My Shopify sales dropped — how do I find what changed?
Short answer: Line up the drop against everything that changed in the store around that date: theme publishes, new or ended discounts, price edits, and experiments starting or ending. Shopify Analytics can show some changes as chart annotations, but not all of them. A complete change log on the same chart makes the cause much easier to spot.
Step by step
- Pin down when it started. Open the sales or conversion chart and find the first day that looks off. Compare with the same weekday a week earlier.
- List what changed in the days before. Check:
- Theme publishes or theme edits
- Discounts that started or ended
- Product price changes
- Experiments or scheduled launches that went live or ended
- App installs or removals
- Rule out outside causes. Holidays, ad spend changes, stock-outs and site outages can look the same.
- Check one change at a time. If a change lines up with the drop, compare the days before and after it.
What Analytics shows on its own (as of October 2026)
Shopify added automatic annotations in May 2026 for events such as product publishing, theme publishing and app installs. They're hidden by default. Discounts, price changes and experiment start/end aren't among them, and you can add manual notes yourself.
With Upshot
On every plan, including Free, Upshot records experiments starting and ending, new discounts, theme publishes and price changes automatically, and puts experiment starts and ends and new discounts on your Analytics charts as annotations (theme publishes already get Shopify's own annotation). When a number moves, the likely cause is on the chart or in the log. You can turn annotations off or delete them anytime.