Session replays and friction analysis

Session Replays shows you real visits to your storefront — as video. Each recorded session captures the pages a shopper saw, where their cursor went, what they clicked, what they added to cart, and how the visit ended, with every interaction listed on a timeline you can click to jump the video.

The recordings list

Each row is one recorded session: start time (in your shop’s timezone), entry page, activity counts, duration (total and active), device and location, outcome — Browsed or Converted — and any A/B experiments the visitor was part of. Filters along the top narrow the list to converted sessions, sessions with rage clicks, or include very short visits.

A Converted session links all the way through: the replay shows the shopping, the timeline shows the checkout steps reached, and the session’s detail rail shows the actual order — items, discount code, total.

Watching a replay

The player works like any video player: click to play or pause, drag the scrubber, use the speed controls, and skip inactive stretches automatically. The interaction timeline follows playback and highlights the current moment; clicking any row jumps the video there.

Shopify’s checkout runs on Shopify’s own pages, so the video ends at the checkout boundary — and the timeline keeps going: checkout steps reached (contact, address, shipping, payment), whether the discount-code field was used, and how it ended. The end-of-video summary reads this back in plain language.

Friction signals

Two signals are flagged automatically on every recorded session:

• Rage clicks — bursts of rapid clicks on one element that isn’t responding.
• Dead clicks — single clicks that visibly did nothing.

Brand Pulse rolls these up into Top friction points: the places shoppers get stuck, ranked by how many sessions were affected, each linked to the recordings that show it.

Findings

The Findings tab carries the automated analysis: recurring patterns across your recorded sessions, written up with the session counts behind each one and links to example recordings. Findings appear once enough sessions have accumulated for a period — an empty Findings tab early on means “not enough data yet,” not “nothing is wrong.”

Settings

Settings → Session Replays controls recording: the on/off switch, the daily recording target (how many sessions per day to aim for — sampling adjusts to your traffic automatically), and the minimum session length worth keeping. Recording is off until it’s switched on, and nothing is recorded for stores where it has never been enabled.