owl !

Have you viewed the abandoned cart data? Have you adjusted your shipping rates, discount, or call to action strategies lately? This can all affect conversions significantly. 

[brandwise--owl]

I actually changed to free shipping when I started to notice changes a couple months ago. It should have improved but it's still dropping. I am 99% sure something is broken.

I have had a couple customers tell me that they can't checkout but I haven't heard back from them about exactly what is happening. I have tried to checkout on an iphone, an ipad, macbook, windows laptop, and three different kinds of android phones, in both incognito mode and regular, cookies and cache cleared and I cannot replicate any issues at checkout.

I've been digging very deep into this.

Update- I also just sent a very good discount via email, if this doesn't result in conversions then I know something is broken. I have sent various email discounts for much less and gotten conversions from them.

[Samanthatga]

I completely agree. Our store sessions are way up. The conversion rate is down sales are down. we’ve been in business for 20 years. Something is not adding up. I’ve been on Shopify for two years. I have noticed that the way that they calculate the conversion rate is not correct. If you click on the actual conversion rate, it will give you their formula do the math yourself you’ll see that their report is at least one percent off. This leads me to believe that perhaps the amount of sessions reporting is incorrect as well. The only thing we can really rely on sales because we can actually track that. What solutions have you come up with?

[p1Commerce]

It's a mistake to think that an increase in sessions always equates to an increase in conversions as it depends on the quality of the traffic.

First thing to do is identify the source of increased conversions.  It's common for increased bots or other sources of low quality traffic to cause a drop in conversion. 

Since the start of the year, there's also been an issue with Shopify analytics being indexed by search engines, which if you're looking at Shopify sessions, could be the cause of your issue.

If you're using GA, you need to look at creating a filtered view to identify and exclude bad sessions.

[brandwise--owl]

The increase in sessions is drastic, which is why I was concerned about the drop in conversions. I've had consistent numbers for over a year so I suspect something is not working properly.

Would you be willing to assist with the filtered view in GA for bad sessions? Could 'bad sessions' also cause a sudden drop in conversions, I can't make sense of how they would be related.

[brandwise--owl]

I just noticed this today.. does it take more than 1 day for the conversion rate to update?

[aa_pr]

I'm experiencing the same issue where sessions and visitors doubled but the funnel (add to cart > sessions converted) stayed nearly the same. I only see this increase in sessions in Shopify and it's not reflected in GA4. Could there be a glitch or bug in the way Shopify is tracking sessions & visitors?

[brandwise--owl]

There certainly could be a glitch in the way Shopify tracks sessions, but it doesn't explain the sudden drop in completed checkouts. The number of customers reaching checkout has increased but completion has decreased leading me to believe something is wrong at checkout.

[p1Commerce]

Conversion drops can be extremely hard to troubleshoot.

From a session stand-point, if your sessions have suddenly doubled, you have to ask why? Was there marketing initiatives done?  Did Google rankings change drastically? Is there suddenly a link from a major source of traffic?  If the answer is no, the reason for the sessions increase is likely a technical issue.

You can see at https://community.shopify.com/c/blog/shopify-web-pixels-manager-sandbox-faq/bc-p/2078025#M796 that Google had been indexing analytics urls, which, if unfiltered, would have looked like an increase in traffic.

Other reasons for conversion changes could be technical changes, apps installed that create javascript errors, increases in shipping rates, competitors adjusting their pricing down, seasonality, and a myriad of other possibilities.

Sorry I do not have the time available to help create filtered views for non-clients or to provide more than general guidance via the forums.

[Kmartisback05]

Im curious if you ever found a source for the issue. We have been having issues and we have it down to a specific date of  March 8th 2023. We are in a highly specialized industry, we have the lowest prices, and we even lowered our pricing and added free shipping and our conversion rate was typically around 2% it is now well below 1% we have improved our website significantly, SEO, Email Marketing, We still have work to do. but we should be seeing improvements not further decline in conversion. we were doing better with a debut theme from 2020 and nothing worked on the website.  We are a top 5 for the vast majority of our products on google. It just doesn't make sense.  Could you reach out to us at sales@allprotruckparts.com

[desmo2023]

Sessions are a useless metric in Shopify because there is no way to exclude your team's daily visits to the site other than having them always work from inside the admin tab.  This is a critical error and there is an nearly endless chain whereby Shopify asked tons of questions, but the solution never appears - simply exclude all admin IPs from any analytics.  Thinking of moving away from Shopify because they refuse to solve this problem easily.

[Andrea13]

Thank you for this thread. We have been experiencing the same issue with our traffic remaining the same but our conversion rate crashing to 0.20%! Our shopify site is 6 years old and our sales and traffic have been consistent for the last 3. We have been down the many rabbit holes you mentioned, G4 migration, SEO ranking, Google updates, site speed, sales funnel, payment gateways, testing the checkout process, the elimination list goes on. We hired developers to look into our code and apps. Shopfiy continues to gives us generic answers. 

We are UK based, one day we had 1000% increase in bot traffic from the States another day 300 visits in half an hour from Germany. Over week ago no conversion data was being recorded or conversion summary was not available on our orders. 

Shopify said they were aware of the issue and developers are working on it. Conversion data is back but our conversion rate/sales remains close to zero. Time to leave Shopify, nothing makes sense. 

[Kmartisback05]

Hey Andrea Curious what Channels you are selling on? Also what apps are you using for those channels. I have a theory, but I can't necessarily confirm it. If you are on Google Merchant Center, were you using an app for your feed or were you using Google and Youtube?

[Andrea13]

Hey, thanks. We are selling through online store and social media, Google and Youtube are not connected. We are using the Simprosys app for the feed to the Merchant Center. 

[wiselywoven]

@brandwise--owlThank you for voicing your issues. We have been fighting the same exact fight. Intermittent conversion crashes that keep getting worse. Strange bugs here and there. We are on Shopify Plus. The Support team sincerely wants to help but they can only chase what they can replicate. I feel like we are hunting a ghost in the Shopify machine. We have been requesting our store get the cache refreshed and data resynced - this often seems to be some kind of fix but not sure why. Maybe it's a caching issue? App conflicts? Theme error? Checkout problem? I feel like Sherlock Holmes. Close to suggesting to my team that we move to a platform that doesn't rely so heavily on an ecosystem of apps to have functionality - and hopefully more stability.