Live Visitors for E-commerce Stores
Updated
TL;DR
To see live visitors on an e-commerce store, add the whoisbrowsing script to your storefront and open your shop: each shopper appears as a live cursor on the real product page, with their source, approximate city and device. It never captures what a shopper types, so checkout details are not collected.
What a store owner can watch
A store has a few pages where the money is decided: product pages, the cart, shipping information and checkout. A live view lets you see those moments as they happen:
- Which product is being looked at now. The side panel lists live counts per page, busiest first, so a product that a post or an assistant just sent traffic to rises to the top.
- Where shoppers hesitate. A cursor that hovers over the size selector, or a phone band that stays over the reviews, is a hint about what people want to know.
- Where they came from. Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, another site's link, or direct. If an assistant is recommending your product, you see it per visitor, live.
- Which device. Desktop, tablet or phone, plus browser and operating system. Phone visitors are drawn as a see-through band over the part of the page they are viewing.
No checkout capture
This is the part store owners ask about first, so it is worth being plain.
Your visitors' browsers send the page, pointer position, clicks, scroll, device type, source, browser and operating system, and time on site. Never keystrokes, form values or page text. That means:
- Card numbers, names and addresses typed into a form are not sent, because form values are never sent.
- Product names and prices on the page are not sent as text. The owner sees the page itself in their own browser; the visitor's browser reports where the pointer is, not what the page says.
- Query strings never leave the browser, and URL tokens in a path (UUIDs, long hex strings and long random tokens) are sent as
:id. A link such as/orders/9b2f6c1e-4d3a-4f6b-8a2e-1c7d5e9f0a3bis reported as/orders/:id. A short number in a path, such as an order number, is sent as it is, so keep anything private out of your page addresses.
Nothing about your visitors is stored on our servers. No cookies on your visitors.
What a shopper's visit looks like
Here is what you might see on an ordinary afternoon. A line appears in the side panel: a phone visitor from Google, near Austin, TX, on a product page. On the page, a see-through band sits over the photos, then moves down to the reviews and stays there a while. The band jumps back up to the size options, and a moment later the line's page changes to the cart, and the pages-this-visit count goes up by one. You did not learn who they are, and nothing they type is sent, but you saw that the reviews mattered to that shopper before they added to cart.
Install on your store
The snippet is one tag, under 4 KB gzipped, loaded after the page:
<script src="https://live.whoisbrowsing.com/s.js" data-site="YOUR_SITE_ID" defer></script>
Platform steps differ, so follow your guide in install. For Shopify, see install on Shopify. Check your plan for where custom code is allowed, especially on checkout pages: some platforms restrict scripts there, and we do not assume what yours allows.
Test as a shopper would: open your store in a Chrome Incognito or Safari private window while watching, and you will see yourself.
Who is and is not shown
Visitors from the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland, and browsers with Global Privacy Control, are never shown. If a large part of your customers are in those regions, you will see fewer visitors than actually browse. That is the intended trade: it keeps the tool simple to defend, and you can read why in Global Privacy Control explained. The privacy page lists everything.
A few ways to use it
| Moment | What to look at |
|---|---|
| You send a promotional email | Live count on the product page; sources shifting to "another site's link" |
| A sale starts | Whether phone visitors scroll past the offer |
| Ads are running | Whether visitors from the ad land on the page you expected |
| A page is slow or broken | Cursors that stop moving and visitors who leave within seconds |
When whoisbrowsing is NOT the right tool
It shows the present only. There are no recordings, no heatmaps over time and no conversion reports. If you need to measure conversion rate, revenue per source or abandoned carts, use your store's analytics. If you want to replay a shopper's session after the fact, use a replay tool such as Microsoft Clarity or Contentsquare (which Hotjar is now part of), which keep sessions for later review.
It is free, with no credit card and no usage limits for now, and you can read more on the home page or try it without signing in.