Live View

What Live View shows

Live View (Home in the sidebar, then the Live View tab) shows what is happening on your store at this moment. It updates itself about every 5 seconds (every 15 seconds while nobody is on your store, or after 10 minutes without touching the page, as on a TV) and has four parts:

• Right now: how many visitors are on your store, and whether they are browsing, looking at a product, have a cart, or are in the checkout at contact, delivery or payment. Plus the orders paid in the last 10 minutes.
• Today: sales, orders, conversion rate and average order value so far today, each compared with yesterday up to the same time of day.
• Globe: a dot for each place visitors are in right now, a green dot for buyers of the last 10 minutes, and the top countries and cities.
• Activity: an anonymous feed of what happened in the last 30 minutes, and the products viewed, added to a cart and bought in that time.

Live View is on every plan. It counts visitors from the theme line and the LatchPay checkout, so a store without the theme line shows no visitors (the page tells you so); paid orders still show.

The page stops updating while its browser tab is hidden and picks up again as soon as you come back. The "Pause updates" button stops all updates and movement until you press "Resume updates".

Visitors right now and where they are

A visitor is one browser on one store, under a random id the theme line keeps in that browser. A private window or another device is another visitor. A visitor counts as right now when their browser sent something in the last 5 minutes.

Every visitor right now is counted once, at the furthest step of their visit: Browsing, Viewing a product, With a cart, then Checkout: contact, Checkout: delivery or Checkout: payment. A visit starts over after 30 minutes without activity, and a visitor who paid and then starts a new cart starts over too. A visitor who paid and is still around counts under Browsing.

• Active carts is everyone with a cart, including those in the checkout.
• Checking out is everyone at contact, delivery or payment.
• Purchased (or "Paid in the last 10 minutes") counts the orders paid in the last 10 minutes, the same orders the Orders page lists. Test orders never count.

What LatchPay can tell about the checkout steps

The checkout step is where the buyer's form stands: contact while the email is not filled in, delivery while the address or the shipping rate is missing, payment once those are done (or on the Payment page of the two-step layout, or after pressing Pay or a wallet button). A cart that does not ship skips delivery.

How LatchPay knows someone is still there

Someone reading one product page for a few minutes sends no clicks. So that they stay counted, the theme line and the checkout send a small "still here" signal about once a minute while the page is visible. The signal carries no page, product or amount, and it never counts as a session or a funnel step in Insights.

• It pauses while the tab is hidden, the phone is locked or the browser is minimised. Such a visitor drops out of "right now" about 5 minutes later, and comes back within seconds of returning.
• It stops after 30 minutes without a click, key press or scroll, so a storefront left open on a shop screen does not count forever. The next interaction starts it again.
• It is never sent from a browser with Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track on; those visitors are not counted.

Today, against yesterday by this time

"Today" runs from midnight in your store's time zone (the one set in Shopify) until now. "Yesterday by this time" is yesterday from midnight up to the same clock time, so at 14:30 you compare with yesterday until 14:30. On the days the clocks change, yesterday is 23 or 25 hours long, and the comparison still uses the same clock time.

• Sales and orders are the orders paid through the LatchPay checkout, counted as on Home. Orders from other Shopify sales channels are not in them; the Store-wide block on Home shows those.
• Conversion rate is sessions with a paid order divided by all sessions today, the same definition as Insights. The session count is refreshed about once a minute; orders update on every refresh.
• Average order value is sales divided by orders, per currency.
• Test orders are never counted.

Where the location comes from

The location comes from the visitor's internet connection: with every request, our hosting provider tells LatchPay the approximate country, region and city it derives from the connection's IP address, with the rough coordinates of that city. LatchPay keeps only those, never the IP address itself.

• It is the location of the connection, not of the person. A visitor on a VPN shows up in the VPN's city; mobile networks, company networks and privacy relays often show a larger city nearby, or another region.
• When no location is known, the visitor still counts but has no dot, and the lists say how many visitors have an unknown location. The feed then says "Someone" without a place.
• The city is the finest location Live View ever shows. The dots sit on the city, never on an address.

The globe, the activity feed and top products

• Globe: teal dots for visitors right now, larger green dots for buyers of the last 10 minutes. With more than 150 places, the busiest 150 are drawn and the legend says so. Without WebGL in the browser, the card shows the top cities instead.
• Top locations: the five countries and five cities with the most visitors right now.
• Activity: the latest 20 things that happened in the last 30 minutes, such as "Someone from Utrecht viewed Linen shirt", "Someone from Berlin added Linen shirt to the cart · €84.00", "started checkout" and "paid €120.00". The same visitor doing the same thing twice within a minute shows once.
• Top products (last 30 minutes): Viewed and Added count visitors, Bought counts units sold.

Product names under Viewed, Added and in the feed come from the product's web address ("linen-shirt-blue" reads "Linen shirt blue"), because that is what the storefront reports. Bought uses the real product titles from the paid carts.

All stores and currencies

With two or more stores, the Live page has a switch next to its title: the current store, or "All stores". The store menu keeps choosing the current store for every other page.

• Visitors, steps, orders, sessions and conversion add up over all your connected stores.
• Money is listed per currency and never converted or added across currencies: a euro store and a dollar store show two lines.
• Each store keeps its own day in its own time zone.
• Feed lines show the store name. Disconnected stores are never included.

TV mode

"TV mode" shows Live View on its own, without the sidebar or header, in large type you can read from across the room: the globe, the main numbers and the latest activity along the bottom. It keeps updating.

• Press "Full screen" to fill the whole screen (the browser needs that click; it never happens by itself). Browsers that cannot do this, such as Safari on iPhone, do not show the button.
• In browsers that support it (such as Chrome and Edge), the screen does not go to sleep while TV mode is open.
• Esc leaves full screen; a second Esc, or "Exit", returns to the normal page with the same store or All stores.
• If your sign-in expires while the TV runs, it shows "You were signed out." with a button to sign in again, never numbers that quietly stopped. When the connection drops, it says so and catches up once it is back.

Why the numbers differ from Shopify's Live View

Numbers close to Shopify's own Live View are normal; equal numbers are not to be expected:

• Shopify counts sessions and visitors in its own way, with its own time-outs. LatchPay counts a visitor as right now for 5 minutes after their last signal.
• Shopify sees visitors LatchPay does not: browsers with Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, many ad blockers, pages without the theme line, and other sales channels such as the Shop app or point of sale.
• Shopify's sales include every channel and every checkout; LatchPay's include only orders paid through the LatchPay checkout, without test orders.
• Shopify may place a visitor from the same connection in a different city.

What is never shown, and how long it is kept