Here is a helpful guide on customer events and custom pixels in Shopify, including important considerations for testing checkout steps and purchase events.
Firstly, you should be aware that checkout events including the thank-you page are now managed by the customer events section. Thus, they will not be displayed in the summary section of GTM (Google Tag Manager) Preview Mode.
When debugging the steps in the checkout process, it's best to close the GTM (Google Tag Manager) Preview Mode and instead use only the browser console or Network tab for checking the signals in detail for monitoring.
Let’s continue with the details.
Customer Events for Headless Stores
Customer events are not currently supported in headless stores. This limitation means that customer events cannot be used and checkout steps and other interactions including the thank-you page cannot be tracked .
For headless stores, it is recommended that purchase and other order success related events be triggered through the Order Status Page field.
However, Shopify has announced that they are working to integrate customer events into the headless structure, suggesting that the capability to use customer events in headless stores may soon become a reality.
Tracking Checkout Steps w/ Third-Party Apps
When using third-party checkout applications, if the app does not emit the relevant events, the corresponding customer events defined with the subscribe method will not be triggered, and the checkout steps will not be tracked.
This also applies to shop.app as well. For more information, please refer to this article about Emitting Data.
However, you can use custom pixels to track customer events related to the thank-you page and order result pages via the Order Status Page.
Shopify Custom Pixels
Shopify custom pixels are tools that centralize and secure the management of scripts on your website by running them in a sandbox environment.
This sandbox environment isolates scripts, allowing them to run without affecting other parts of your site, and limits their access to data to prevent security risks.
However, this secure setup means that some third-party pixels may not work if they need access to more data .
If you're using Shopify Custom Events, they also run in this protected environment, which might stop some marketing and analytics tools from accessing the data they need.
If your analytics tool can't send data from this sandboxed environment and there's no plan to update this capability soon.
You can temporarily collect purchase events through the Checkout > Order Status Page under an Additional Script. But note that this method will be available until the second half of 2025, giving you some time to find alternative solutions or adjust your setup.
For more information, you can read through Shopify’s documentations:
How to Test Purchase Event
Purchase event is managed by the customer events section like the thank-you page. Therefore it will NOT appear in GTM Preview Mode. Instead you can test checkout events on the browser console/network tab.
Here’s what you can do.
To test purchase and other order results event, you need to use one of the following methods:
- check the browser console dataLayer argument or network tab,
- monitor the real-time purchase event report in GA4,
- or check the outgoing requests section in the GA4 tab of the Analytics Debugger Chrome extension.
You can follow our step-by-step tutorial here to debug your whole setup.
