Propel Commerce. Vancouver, BC. Bootstrapped since 2019. 10,000+ Shopify stores across five apps.
Before Propel, Chris ran a Shopify store called SOLID — Tool Chests. Real product, real inventory, real Meta ad spend going out the door every week. And he kept hitting the same wall every Shopify founder hits: the analytics dashboard told him conversion was dropping, but it couldn't tell him why. Why aren't these visitors adding to cart? Why is mobile checkout falling off a cliff on Tuesdays? Was that broken on the new theme push, or has it always been like this?
He tried the obvious tools. Hotjar felt like an aftermarket bolt-on — the filters didn't speak Shopify, the script slowed the storefront, and the dashboard buried the signal. Lucky Orange was mature but expensive and dated. Microsoft Clarity was free and fine but had no idea what a Shopify customer was. None of them were built for someone running a Shopify store.
So he built the tool he wanted. That became Propel Replays — session replay, heatmaps, AI summaries, and surveys, all native to Shopify. Filter sessions by any Shopify customer field. Replays link back to the actual order in your admin. 0ms impact on Core Web Vitals. The kind of tool you'd build if you were the merchant. Because he was.
These are the four reasons most founders install Replays. They're also the four reasons Chris built it.
You can see the click-throughs in Meta Ads Manager. You can see the bounce rate in Shopify Analytics. You cannot, for the life of you, see what those visitors actually do on the landing page before they leave.
Filter sessions by UTM source. Watch the post-click. In the first ten replays you'll see the pattern: visitors land, scroll past the hero (which is sized for desktop), can't find the product image gallery on mobile, hit the back button. Or they land, scroll, hit the size chart link — which opens in a modal that's broken on iOS — and bail.
This is exactly the problem that made Chris build Propel in the first place. You shouldn't have to spend $50 of ad budget to learn one thing about your landing page. Watch ten sessions, fix the friction, ship by lunch — our Shopify CRO playbook walks through what to fix first, in what order.
You've spent three weeks on the new PDP. Photography, copy, variants, reviews migrated, Klaviyo flows wired up. You launch. Conversion is half what your existing bestsellers do. Why?
Watch the first 50 sessions. AI summarizes each one in two sentences, so you skim the lot in fifteen minutes. You'll catch the bugs before the launch week is over: a variant swatch that doesn't update the main image on mobile Safari. A "select size" prompt nobody sees because it's below the fold on iPhone SE. The post-purchase upsell triggering rage clicks because the close button is a 12px cross.
"It is the best way to troubleshoot especially when I launch a new product." — KayarizeGifts (verbatim App Store review). This is the use case founders write to us about most.
You know the feeling. One support email lands at 11pm. "Hey, I tried to check out and it wouldn't let me." No screenshots, no browser version, no order ID. Is your store actually broken?
Pull up the customer by email or order ID. Find their session. Watch what actually happened. In ninety seconds you know whether it's a real bug, a coupon-code typo, or a Shop Pay quirk on their browser. Reply with a fix instead of a "could you send a screenshot?" and they're checked out before breakfast.
Your dev or agency can see the same replay — copy the link, paste in Slack. Beats screenshots. Beats "works on my machine." Beats the support ticket that drags on for three days.
Klaviyo. Triple Whale. GA4. The reviews app. The upsell app. The bundles app. Your Shopify bill is a small mortgage. You still don't know why your cart-to-checkout drop-off is 68%.
Propel Replays Basic is $9.90/mo (or $6.44/mo billed annually — 35% off). 20,000 pageviews. Free up to 750 pageviews/mo if you want to run it forever without paying. It tells you exactly the thing the rest of your stack can't: why this specific shopper, on this specific session, didn't buy.
We're a small Vancouver studio, not a VC-backed land grab. Pricing stays sane. Support is a human (Tom — merchants name him in the App Store reviews). The only thing the app does is help you see why people don't buy. That's it.
And for solo founders specifically: insight alerts proactively surface the replays worth watching, and product-page alerts flag when add-to-cart rates drop on a specific PDP — so you catch a broken theme update or a bad image change the day it happens, not the day Triple Whale finally notices.
One-click install from the Shopify App Store. Replays adds itself as a theme app embed — toggle it on, and replays start recording on every page automatically. No GTM. No theme.liquid edits. No developer needed. If you can install a Shopify app, you can install Replays.
Plays nicely with the rest of your stack: Shop Pay (we never capture payment fields), Shopify Analytics (Replays is the qualitative layer Shopify Analytics doesn't ship), Klaviyo, Triple Whale, your reviews app. Filter replays by any Shopify customer field — order count, total spent, customer tag, cart value, UTM source. The filters know what a Shopify customer is. Generic SaaS tools don't.
Heads up: 0ms impact on Core Web Vitals, measurably. Lighthouse scores are identical with Replays installed and disabled. Critical for paid-traffic landing pages.
Real things, from real merchants, in roughly the order they tend to find them.
Install Propel Replays free on the Shopify App Store. First replay records in under a minute. Free up to 750 pageviews/mo. 7-day free trial on every paid plan.