Shopify Analytics: your sessions changed on September 21, 2026, not your sales
If your store runs on Shopify, your sessions and conversion rate may have changed between September 21 and 23, 2026. This is neither a drop in traffic nor a rise in sales: Shopify changed the way it counts visits. Your orders, sales and customer counts stay the same.
What Shopify changed
Shopify Analytics now counts sessions with human visitors first. Bots and system traffic (automated visits that do not come from a shopper) are classified more consistently and left out of reports by default. A real shopper's journey is kept even when it does not produce a standard pageview.
Shopify states that your past data is neither deleted nor reprocessed. Bot classification only applies to sessions from October 7, 2025 onward, though: before that date, reports cannot separate them.
The numbers that may move
Shopify lists sessions, conversion rate, add-to-cart rate, reached checkout rate, checkout conversion rate, bounce rate, pageviews per session, online store visitors and searches.
With fewer sessions counted for the same number of orders, your conversion rate can go up without your store selling more. A late-September report could therefore credit a campaign or a site change with a lift it had nothing to do with.
What to do in your reports
- Treat September 21, 2026 as a new baseline: compare a period after that date with another period after that date.
- To go further back, stay after October 7, 2025, and keep the same human-or-bot filter setting on both sides of the comparison.
- Judge a campaign on your orders and sales, which the update does not touch. If you also track the store in GA4, the gap between the two tools may change without your tracking being broken.
Our eCommerce agency reviews these reports with you before a budget decision rests on a number whose definition has changed.
What a good rate looks like for each type of store is covered in what a good conversion rate is. Google made a similar correction, described in the drop in Search Console impressions.
- Shopify Changelog, Shopify Analytics session measurement improvements, September 21, 2026. Source for the change, the affected metrics and the new baseline.
- Shopify Help Center, Session measurement update, accessed September 25, 2026. Source for the preserved past data, the October 7, 2025 date and the comparison method.
- Shopify Help Center, Behavior reports, accessed September 25, 2026. Source for the September 21 to 23, 2026 rollout window.
Gabriel almost always takes your first call and carries out your audit. He builds the strategy starting from your growth goal: where to put your budget, which market to test and how to connect each lead to a real sale in your CRM. He mainly leads engagements for three goals: Optimize the profitability of your digital campaigns, Develop a new market, and Generate demand and growth. With Geneviève, he also works on organic search (SEO), AI visibility (GEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO). The sales a Google Ads or Meta Ads campaign brings in depend on the page that receives the click. He writes mainly about marketing strategy, paid advertising and measurement.
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