Shopify not storing sessions from users - add to carts not being stored in shopify but in datastream

Technical Q&A
1

I understand that with the privacy settings that there is clearly difficulty directly retargeting users. This is to be expected. What I do not understand is Shopify not storing the session for users and keeping their carts intact. Shopify seems to only be storing 15% of the carts created on the site.

This is confusing on many levels:

  1. Shopify should be able to tell you when users add items to their carts - shopify’s internal database does not seem to be able to do this either (cookies or privacy should be irrelevant) Users are shown blank pages or a site the continues to refresh over and over - with no reason from shopify as to why this should/would occur

1a) the issues that I am seeing in shopify appear to be what happens when absolutely NO cookies are stored (there is a reason there are necessary cookies in every website - does shopify seriously not keep the information required to buy on a website

  1. Our site appears to have about 50+% of all sessions coming from itself - this is of course impossible but shopify support has advised us that this is “expected behavior” and that it makes total sense for a user to not leave a site, stay in the exact same session, but have the site fully refresh and lose all cart contents, etc…

  2. We can see in the data stream that is being pulled from shopify that our users website behavior has not radically changed, folks are coming to the site, staying on the site for several pages, and adding to cart. We can not however send abandon cart emails to folks at a consistent clip as shopify isn’t keeping the carts so they no longer exist, we have had to resort to sending folks to shop-all as we dont have an answer.

Any shopify back end experts out there? We would love some help please. We have pushed directly with shopify and are getting nowhere. I pray that I am wrong and some qualified shopify resource will see this and offer to resolve the issue. If this happened with magento/oracle ecommerce the answer is simple - fix caching/session settings but here in shopify- it is just a mystery. To save some time I know that shopify uses googles rules for sessions (30 minutes or midnight) the issues stated above fit neither scenario so no need to explain how sessions work to us.

Any/all help would be greatly appreciated!!!

2

You have a lot going on here.

>> Users are shown blank pages or a site the continues to refresh over and over - with no reason from shopify as to why this should/would occur

There are some things you’d want to do to rule out first since local browser settings, browser extensions, the theme code, and some third party apps could be part of the issue. Are you sure that in your testing you’ve ruled those things out? If you can replicate well post the steps here so others can chime in.

For now I’d suggest watching the network logs in your browser debug console to make sure there’s:

  1. Not any errors being shown in the add to cart request. Eg, you might add to cart, but perhaps the request is malformed/wrong so it fails
  2. Nothing is running post click that might see it cleared.

Testing on a different on a different device is also recommended, as is testing with a fresh unpublished theme. They can help rule out local device issues, along with helping to rule out code customisation.

What is the blank page you’re talking about? Actually blank, or a cart that just has no content? An examples would be helpful.

>> does shopify seriously not keep the information required to buy on a website

If you’re seeing cookies missing make sure this is not a local problem first. There are millions of Shopify stores, so you should have the confidence that the right defaults are there. Now what is unknown here is what else might be going on within the page.

>> as shopify isn’t keeping the carts so they no longer exist

Abandoned carts would come from someone at least making it to the checkout funnel - not before. So makes some sense if something is purging the cart/cookies/something before that point happens. Seeing a site example would also be helpful here as we can really only speculate.