The State of Visitor Engagement on Shopify Stores [Original Study]

Success in ecommerce relies on the effectiveness of converting visitors into repeat customers.

But with an average onsite conversion rate of 3%, more effective strategies are required to convert more of those 97% of visitors who leave.

Our report analyzes 500 successful Shopify stores to identify the most effective methods for engaging visitors and retaining customers.

This report will help you to:

• Find out the most popular onsite marketing strategies from high-earning Shopify stores

• Discover more ways to maximize conversions by engaging more of their existing visitors

• Learn increasing trends in customer engagement and conversion rate optimization in ecommerce

In this report:

• What changed since 2023

• What we found

• Trends and predictions for 2027

• Methodology and sample

What changed since 2023

Eight onsite measures gained more than five points between the 2023 and 2026 samples. The two largest are both about format rather than offer.

Multi-step campaigns nearly tripled, and mobile popups went from a minority tactic to close to half the sample. Neither needed a new channel, only a different way of using popups, which most stores already had.

The eight largest gains, ranked by size of change:

Two measures went the other way. Embedded signup forms slipped from 43% to 41% of the stores that collect phone numbers, and Mailchimp fell from 14% to 4%.

One more measure gained more than five points but sits offsite rather than onsite, which is why it is not in the chart above: Omnisend went from 5% to 16% of stores, taking second place behind Klaviyo.

Going back further, popups were on 50% of stores in our 2018 study and live chat on 24%, so both have climbed across all three editions.

What we found on 500 Shopify stores

How many Shopify stores use popups?

We found that 69% of Shopify stores use popups, making them the most common "non-native" visitor engagement tool on Shopify websites.

Our 2023 sample put the figure at 62%, and our original 2018 study at 50%, so adoption has grown steadily across all three editions.

How many Shopify stores show popups on mobile?

41% of all the Shopify stores we checked used mobile popups (reminder: 69% of the sample had any type of popup). Mobile campaigns have moved from a minority tactic toward standard practice since 2023.

The gap that remains is still worth naming: a share of stores that run popups keep them on desktop only, so their mobile sessions get no onsite campaign at all.

How many stores run more than one popup campaign?

The traditional use case for popups is lead generation. However, in our sample, 38% of Shopify stores used more than one popup campaign to engage visitors differently.

That is up from 29% in 2023, and it is the clearest sign that stores are treating popups as a channel rather than a single signup form.

What else do Shopify stores use these campaigns for?

Email capture is still the anchor, and 61% of stores run a campaign that trades a discount code for an email address. The interesting part is what the other campaigns do.

Across the full sample, these were the goals we recorded beyond a plain email signup:

How many Shopify stores use multi-step popups?

A multi-step popup splits the ask across two or more windows, usually an email field first and a phone number or a preference question second.

48% of stores in the sample ran one, counting quiz popups. That is up from 17% in 2023, the largest single move we recorded in this edition of the study.

Splitting the ask keeps the number of fields on screen low, and the second window only reaches visitors who already committed to the first.

How many Shopify stores run a dedicated campaign for returning visitors?

One goal of this study was to determine if Shopify stores had some strategies to engage specific visitor groups (new/returning, organic, those who added products to the cart, etc.)

While all the stores in the sample had tailored offers for first-time visitors, only 8% of the stores had a dedicated campaign for returning visitors (even when we had an item in cart that was still in there on the second visit).

This finding suggests an opportunity to increase sales by creating more personalized onsite marketing campaigns.

The split between the two groups in this sample:

How many Shopify stores collect phone numbers?

More than one-third of Shopify stores (39%) had active campaigns (popups, signup forms, etc.) to collect phone numbers, which suggests that they use SMS marketing in their lead nurturing strategy.

Stores using phone number capture campaigns predominantly employed embedded signup forms (41%) and popups (33%) as the primary methods for collecting phone numbers.

What is the most common first-order discount on Shopify?

One thing remains constant: offering discounts is the most common method to turn first-time visitors into customers.

74% of Shopify stores use discounts, whether in percentages or currency amounts, to encourage first-time shoppers to buy.

Out of those stores, the most common choice (32%) was a 10% discount, followed by 18% of stores that offered 20% off. Also, 14% of stores welcomed newcomers with a 15% discount for first orders.

The mix has shifted toward the smaller figure since 2023: more stores now open at 10% off, and fewer at 20%.

Most stores deliver that discount through a popup. 61% of all stores ran a campaign trading a discount code for an email address, which makes it the single most common popup use case in the sample.

Which limited-time offers do Shopify stores run?

When analyzing the use of limited-time offers, we recorded six types across the sample.

Topping the list is "sales on selected items," used by 39% of stores. Following closely are BOGO (Buy One, Get One) offers, a choice for 19% of stores, and minimum purchase offers at 18%.

Last chance offers appeared on 9% of stores. Two formats were rare: giveaways and contests on 4%, and an onsite offer aimed at a visitor with something already in the cart on just 2%.

How many Shopify stores embed Instagram or TikTok?

