Merchants are experiencing a widespread issue where 30-60% of orders show no conversion details in Shopify’s conversion summary, severely impacting revenue attribution and marketing analytics. Most conversions incorrectly appear as “Direct” traffic instead of their actual source.
Timeline & Scope:
Problem began around November 9th following Shopify’s GDPR compliance backend changes
Issue persists through 2025, affecting multiple merchants
Some users reported temporary improvements, but problem recurs
Root Cause (per Shopify Support):
Mismatch between buyer session tokens and checkout events
Customer privacy/cookie consent settings may be blocking data collection
Merchants in certain countries require consent banners, but if not properly configured, the system can’t collect conversion data even when consent is needed
Potential Solution:
Check Customer Privacy settings for countries requiring consent
Either implement a proper cookie consent banner or remove those countries from data request requirements
Some merchants suspect third-party cookie consent apps (like Avada) may contribute to the issue
Current Status:
No official fix from Shopify. The discussion remains open with merchants seeking workarounds for accurate attribution tracking.
Summarized with AI on October 31.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
I’m hoping someone might have any insight/solution to this because I’m at my wit’s end going back and forth with Shopify (I get a different answer each time).
Since the 9th of November, when Shopify made the backend changes for GDPR compliance, our website sessions have jumped off a cliff and a huge amount of orders (anywhere between 40-60% daily) have suddenly stopped showing any conversion details in the conversion summary. This is having a massive knock-on effect on our revenue attribution and paid marketing targets, as virtually everything is showing as Direct in the source/medium reports.
We use Shopify’s own Google & YouTube app to send everything to GA4 and the latter for Google Ads conversion tracking. We also use Shopify’s own Privacy & Compliance app for our website cookie banner, which has always been set to “Collect data after consent”, as we’re in the UK.
Shopify initially said that it was due to customers not accepting cookies. I don’t think I’m doing anyone a disservice when I say that it’s highly unlikely that overnight the vast majority of people suddenly decided to use ad blockers/incognito mode/not accept cookies.
They then said that it has to do with the “correlation between buyer session tokens and checkout events. Essentially, the tokens that link these sessions and checkouts are not matching up correctly. This mismatch could cause an order to not be linked to a session on the day it was placed, which in turn may impact the reported conversion rate.” Support say the devs are working on it, but it’s been over a month now and it’s still not been fixed.
Has anyone found a workaround to help with revenue attribution, or is it genuinely just a case of waiting for Shopify to fix it?
I just noticed that 30% of our sales does not even appear in Shopify store conversion. This is kind of interesting, at least they should know that we sold more based on the time the order was placed, regardless of the source.
Hey, in case anyone still has this issue in 2025. It is linked to the cookies, now support will not manage to tell you where it comes from. but essentially in customer privacy in your settings, it can be that you have some countries selected in which you are asking for consent in order to take their data (such as conversion infos) and if you don’t have a banner for the cookies set up well then you will not ask for their consent yet the system needs their consent.
So, either make a cookie banner or delete those countries off your data request.
