If your Shopify conversion rate jumped in late September and nothing else changed, your site probably didn’t suddenly get better. Shopify changed how it counts sessions, and because conversion rate is orders divided by sessions, every session-based metric in your reports moved with it.
This matters more than it sounds. Black Friday is the period most brands compare year on year, and it’s the first peak measured under the new method. Here’s what changed, which way your numbers are likely to move, and what good reporting looks like from here.
What changed, and when
The rollout ran from 21st to 23rd Sep 2026. Shopify made three changes to how a session is defined.
Time. Sessions are now based on continued customer activity rather than ending at midnight UTC, and a session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. A shopper browsing from 11.50pm to 12.10am used to count as two sessions. Now they count as one.
What counts as a visit. Some sessions without a pageview are now counted, such as a customer going straight to checkout from a cart link. For subscription brands, and anyone sending shoppers directly to checkout from email or SMS, that’s a meaningful share of traffic that was previously invisible.
Bots. This is the big one. Identified bot sessions are now filtered out of session-related reports by default, although you can switch them back on in reports that support the Human or bot filter.
What didn’t change matters just as much. Your orders, sales and customer counts aren’t affected by this update. Revenue is still revenue. Only the denominator moved.
Which way your numbers will move
The three changes pull in different directions, so there’s no single answer. Filtering out bots reduces your session count, which can raise conversion rate. Counting sessions without a pageview increases it, which can lower conversion rate. Merging sessions across midnight pushes sessions down slightly.
For most stores, bot filtering does the heavy lifting. Take an illustrative store with 100,000 sessions and 2,500 orders in a month, giving a 2.5% conversion rate. If 15,000 of those sessions were bots, filtering them out leaves 85,000. Add back 3,000 sessions that went straight to checkout without a pageview, and the new count is 88,000. The same 2,500 orders now give a conversion rate of 2.84%.
That’s a 14% jump in conversion rate, without a single extra order. Shopify’s own guidance is blunt about this: a higher or lower conversion rate after the update isn’t automatically good or bad, and it should be treated as a new baseline.
The same logic applies further down the funnel. Add to cart rate, reached checkout rate, checkout conversion rate, bounce rate, pageviews per session, average session duration and online store visitors can all change too.
Where it catches brands out
Board and investor reporting. A conversion rate chart that runs through late September now has a step in it that has nothing to do with performance. If that chart goes to a board without a note on it, someone will either take credit for the jump or start asking awkward questions about it. We’d recommend marking 21st Sep on every session-based chart you share.
Black Friday year-on-year comparisons. This is the trap most brands will walk into. Shopify’s bot classification only applies to sessions from 7th Oct 2025 onwards, so BFCM 2025 can be filtered for bots. But Shopify is clear that using the same filter setting doesn’t make sessions measured before the update directly comparable with sessions measured after it. The midnight and no-pageview changes still apply. If your Black Friday conversion rate looks up on last year, check orders and revenue before celebrating.
Before-and-after analysis. Any piece of work judged on Shopify’s conversion rate, where the “before” falls ahead of 21st Sep and the “after” falls behind it, needs a second look. That includes site launches, PDP redesigns and checkout changes. The measurement change will flatter some results and hide others.
Other tools and dashboards. If an app uses session data from Shopify Analytics, the data available to that app can change too. The gap between Shopify and GA4 will also shift, because GA4 counts sessions its own way. Neither number is wrong. They’re measuring different things, which we covered in more detail in our piece on what GA4 gets from Shopify server-side tracking.
Headless stores. For some headless setups, filters and session behaviour can differ depending on how storefront analytics are implemented, and some stores were sent messages about session cookies. If you run Hydrogen or a custom headless build and got one of those messages, it’s a job for your development team or agency.
What good reporting looks like now
The brands that handle this well anchor their reporting on the numbers that didn’t move: orders, revenue, average order value and new versus returning customers. Conversion rate is still a useful metric, but from now on it’s a trend line measured from a new starting point, not a score to compare against last year.
It’s also worth being consistent about the bot filter. Shopify’s Home page and Live View filter identified bots automatically and the filter can’t be adjusted, while other reports let you toggle it. If one person in the team reports with bots included and another without, you’ll end up with two conversion rates in the same meeting.
There’s an upside here too. A conversion rate with less bot traffic in it is a better guide to how real shoppers behave, and CRO decisions made on cleaner data are better decisions. You just have to stop comparing the new number with the old one.
Where we’d start
Shopify says most merchants don’t need to take action, and in a technical sense that’s true. Nothing is broken. The work is in how you read and share the numbers. Before Black Friday, we’d recommend annotating the 21st Sep change on your key reports and agreeing which metrics your team will judge peak on. We’d also suggest making sure everyone uses the same bot filter setting.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your BFCM reporting, get in touch with the team.
FAQs
Why did my Shopify conversion rate go up in September 2026?
Shopify changed how sessions are counted between 21st and 23rd Sep 2026. Identified bot sessions are now filtered out by default, which reduces session counts and can raise conversion rate even when orders haven’t changed.
Did my Shopify sales data change?
No. Orders, sales and customer counts aren’t affected. Only session-based metrics, such as sessions, conversion rate and add to cart rate, are calculated differently.
Can I compare Black Friday 2026 with Black Friday 2025 in Shopify?
With caution. Bot filtering can be applied to BFCM 2025, but the other session changes mean the two periods still aren’t directly comparable. Compare orders and revenue first, and treat conversion rate as directional.