Just under one-fourth (24%) of Shopify stores had Instagram feeds embedded into the homepage (the most popular page) or other pages, up from 21% in 2023.

The official TikTok app made the larger move. Adoption almost doubled, from 10% of Shopify sites in 2023 to 19% now.

Both are worth recording alongside campaigns because they bring another channel onto the storefront itself.

An embedded feed gives the homepage content that refreshes without new production work, and the official app connects the catalog to a channel where product discovery happens.

How many Shopify stores have live chat or a chatbot?

Over half (54%) of Shopify stores used live chat, both for customer support and marketing purposes. This marks a substantial increase from our original study in 2018, where only 24% of stores had live chat.

Chatbots moved faster than expected. 28% of Shopify stores now run one, against 16% in 2023.

Which email marketing app do Shopify stores use?

Email is an offsite channel, so it sits outside the onsite campaigns the rest of this study measures. We recorded it because the email app is where onsite signups land, and the choice decides what a store can do with a contact once it has one.

Klaviyo is the email marketing app on 68% of the stores we analyzed. Omnisend follows at 16%, and Mailchimp has fallen to 4%.

Customer engagement trends and predictions for 2027

After analyzing the results, we have also noticed some changes and patterns in engagement strategies. They might affect how Shopify stores convert their customers.

Popups will play a bigger role in ecommerce personalization

Ecommerce personalization means adapting the shopping experience to the individual: page content, product recommendations, and offers matched to preferences and browsing behavior.

Two changes moved popups into that job. Targeting rules became granular enough to make a campaign contextual, and A/B testing made it cheap to find which version works on which group.

A campaign can now read the page a visitor is on, how many pages they have seen, what sits in the cart, where they arrived from, and whether they have bought before. On Shopify that extends to order count, days since the last order, cart value, and remaining inventory.

The second use is data collection. Progressive profiling asks for one thing at a time, across steps in a campaign or across separate visits, so a store builds a picture of a customer without putting a long form in front of anyone.

Shopify store data becomes the default targeting input

Shopify store properties stop being an advanced option and become the starting point. Instead of targeting a page or a device, campaigns read cart value, order count, product tags, remaining inventory, and the date of the last order.

What changes is the question a campaign can answer. Page targeting knows where a visitor is standing; store data knows who they are and what they have already done, which is the difference between a generic offer and a relevant one.

Expect these conditions to move from a specialist setting into the default setup, the way exit intent did a decade ago.

AI cart recovery replaces exit intent

Exit intent has been the default abandonment trigger for a decade. The trigger reads a cursor travelling toward the top of the browser window, so it fires once the visitor has already decided to leave, and on a phone there is no cursor to read at all.

AI cart recovery works from the session rather than the gesture. It scores behavioral signals as they accumulate, the order of pages, time on each, scroll depth, and what enters and leaves the cart, then fires only for visitors showing real signs of abandoning.

Two things follow. The campaign reaches phone sessions that exit intent never could, and it stops interrupting shoppers who were still browsing.

Reach is the other shift. Email-based recovery can only address shoppers a store has already identified, while an onsite model reads behavior whether the visitor is known or anonymous.

AI product recommendations move off the product page

Recommendations used to live in a carousel below the fold. They are moving into the channels that reach a visitor while they browse: popups, embeds, and the onsite feed.

A Shopify catalog gives a recommendation model enough to work with: what a visitor has viewed, what sits in the cart, what sells alongside it, and what is trending across the store. The same set feeds a popup, an embed, or the onsite feed.

The reason to move recommendations off the product page is coverage. A carousel below the fold only reaches visitors who scroll that far on that page, while a campaign can reach a visitor anywhere in the session, including on the way out.

Quizzes become a primary lead capture format

Quizzes were on 22% of stores in this sample. They are moving from a content feature to the first thing a visitor is asked, because a question converts better than an email field.

The structure is short and branching. Two or three questions about need, budget, or preference, each answer narrowing the next question, then a set of matched products and an email field at the end rather than at the start.

Asking before requesting works because the first click costs the visitor nothing. By the time the email field appears, the visitor has already invested a few taps and is looking at products chosen for them.

The second benefit is the data. A quiz answer is stated preference, not inferred behavior, which is what makes the follow-up email and the next onsite campaign relevant.

Control groups become the measurement standard

Click-through rate says a campaign was noticed. Whether the store sold more than it would have without the campaign is a different question.

A held-out control group, where a share of visitors see no campaign at all, is what turns a click number into revenue per visitor at statistical significance.

Expect that to become the reporting standard rather than an advanced option, because it is the only way to separate what a campaign contributed from the sales a store would have made anyway.

Useful resources for Shopify marketers

• Shopify success stories

• The best Shopify stores [+their revenues]

• How to add a popup to a Shopify store

• How to get sales on Shopify [10 strategies]

• Shopify marketing strategies for beginners

• The top-rated Shopify popup apps [reviewed]

• The list of the best Shopify apps [with ratings]