Why are my active carts continuously rising with minimal visitors?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

Core Issue:
Merchants report abnormally high active cart counts in Shopify’s Live View analytics (ranging from hundreds to thousands) despite having only a handful of actual visitors. This discrepancy has persisted for weeks to over a year for some users.

Key Findings:

  • The issue appears isolated to Shopify’s Live View; Google Analytics shows normal traffic patterns
  • No third-party cart/checkout integrations are involved in reported cases
  • Shopify Support attributes the behavior to bot activity: bots reuse the same checkout tokens to create multiple sessions, artificially inflating cart numbers

Business Impact:

  • One merchant reports complete sales drops (to zero) during spike periods, with recovery only after Shopify intervention
  • The problem recurs cyclically even after support “fixes” it
  • At least one user reports sales never recovered after a year of this issue

Resolution Status:

  • Ongoing/Unresolved: Shopify developers are “aware and constantly improving” the issue, but no permanent fix has been deployed
  • Affected merchants must repeatedly contact support for temporary resolutions
  • Some users are considering migrating to alternative platforms due to lost revenue and platform reliability concerns
Summarized with AI on November 1. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
11

Hi, @vacationgrabs !

Thank you for following up in this thread!

I appreciate you for bringing this case to the Help Center so that our authenticated support team could gather more information. Our developers are actively working on improving this issue to provide a better experience for our merchants. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we continue to make progress to address this issue.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to let us know.

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