We recently converted to Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility, and I don’t know if this is related, but we are now seeing billions of dollars in fake sales reported in GA4. This is not being reported in Shopify thankfully. The traffic is mostly all coming from Germany, not engaged with less than one sec of session duration. We are seeing 20k plus users a day coming from Germany, where generally we see about 500-2,000 in the USA. They are all direct traffic or unassigned traffic. Is anyone else seeing this? How do we stop it? It’s destroying our reporting.
Topic summary
Main issue: After migrating to Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility (new checkout framework), GA4 (Google Analytics 4) is reporting billions in fake sales, while Shopify’s own sales data remains accurate.
Observed pattern:
- Sudden surge to 20k+ daily users from Germany (vs. typical 500–2,000 in the US).
- Traffic is “Direct” or “Unassigned,” with “not engaged” sessions under 1 second.
- Indicates spoofed purchase events affecting GA4 only.
Actions/temporary workarounds:
- Filter affected data in GA4 via the (not set) category to keep reports readable.
- Set up GA4 filters to exclude traffic from Germany.
- Related discussion linked about GA4 purchase event spoofing for additional context.
Status/outcome:
- No confirmed fix or root cause identified yet, and no confirmation that Checkout Extensibility is the cause.
- Issue remains open; current approach is mitigation via GA4 filters. Key questions (cause and permanent prevention) are unresolved.
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Any luck? In the short term, I’ve found you can filter it out of most reports via the (not set) category, which isn’t ideal, but it will at least make your reports readable again.
I noticed you were active in the other related thread, too. I’ll link it here so other people can find it: https://community.shopify.com/post/2702829
No luck so far. That filter will work. I also set up some excluding traffic from Germany.