How Shopcheck works,
step by step.

More scheduling details:

• Browser checks run at most once an hour. Buyer journeys, and any check with a step that clicks or types, run in a real browser. Pair one with a frequent uptime check on the same page for a fast signal in between. A new journey runs once a day until you change it.
• A product is updated also runs the check when product data changes. A catalogue sync fires it once per product, so a burst is collapsed into one run.
• Give up after (ms) can be at most 30,000. For a journey it is how long each step may take.
• Recover after N passes is how many passes in a row close the incident again, one to start with. Raise it for something that flaps, so you are not told it is fixed three times before it is.
• For a journey, Estimated usage counts each device as its own run, so three devices use three times the browser minutes. See Plans & billing.
• Heartbeat and incoming-alert monitors wait to be called rather than running checks, and a change to your store cannot change what Shopify's status page says, so none of these has store-change triggers and the panel is called Timing and retries.
• API and latency monitors set their speed limit under What to check, beside their other expectations, so this panel does not offer Slow if over (ms) for them. Shopify status and Apps monitors have no speed limit at all.

Where an incident's alert goes is covered in alerts and incidents.

More details on when incidents open and close, and who hears about them.

When an incident opens and closes

• Alert after N failures and Recover after N passes, on a monitor's Schedule step, decide when an incident opens and closes. Both are one to start with.
• A page check that fails with a network error or a server error is retried once, two seconds later, before it counts.
• Each device is tracked separately, but a monitor failing on several devices at once sends one alert.
• An incident closes on its own when the monitor recovers, and channels set to hear When it recovers are told. Resolve incident closes it by hand and sends no recovery notice.

Other channel settings

Email is the only channel on to start with. Email has a Subject prefix and Include monitor notes; Slack and webhook payloads always carry the notes. Slack's Mention on failure never fires on a recovery.

Not hearing the same thing twice

Quiet hours

Set under Settings → Schedule → Quiet hours, in the store's Timezone. During them, scheduled checks are skipped for the whole store, so nothing fails and nothing alerts. It is a pause, not a mute: a problem that starts at 2am is found when quiet hours end. Pings from your own jobs that arrive in the meantime are checked afterwards, and checks triggered by a theme publish or a product update still run.

Because quiet hours pause every monitor, keep them short. To quieten one noisy monitor, raise its Alert after N failures or lower its severity instead.

Verifying a webhook

Signing is off until you turn it on. Tick Add a signature header so you can verify it came from Shopcheck and enter a Shared secret of your own. Every request then carries an X-Shopcheck-Signature header: the HMAC-SHA256 of the raw request body, keyed with that secret, as hex.

import { createHmac, timingSafeEqual } from "node:crypto";

const expected = createHmac("sha256", process.env.SHOPCHECK_SECRET).update(rawBody).digest("hex");
const received = request.headers["x-shopcheck-signature"] ?? "";
const valid =
  received.length === expected.length && timingSafeEqual(Buffer.from(received), Buffer.from(expected));

Compare against the raw body before it is parsed, and with a constant-time comparison. Shopcheck does not follow redirects and gives up after five seconds, so point it at the final URL and answer quickly.

More incident details

Incidents can be filtered by kind — failing checks, monitoring limited, conversion drops and Web Vitals — and sorted by age or revenue impact. Resolve selected closes several at once.

A setup that works for most stores

More details on real-shopper data, the three sources and performance alerts.

When real-shopper data does not appear

Checkout pages sit outside your theme, so the embed cannot see them. The Shopcheck web pixel, added when you install and set to Always on under Settings → Customer events, counts checkout starts and completions there. Until it has reported, Checkout completion carries an asterisk.

Reading the three sources

• Lab runs usually beat both field rows, and PageSpeed Insights' throttled mobile numbers too, because they run unthrottled. A gap is expected, not a contradiction.
• The Performance score is the real-shopper score, and falls back to the lab score while there is no shopper data. The label under it says which.
• The date, device and visitor filters apply to real-shopper data only. Speed vs competitors and the Google row always use Google's 28-day data, for up to five competitor domains.
• A breakdown row needs 50 page loads before it gets a pass or fail.

How performance alerts decide

• Each Core Web Vitals rule can be limited to devices and page types, and set to alert, track only or off.
• Conversion and error rules start as Track only, which records an incident without notifying anyone. Stores with little traffic are never flagged.
• Both show up under Incidents, as Web Vitals or conversion drops.

Reading a regression

What performance monitoring does not do

It does not tell you the store works. A storefront can post excellent Core Web Vitals with a completely broken add-to-cart button — the page paints fast, it just does not function.

That is what buyer journeys are for. Speed and function are separate questions, and both need an answer.

Shopcheck is priced as fixed monthly tiers with usage included, billed through Shopify. The one lever that changes your plan is how many advanced monitors you run. Try your own numbers in the calculator above; current prices are also on the pricing page.

Plans

Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, run by Shopify, and keeps 90 days of history. Page checks run as often as every 15 minutes and browser checks as often as every hour on all three.

You are not billed per run, per screenshot or per minute. Storefront monitoring is the wrong product to hand anyone an unpredictable bill for: the moment frequency costs money per run, people check less often, and a check that runs rarely finds out late.

What counts as an advanced monitor

Any monitor that runs in a real browser — a buyer journey, or any check with a step that clicks or types — and every store data check. Uptime, latency, content, apps in your theme, API endpoint, Shopify status, AI agent readiness, heartbeat and incoming-alert monitors that do not open a browser are unlimited on every plan.

Two things do not change the count:

• Devices. One journey on desktop, tablet and mobile is one monitor.
• Frequency. Running a journey hourly or daily is the same monitor.

Extra advanced monitors

Past your plan's allowance, each extra advanced monitor is billed at your plan's add-on price rather than blocked, because adding one is the intended way to widen coverage. Shopcheck asks before saving one, and suggests the next plan up when that is the cheaper option. Charges are prorated.

The calculator above works out which plan is cheapest for your monitors: one or two extras cost less than moving up a plan, but once you need as many as the next plan includes, upgrading is cheaper.

Usage limits

Each plan includes two monthly allowances. Both are limits, never a bill, and both reset with your Shopify billing cycle.

Every channel at Tier 1 on the Notifications tab is told when an allowance is 80% used and again when it is used up, and Billing & Subscription shows where each one stands.

Nothing is silently dropped or shown as passing. A skipped run says it was skipped and why, because a monitoring product that quietly stops monitoring is worse than none: you still believe you are covered.

The Billing page

Billing & Subscription in the app shows:

Billing through Shopify

Charges appear on your Shopify invoice, so there is no card to store with us. You approve the charge in Shopify when you pick a plan.

Without a plan, Shopcheck is read-only: your monitors and history stay, but nothing runs until you choose one.

Changing plans

Change plan whenever your monitoring changes; monitors, history and baselines carry over. If a smaller plan includes fewer advanced monitors than you run, the ones beyond it become extras, and any extra you have not approved is paused, most recently enabled first.