Action Replay
Action Replay records what real visitors do on your storefront and lets you watch it back like a video. Use it to see where shoppers hesitate, which page loses them, and why a cart was abandoned.
Open Action Replay in the dashboard menu (it sits just under Sales Analytics).
What gets recorded
Recording captures the page as the visitor saw it, plus what they did:
- Mouse movement, clicks, and scrolling
- Page changes as they browse from one page to the next
- Screen size and orientation changes
- Which pages they visited, where they came from, their device type and country
What is never recorded
Privacy protection is always on. You cannot switch it off, and it applies to every store.
- Everything typed into a form is hidden. Names, emails, addresses, passwords and search text are masked. You can see that the shopper typed something, never what they typed.
- Payment frames are blocked. Card fields supplied by your payment provider appear blank in the replay. This is deliberate — card details are never captured.
- Visitors who ask not to be tracked are skipped. If a shopper's browser sends a "Do Not Track" signal, no recording is made at all.
Because of this, checkout replays look incomplete — empty boxes where the shopper was typing, and a blank area where the card form sits. That is the privacy protection working, not a fault.
Turning recording on and off
Recording is on by default for every store and records 100% of sessions.
To change it, click the gear icon at the top right of the Action Replay page:
- Use the Record visitor sessions for this store toggle to turn recording on or off.
- Set Capture rate to 100%, 50%, 25%, 10% or 5% of sessions. Lower it if you have high traffic and only need a sample.
- Save.
Two things to expect:
- Changes apply to new sessions only. A visit already in progress keeps its original setting.
- It takes a few minutes for the change to reach your storefront, because your shop settings are cached.
The session list
Each row is one visit:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Started | When the visit began |
| Visitor | A short anonymous visitor ID, marked "(logged in)" if the shopper was signed in |
| Device | Mobile, tablet or desktop, worked out from the browser |
| Duration | How long the visit lasted |
| Pages | How many different pages they viewed |
| Entry page | The first page they landed on |
| Country | Where the visit came from |
Sessions are always listed newest first. Use Refresh to pull in recent visits, change rows per page (10, 25 or 50), and move through the list with Previous and Next.
There is no search or filtering in Action Replay yet — you cannot search by country, device or date, and there is no total session count. Work through the list from the newest visit backwards.
Click any row to open the replay.
Watching a replay
The player opens in a window with these controls:
- Play / Pause and Restart
- Speed — 1×, 2×, 4× or 8×
- Skip inactivity — on by default, jumps over pauses where the shopper did nothing
- Progress bar — drag to move through the visit. Amber shading marks idle periods where nothing happened.
Long sessions
A replay starts playing within a second or two, then keeps downloading the rest of the visit in the background. A Buffered % chip shows how much has loaded, and the grey fill on the progress bar shows the same thing.
If playback catches up with the download you'll see Buffering… for a moment, and it resumes on its own.
Jumping far ahead in a long visit is not instant. The player has to load everything up to that point first, so it will show "Buffering…" while it catches up. Skipping ahead a little at a time is faster than dragging straight to the end.
"This session is too short to replay"
Some visits are too brief to produce a usable recording — the visitor left before enough of the page was captured. These rows still appear in the list, but there is nothing to play.
How long recordings are kept
Sessions expire after 30 days and stop appearing in Action Replay. Download or note anything you want to keep before then — there is no export.
Who can see recordings
Action Replay is covered by the Analytics staff permission, together with dashboard stats and sales analytics. Staff members without that permission see the menu item locked. You only ever see sessions from your own store.
Common questions
Why are there fewer recordings than visitors in my analytics? Three reasons. Visitors whose browsers send "Do Not Track" are never recorded, your capture rate may be below 100%, and very short visits may not produce a playable session.
Why can't I read what the customer typed? All form input is masked for privacy and this cannot be turned off. Use the recording to see where someone struggled — a field they returned to repeatedly, or a form they abandoned — rather than the content.
Why is the payment step blank? Card fields come from your payment provider in a protected frame that is deliberately never recorded.
One customer appears as two separate recordings. A visit is split after 30 minutes of inactivity. If a shopper leaves a tab open and comes back later, that becomes a new session.
I changed the capture rate but nothing changed. It only affects new visits, and takes a few minutes to reach the storefront. Sessions already under way keep their original setting.
Can I delete, download or share a single recording? Not currently. Recordings can only be watched in the dashboard, and they clear themselves after 30 days.
Does recording slow down my storefront? Recording runs quietly in the background and is designed to fail silently — if anything goes wrong it stops recording rather than affecting the shopper's experience.