This is How to Identify Your Shopify Store’s Conversion Killers – Part 2 of a four-part series. Part-one reveals why most of what’s considered “best practice” actually risks hurting your Shopify store’s conversion rate, rather than helping it.
Visitor Intelligence Tool #5 – On-Page Pop-Up Polls

Triggering an on-page poll/survey when a visitor is about to leave your store can help gather some insightful feedback about why they’re hot-footing it elsewhere. And once you understand your visitors’ sales objections, you can hypothesize ways to counter them.
But you don’t have to only ask questions when someone is about to exit your store. You can also trigger a poll after a certain amount of time or when a visitor scrolls halfway down the page.
This way, you can capture their thoughts at the exact moment they’re thinking them.

Putting some forethought into the questions you’re asking and the behavior of the poll before you launch it, will garner richer feedback, for example:
- What type of response do you want? Open text, radio buttons, or multiple-choice? (Open text usually gets more valuable responses in my experience because you’re not forcing the responder to shoehorn their answer into one of your predetermined responses.)
- Who do you want to target? New or returning visitors? How long do they need to have been on the page?
- Do you want to ask just one question or a series?
- Do you want an email notification every time someone responds so you can answer any questions they have? (You’d be surprised how many people mistake the polls for Live Chat.)
It’s a good idea to collect at least 200 responses for each poll you run before determining any patterns in the responses. But even if you struggle to get to 200, it only takes one gem of an idea to inspire a split test. And that could change everything for your store and its fortunes.
Visitor Intelligence Tool #6 – Persistent Feedback Tabs

Giving your visitors an easy way to report bugs or tell you what they love or loathe about your Shopify store is extremely useful. If you use Hotjar for this, it even screenshots the section of the page that the respondent was on when they left their feedback.
Visitor Intelligence Tool #7 – Live Chat

You may not think of live chat as a visitor intelligence tool because its primary use is to help drive sales or support existing customers.
But live chat can be incredibly revealing in terms of gathering objections as well as FAQs.
Think about it, every question that gets asked via live chat is an opportunity for you to improve your sales copy or information architecture.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg because, for every person that asks a question via live chat, there are dozens more that had the same question but abandoned your site. And that’s because they didn’t have the patience to start a live chat conversation.
Not only that, but live chat can help pinpoint product pages that are causing confusion, frustration, or prompting questions.
And if you’ve been using a live chat tool for any length of time, downloading and analyzing the chat transcripts can often reveal a host of opportunities to improve your Shopify store too.
You’ll also be able to see which of your customer service teams’ answers, reassurances, and counter-objections routinely result in closing the sale. You can then re-purpose those responses into improving your sales copy.
There are hundreds of live chat tools to choose from. Tawk is a great free option for when you’re getting started. If you want something more sophisticated Gobot is in free beta right now. We recently switched to Drift for our stores, which we’re loving.
Visitor Intelligence Tool #8 – Co-Browsing
Co-browsing tools like Surfly let your visitors share their screens with someone on your customer support team. This is particularly useful if your Shopify store sells technically complicated products with lots of options.

Co-browsing not only helps close complex sales by screen-sharing whilst live chatting or talking to your visitors. It also is like carrying out the ultimate user test. You get direct feedback about points of confusion or uncertainty.
Read How to Identify Your Shopify Store’s Conversion Killers – Part 3.