This is the first CartWatch research note. The figures are from stores running CartWatch in the 90 days ending 22 September 2026. Stores usually install it because Orders → Abandoned checkouts already looks wrong, so a quiet store will come in below these rates.
A flagged checkout is one CartWatch marked as a bot. The other checkouts were scored and stayed under that mark. A score under the line is not proof the buyer was a real shopper. Test stores and our own audit checkouts are excluded.
The 90-day count
From 24 June through 22 September 2026, CartWatch scanned 608,083 checkouts across 169 stores and flagged 567,794. Across those checkouts, the bot rate is 93.4%.
The typical store was close to that. The median store’s rate was 87.9%. Of the 169 stores with any checkouts in the window, 157 had at least one flagged checkout.
Most of it landed after 6 September
The 90-day rate is mostly a September number stretched across a longer window.
Through 6 September, CartWatch scanned 55,492 checkouts and flagged 38,271. The rate was 69.0%.
From 7 September through 22 September, it scanned 552,591 and flagged 529,523. The rate was 95.8%. Those sixteen days are 91% of all checkouts in the window.
The week of 14 September alone accounted for 280,090 checkouts. On 21 September, CartWatch flagged 85,381 checkouts in a single day. That day is 15% of all flagged checkouts in the 90 days.
The same shift shows up store by store. For stores with at least 30 checkouts in that part of the window, the median bot rate was 32.8% before 7 September (35 stores) and 92% from 7 September on (130 stores). More stores show up after 7 September, and those stores were hit harder.
Four stores hold half the flagged checkouts
Half of all flagged checkouts came from 4 stores. 17 stores account for 80%.
The median rate was still 87.9%. A few stores drive the total, and the typical store was high anyway. The median store that saw any bot had 153 flagged checkouts in the window.
Flagged checkouts rarely completed
Of the flagged online checkouts, 63 completed. That is 0.01%.
Of the online checkouts CartWatch did not flag, 74% completed: 24,296 of 32,822.
Sales can look ordinary while Orders → Abandoned checkouts is flooded. The scripts fill that list, and the orders come from the checkouts that were not flagged. Once the list is mostly scripts, the abandonment rate stops telling you why a person left. That is what fake abandoned checkouts and the real abandonment rate is about.
Payments CartWatch would have refused
On the 57 stores with payment blocking on, CartWatch’s counters show 305,264 flagged checkouts in the window whose payment its rules would have refused. That is a count of checkouts that matched the blocking rules, not a count of bots that pressed pay. Shopify does not report whether a bot reached the payment step, so we cannot say how many of those were real payment attempts. Shopify still creates the checkout either way, and the abandoned checkout remains.
Those counts start in mid-August, when stores turned payment blocking on, and rise with the September wave. How many flagged checkouts actually attempt payment, measured on stores where a payment can still reach the processor, is in How Many Shopify Bots Are Actually Testing Credit Cards?. The short answer is about half.
What comes next
Where the checkouts enter, and what the cart looks like, is in How Shopify Checkout Bots Actually Behave. That post covers checkouts scored through 17 September.
The scanned, flagged, and would-have-refused counts are each store’s daily totals for 24 June through 22 September 2026. Completion comes from the online checkout records created in that window. Checkouts with no score, usually because they had no email, are left out of the 93.4%.
CartWatch scores Shopify checkouts as they arrive. On the Starter plan and above, it can tag the customer and keep the address out of Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp, Drip, and Brevo. On the Standard plan, payment blocking refuses the payment when a bot attempts it. Install CartWatch from the Shopify App Store.