Shopify checkout events are essential data points that let you track and analyze key interactions occurring during the checkout process on your Shopify store.
Whether it’s beginning the checkout process, or completing a purchase, these events provide crucial insights into customer behavior at the most important stage of the customer journey.
Once you make sure these crucial ecommerce events work well with your Shopify & GA4 integration, you can leverage ecommerce data collection and get a more granular view of your data.
This provides you with a better picture of your customers’ journey, resulting in actionable insights that can fuel informed decisions.
Here are some key events that are important in the Shopify checkout stage, and how they function:
Event Name | Function | Use Case |
begin_checkout | Triggers when a user starts the checkout process by clicking the checkout button or viewing the Checkout Information page on your Shopify store. |
This event helps you view the number of users that start the checkout process. You can use the data provided by this event to optimize your checkout funnel and reduce cart abandonment. |
add_payment_info | Captures when a user enters payment information during the checkout process. | It provides insights into the payment process and helps you identify any potential issues users encounter when providing payment details. |
add_shipping_info | Tracks when users enter their shipping information during the checkout process. |
It allows you to understand how many users proceed to provide shipping details and whether there are any obstacles in this step. |
purchase | Triggered when a successful purchase is made and the checkout process is completed. | This event is crucial for tracking conversions and calculating the revenue generated from completed transactions. |
If you have a decent Shopify & GA4 integration, you can track and analyze the ecommerce events that occur on your Shopify store with ease.
For example, once you have set up/integrated your Google Analytics 4 account with your Shopify store with all the right settings and optimizations applied, you can see all the important ecommerce events including the ones related to the checkout process.
You have a couple of options to perform this integration. However, you should know that not all the integrations provide you with the same functionality & outcomes and there may be differences in how the events are triggered.
For example, if you integrate GA4 & Shopify through the Google Sales Channel, you may not be able to track some of the important ecommerce events (select_item, view_item_list, add_shipping_info, view_cart, etc) but this may change over time.
In this case, you need a better-performing integration method that provides you with much more data and information
Here is a comprehensive guide on the Shopify & GA4 integration methods:
To make sure you have an integration that works well and produces the ecommerce data you need, check out our complete resource and see what you should do: Shopify & Google Analytics 4 Guidebook.
Here’s a quick look at what this all-inclusive guide includes:
To see if the checkout events mentioned above are included in your list of events being tracked, navigate to Admin > Events (under Property).
Here, you can click on the related event to see more details, such as the parameters applied.
The parameters of the checkout events are important as they help you better analyze all your ecommerce data and optimize your checkout process accordingly.
Here’s a list of these parameters and what they signify:
If you have completed your migration from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 successfully, you can complete your GA4 ecommerce setup and start tracking all the important ecommerce events along with the checkout.
You can also use Google Tag Manager to set up your custom events and choose the parameters you want to track the event with.
By tracking the checkout events with these parameters mentioned above, you can analyze and optimize the checkout process and better understand the customer interactions with your Shopify store.
For example:
You can monitor your checkout funnel and identify the number and percentage of customers who start, complete, or abandon the checkout process.
This can help you detect and resolve any issues or barriers that affect the conversion rate.
You can analyze customer behavior and preferences, such as the payment methods, shipping options, coupons, and items that they use and buy.
This can help you optimize your product offerings, pricing strategies, and marketing campaigns.
You can create custom reports and segments based on the event parameters and compare the performance of different products, categories, brands, variants, etc.
This can help you generate a broader picture to evaluate the effectiveness of your website design, layout, and content.
You can use the event parameters to create audiences and remarketing campaigns that target customers based on their purchase intent, cart value, coupon usage, etc.
This can help you increase customer loyalty, retention, and lifetime value.
GA4 possesses advanced reporting capabilities to provide you with insights into your Shopify ecommerce performance.
Accordingly, you are provided with a wealth of reports that help you analyze the events that users trigger on your Shopify store.
You can use these reports to explore & learn more about how users engage with your content, what actions lead to conversions, and how you can optimize your user experience and marketing strategy.
Not only can you view built-in reports on the dashboard to see the important data for your store, but you can also create custom reports to get a more granular view.
Here are some of the insightful GA4 reports to cover & show you details about the checkout events:
This report shows how many times each event is triggered and how many users trigger each event on your store. You can also see the event parameters that were sent with each event, such as the value, currency, etc.
To see this report, navigate to Reports > Engagement > Events,
In addition, you can click these checkout events and perform more customizations to your report on the top right for further information.
For further analysis, you can apply filters from a wide range of options to customize your report according to your needs.
Basically, the conversions report displays the number and value of conversions that occurred in your store.
To be more specific, a conversion is any event that you mark as important for your business, such as a purchase. The conversion data can be viewed with some delay, unlike other standard events due to the conversion data modeling process.
Once your checkout events are marked as conversions, you can use this report to see how they perform and evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns to improve your return on investment (ROI).
To see this report, go to Reports > Engagement > Conversions
You can view these built-in reports and monitor your Shopify ecommerce performance through Google Analytics 4.
Besides that, you can create your own custom reports through the Explore section for more details about your ecommerce data.
To create custom GA4 reports, go to Explore and click the plus sign to start a new exploration.
Then, you can customize your report by adding the segments, dimensions, and metrics according to your needs to get more insights.
Here is a list of the most common issues related to the checkout events and how to troubleshoot them:
To dig deeper and get further information, you can click here to find solutions to your tracking problems, and secure a complete Shopify data analytics setup & track all the important ecommerce events with Analyzify.