Is session replay the same as a screen recording of the visitor?

No. Session replay reconstructs the visitor's session from DOM events — clicks, scrolls, mouse moves, page changes — and plays them back against the same HTML they saw. It is not a video of their actual screen, and it cannot see other browser tabs or anything outside your store.

Does session replay capture passwords or credit card numbers?

Reputable tools mask password fields, payment card data, and anything explicitly marked as sensitive by default. The replay shows interactions with those fields but not the values typed into them.

Does session replay replace Google Analytics or Shopify Analytics?

No. Analytics tells you what is happening at the aggregate — the conversion rate, the bounce rate, where visitors drop off in the funnel. Session replay tells you why a specific visitor did what they did. The two are complements, not substitutes.

How long are session replays kept?

Industry standard is 30 to 90 days, depending on the vendor and plan. Replays are storage-heavy because they record raw DOM events for every visitor, so retention is usually capped. Propel Replays keeps 30 days on a rolling basis across every plan, free through Enterprise.

Should every Shopify merchant install session replay?

If your store is doing real revenue and you are trying to grow it, yes. Most stores have at least one preventable conversion-rate killer they don't know about, and session replay surfaces it. The first one you find typically pays for the tool's annual cost in a single recovered customer.

What is session replay? A merchant's guide

Session replay is the practice of recording how visitors interact with your store — every click, scroll, mouse movement, and pause — and playing it back as a video-like timeline you can scrub through. It is not a screen recording. It is not a video of the visitor’s actual screen. It’s a reconstruction of the page they saw and the actions they took, played back in your dashboard.

If you’ve ever looked at your conversion rate and thought “this page is leaking and I can’t tell why,” session replay is the answer to why.

What gets recorded, what doesn’t

A session replay tool captures DOM events — the structural data of what the visitor’s browser did. That includes:

Mouse movements and clicks
Touch events on mobile
Scroll position and depth
Page navigations
Form interactions (typically masked by default for privacy)
The DOM as it changed during the session

What’s not captured (or shouldn’t be, in any reputable tool):

Password fields
Payment card data
Anything you’ve explicitly marked as sensitive

The replay reconstructs the visitor’s experience by playing those events back against the same HTML the visitor saw. It looks like you’re watching a recording of their session, but it’s a much more efficient representation under the hood.

What session replay is for

Three jobs, in order of how often merchants actually use them:

1. Diagnose drop-off points. Your analytics tells you 60% of visitors abandon at checkout. Session replay tells you they’re abandoning because the country selector is hidden behind a sticky bar on iOS Safari.

2. Validate launches. A new product page goes live. Watch the first fifty sessions. If the add-to-cart button is broken on mobile, you’ll see it in twenty minutes — not in a customer support email three days later.

3. Resolve customer support tickets faster. A customer says “the cart is broken.” Pull up their session by email, watch what happened, reply with a fix. Beats “can you send a screenshot?” every time.

Session replay is not analytics

A common misunderstanding: session replay tools don’t replace your analytics. They complement them.

Analytics (Shopify Analytics, GA4) tells you what — the conversion rate, the bounce rate, the drop-off step in your funnel. Session replay tells you why — what the visitor was actually trying to do when the data went sideways.

You need both. Analytics quantifies the problem. Replay diagnoses it.

Session replay on Shopify specifically

Most session-replay tools were built for generic websites. They work on Shopify in the technical sense (any JavaScript will run on any page), but they don’t speak Shopify natively. They can’t filter by Shopify customer field, link replays to actual orders, or segment by cart value.

A Shopify-native session-replay tool — one of which we happen to build — does. You can filter recordings by order count, total spent, customer tag, UTM source, cart value, or any combination. You can find the replay for a specific customer who emailed about a broken checkout. You can answer the question that generic tools can’t: what does my best-customer cohort actually do that my one-time-buyer cohort doesn’t?

How long replays are kept

Industry standard is somewhere between 30 days and 90 days, depending on the vendor and the plan. Replays are storage-heavy (raw DOM events for every visitor, multiplied by traffic), so retention is usually capped to keep storage costs sane. If you need a session for a support ticket or a CRO decision, watch it (or share the link) within the retention window.

For Propel Replays specifically, retention is 30 days on a rolling basis across every plan, free through Enterprise.

Should every Shopify merchant use session replay?

If your store is doing real revenue and you’re trying to grow it, yes. The ROI math is one of the easier ones in commerce: most stores have at least one preventable conversion-rate killer that they’re unaware of. Session replay surfaces it. The first one you find typically pays for the tool’s annual cost in a single recovered customer.

If you’re pre-revenue or doing a few hundred dollars a month, you probably have bigger problems than a session-replay tool can solve. Get the product right first.

Where to start

If you’re on Shopify and looking for a session-replay tool, Propel Replays is the one we make. It’s built on Shopify primitives, free up to 750 pageviews per month, and adds 0ms to your Lighthouse score. If you want a comparison against the alternatives, we’ve written an honest one that points you at Microsoft Clarity if free is the deciding factor.

Whatever tool you pick, install it. The merchants who don’t watch their replays are the ones still wondering why their store doesn’t convert.