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. Sessions that a finding is based on are badged, so you can see at a glance which recordings the analysis draws on.

Filters narrow the list to the sessions worth your time: converted sessions, sessions containing rage clicks, sessions cited by a finding, and an option to include very short visits. Filters apply across all your recordings, not just the page you’re looking at.

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) and how it ended. The end-of-video summary reads this back in plain language, including how long the shopper spent in checkout before finishing or leaving.

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

Findings carry the automated analysis: recurring patterns across your recorded sessions, written up with the session counts behind each one and links to example recordings. They’re rewritten on a schedule once enough new sessions have accumulated, so they describe patterns rather than individual visits and lag your very latest traffic by design.

An empty Findings page early on means “not enough data yet,” not “nothing is wrong.”

Bookmarking a session

Star a session from its replay page to keep it, and add a note saying why it’s worth keeping — “this is the checkout bug from Tuesday”. Bookmarks are shared with your team, not private to you: anyone in your organisation sees the star, reads the note, and can edit it, and the list records who starred each session.

Bookmarked sessions collect under Session Replays → Bookmarked, newest first, with the note and the session’s own details. Bookmarking also keeps the recording past the usual 30-day window — it stays until you remove the bookmark.

From an order to its recording, and back

A converted session’s detail rail shows the order it produced — items, discount code, total — and links straight to that order. The same link runs the other way: open any order and the Session recording card lists the visit or visits that produced it, so you can watch the shopping behind a sale you’re looking at.

If a recording has already passed its retention window, the order still lists the session and says the recording expired, rather than hiding that the visit happened.

Which plan includes it

Session Replays is part of the Advanced plan. On Advanced, recording starts automatically — there’s nothing to install beyond Ordinary’s app embed being enabled in your theme. On other plans the Session Replays area explains what’s included and how to get it.

Who gets recorded

Ordinary aims to record every genuine visit, with four deliberate exceptions:

• Visitors who haven’t consented, where consent is required. In the EU/EEA, UK, Switzerland and Brazil, recording only happens with an affirmative signal. If your store shows no cookie banner to visitors from those regions, they have no way to give one — and they won’t be recorded. This is the most common reason a merchant sees fewer recordings than expected. Cookie banner settings live in your Shopify admin under Settings → Customer privacy.
• Bots and crawlers, which are identified and never recorded.
• Very short visits, below the minimum length in your settings.

Ordinary records every other eligible visit rather than a sample of them, so a session you’re looking for should be there.

Which sessions were recorded never affects your reporting. Revenue, orders, conversion rate and attribution all come from complete data — recordings are a separate, illustrative layer.

Privacy

Values typed into form fields are masked in the shopper’s own browser before anything leaves it: replays show that typing happened, never what was typed. Shopify’s checkout pages aren’t visually recorded. Replay video is deleted after 30 days — unless you bookmark the session, which keeps that recording until you remove the bookmark. Session statistics are kept for 90 days.

For the full picture — what’s collected, how long it’s kept, and how visitors in strict-consent regions are treated — see “How Ordinary handles your visitor and customer data.”

Settings

Settings → Session Replays controls recording: the on/off switch, how much to record, and the minimum session length worth keeping. Recording starts automatically once your store is on a plan that includes Session Replays; switching it off stops new recordings within minutes and leaves the recordings you already have.

Storefront recording also relies on Ordinary’s app embed being enabled in your theme. It’s switched on when you connect your store — but if you duplicate or replace your theme later, check that it’s still enabled, since theme changes don’t always carry app embeds across.