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Shopify’s Live View Feature Lets You Take It All In

Wouldn’t it be great if you could view how your online store is performing in real time from your mobile phone or computer? Well, now you can. Shopify has recently added a very exciting feature to its platform, giving small businesses more access to their analytics than ever before. Let us introduce you to Live View.

With just a simple click on Live View, the system will let you see new visitors, products in the basket, customers completing purchases and more. The best thing about this is that you can check your store anywhere, anytime – and on any device. Being able to access this type of data can allow you to make informed decisions about future inventory, marketing campaigns and how best to engage with your customers.

As many small businesses carry out more operations digitally, it is becoming increasingly easy to access a wide range of data online. Shopify is using this technology to give its users more features on its platform, allowing owners to be more efficient and to dive deeper into the store’s analytics based on the information they receive.

With Live View installed on your Shopify store, you can track how many visitors are on your site at that specific moment, as well as their geographical location.

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With Live View installed on your Shopify store, you can track how many visitors are on your site at that specific moment, as well as other details like their geographical location for example. This type of data means you can watch your marketing efforts (such as promotional emails or social media campaigns) pay off in real time! Live View also lets you monitor daily totals, orders and sales while keeping a pulse on your purchase funnel as visitors add items to their carts and successfully make purchases – so you can watch as your visitors become customers and celebrate sales as they happen there and then. That’s pretty nifty, right?

On the Live View map itself, you’ll see white dots to indicate visitors and orange dots to indicate sales. The dots will pulse and then fade after a period of time to make way for a new sale to be shown.

Live View Metrics

Below are some of the metrics that are shown in Live View alongside an explanation of what they represent.

Visitors Right Now – This shows the number of visitors who have been active on your online store in the past 5 minutes. To remain active, the visitors will need to view a page or click a button. A ‘visit’ will terminate after 5 minutes of inactivity from the user.

Today’s Totals – The total number of visits, orders and sales for that day. These numbers reset to zero at midnight automatically based on the store’s time zone.

Visits – The total number of visits to your online store since midnight

Orders – The total number of orders placed on the store since midnight. An order occurs when a visitor completes the checkout process and an item has been successfully purchased.

Current Behaviour On Your Store – This indicates the number of visitors on the store that have either added an item to their cart, reached the checkout page or completed a purchase in the last 10 minutes.

Active Carts – The number of visitors who have added one or more items to their carts in the last 10 minutes. This number is usually smaller than the number of visitors due to customers browsing the site.

Checking Out – The number of visitors who have added one or more items to their carts, proceeded to the checkout and submitted their contact information including name and address in the last 10 minutes. This number will be smaller than in ‘Active Cart’ figure due to visitors adding items to their cart but continuing to shop or leaving the site before completing a purchase.

Completed – The number of visitors who have added one or more items to their cart and completed the checkout process in the last 10 minutes. This tends to be the smallest number out of the four due to a lot of customers leaving the site without converting.

Real-time Page Views The number of pages that users visited during the last 10 minutes.

See also: Shopify’s eCommerce Empire Is Growing In Amazon’s Shadow

The Live View feature will particularly benefit businesses during popular retail events throughout the year such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the January Sales when larger marketing campaigns come at a more costly price. With Live View, you are able to see the return on said campaigns, making life as a retailer a lot less stressful.

Live View is just as useful going past the holiday seasons. It will remain a digestible and visual representation of your store’s performance and the perfect way to monitor a sudden spike in activity. For example, when a summer sale is launched or you score a killer press mention.

In our opinion, the very best part of Live View is its accessibility. All this information is reachable from the palm of your hands since it’s no longer just your online store that’s always on the go, but you too!

This is what makes Live View all the more appealing, and is available to all merchants with an online store on both desktop and mobile. No matter where you are or what you are doing you can keep up to date.

Now, it goes without saying that this is a powerful tool for all Shopify merchants. The fact that small businesses have access to it just shows us how digital technology has changed and evolved in the past decade. With the Shopify platform, you now have real-time information about your store – and possibly even more importantly, how your customers are interacting with it. If used properly, Live View will be able to introduce a new level of efficiency and higher ROI’s in inventory management as well as marketing.

Live View is now available on both desktop and mobile to ALL Shopify merchants with an online store. In order to get started and see the delights of Live View yourself, just click the “Live” tab and then “See Live View’ to explore the new feature for yourself.