// Bilby · the data report
The State of Broken Shopify Stores.
Of 1,490 public Shopify stores Bilby visited in a real browser, 38% had a broken or degraded buying path on the night we visited them.
Measured: 1,490 visits between 1 September 2026 and 2 September 2026 (UTC), one night per store, computed live from the visit records when this page was served (29 September 2026). Our own demo store and test hosts are excluded from every figure.
By market
| MARKET | STORES VISITED | BUY PATH BROKEN (P1/P2) | MEDIAN MOBILE HOME LCP | MOBILE HOME LCP > 4 S | PURCHASE-PATH TRACKING FINDINGS | AVG SCORE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US | 821 | 45% · n=821 | 3.1 s · n=657 | 30% | 14% | 80 |
| AU | 362 | 21% · n=362 | 3.9 s · n=261 | 33% | 10% | 92 |
| EU | 175 | 36% · n=175 | 3.1 s · n=152 | 33% | 2% | 82 |
| UK | 67 | 33% · n=67 | 2.0 s · n=63 | 12% | 10% | 86 |
| CA | 65 | 51% · n=65 | 3.9 s · n=52 | 40% | 14% | 79 |
- STORES VISITED
- stores whose visit completed, by the store’s market; a store that refused the browser or errored on our side is not counted as visited anywhere on this page.
- BUY PATH BROKEN
- share of visited stores with at least one P1 or P2 finding — a step of home → collection → product → add-to-cart → cart → checkout that failed or a broken feature on it — on the night visited, visits to 2 September 2026.
- MEDIAN MOBILE LCP
- the median, across stores, of the home page’s Largest Contentful Paint at 390×844 in a real Chromium from the store’s market region (PerformanceObserver, one load per store); n is the stores with a mobile measurement.
- LCP > 4 S
- share of those stores whose mobile home LCP exceeded 4 s on mobile (Google’s “poor” threshold).
- TRACKING FINDINGS
- share of stores where an add-to-cart or begin-checkout event failed to reach an installed analytics platform’s own collection endpoint during the visit (Money check).
- AVG SCORE
- mean Bilby health score, 100 minus the severity points of every finding, floored at zero.
Every cell prints from the visits themselves; a market's row is only meaningful once it passes 50 stores. The 26 August 2026 checkout-scripts sunset is the reason the tracking column exists: a store whose add-to-cart or begin-checkout event no longer reaches GA4 / Meta shows up here as a Money check finding on a single night’s visit (purchase itself needs a real order — we never place one).
Methodology
- Sample. Public Shopify storefronts with at least one product page in the latest Common Crawl monthly index (
*.myshopify.com/products/*), de-duplicated by host, password-protected and development stores skipped, the store’s active currency read once to place it in a market. Majority US by construction of the web; every cut prints its n. - Visit. The same free scan every merchant can run: a real Chromium browser, desktop 1440×900 and mobile 390×844, from the nearest of six regions, home → collection → product → add-to-cart → cart → checkout, stopping at the payment step. robots.txt is respected; a store that refuses is not visited and not counted.
- Findings. Deterministic checks first (HTTP, cart endpoint, tracking requests, Web Vitals); a frozen Claude judge only where a human eye is needed, confirmed by a second signal before it becomes P1. Rate limits (429/403) are never findings. Rules: /bilby/methodology.
- Cuts. Market = the store’s active currency, read once when the sample was built (USD → US, GBP → UK, CAD → CA, AUD → AU, EUR → EU); the visit itself ran from the nearest of six regions. Speed rows count a mobile homepage LCP above 4 s, measured on our machine class and discounted when our own browser was starved.
- Limits, printed. One night per store; no purchase events (no orders placed); stores that wall automated browsers are absent; the sample is what Common Crawl saw, not the whole platform. Bilby scores its own store publicly under the same rules, and a separate study checked the product data on 409 live Shopify stores.
Press kit
- Cite as: The State of Broken Shopify Stores, Navaal (Bilby), 2026, https://navaal.ai/bilby/data — CC BY 4.0.
- Live figures update nightly; the table above is the source of truth, and the measurement line under the headline dates every figure. Quote the numbers with that date.
- Marks: bilby mark · navaal wordmark (BRAND.md rules). Contact: support@navaal.ai — Waqas Ahmad, Navaal, Sydney.
- The demo store used in every screenshot and the film is our own labelled store, Fernwick & Co.; no merchant is named without consent.
