We scanned 10 Shopify stores doing $1M+ in revenue and found 55 bugs.
Every store on this list is successful: real brands, real customers, products that sell. When we ran each one through a scan across mobile, tablet, and desktop, we found 55 bugs that real customers are hitting right now.
Actual broken things on live stores. Not hypothetical, not best-practice recommendations.
The results
| Store | Bugs Found |
|---|---|
| Beardbrand | 16 |
| Chubbies | 11 |
| Buffalo Jackson | 8 |
| Ridge Wallet | 6 |
| Hexclad | 3 |
| Bombas | 3 |
| True Classic | 3 |
| Cuts Clothing | 2 |
| Shinesty | 2 |
| Vuori | 2 |
| Total | 55 |
Cookie banners are blocking the thing they're supposed to protect
The most common pattern we found was also the most ironic. Cookie consent banners, designed to protect customers, kept showing up directly on top of the content customers came to see.
Beardbrand had it worst. On mobile, their cookie banner wasn't covering a headline or nudging some secondary text out of the way. It was sitting on top of the shopping cart. A customer who'd already picked their products and tapped checkout couldn't see their cart contents, prices, or quantities. Just a consent popup where their order summary should have been.
Hexclad's banner was covering their "Shop Now" button on tablet. Bombas had their cart failing to load on tablet entirely, a different cause but the same outcome: customer ready to buy, website unable to complete the transaction.
A cookie banner that blocks your checkout turns customers away at the door.
Seven out of ten stores had broken content on at least one device
These stores have mobile layouts. The problem is that having a mobile layout and having a mobile layout that works are two different things.
Cuts Clothing's hero carousel, the main product showcase on their homepage, was completely blank on tablet. Not slow to load, not misaligned, just blank. Shinesty had entire product sections rendering as empty space. Vuori's Livvy Dunne collection page had product listing slots showing as empty on mobile, a high-traffic influencer collab page of the kind you'd expect extra polish on.
Tablet traffic is roughly 10-15% of most ecommerce stores. That's not a rounding error. That's real customers landing on what looks, to them, like a half-built website.
Missing reviews - the quiet one that probably hurts the most
Buffalo Jackson, Ridge Wallet, and Beardbrand all had customer reviews and star ratings missing on mobile product pages.
Desktop looked fine, and that's where everyone checks: reviews loaded, stars visible, social proof intact. On mobile they were gone, either not rendering at all or loading so far below the fold there was no indication they were even there.
The customer who found the product through an Instagram ad and landed on mobile with no reviews visible is making a buy-or-bounce decision based on a page that differs from the one you designed and tested. You have reviews. They can't see them.
Conflicting information is costing you conversions you'll never trace
Chubbies had free shipping messaging in two different places on the same page, each showing a different threshold. The header said one thing, the footer said another.
This sounds minor, but the impact compounds. Customers who see conflicting shipping information don't assume it's a glitch, they hesitate. That moment of "wait, which one is true?" is small individually and significant at scale. At serious volume, that hesitation plays out across thousands of sessions every day. It doesn't show up as a bounce in analytics. It drags conversion rate down in a way that's hard to attribute.
A 500 error on product images. At Hexclad.
Actual server errors, HTTP 500s, failing to serve product images on tablet. Not slow images, not missing alt text.
Hexclad is one of the most recognizable DTC cookware brands around, with a real budget, a real team, and real infrastructure. Their product images were failing with server errors on a device category representing meaningful traffic, likely for longer than anyone realized. Nobody caught it because nobody on the team was browsing the store on tablet looking for broken images.
The technical debt hiding underneath
Almost every store had a secondary layer of issues that don't break the experience visibly but affect performance and discoverability over time.
Hundreds of images missing width and height attributes, causing layout shifts that hurt load times. Incomplete meta tags. Analytics requests firing incorrectly and creating data gaps. Missing image alt text at serious scale - 198 images at Hexclad, 101 at Bombas.
None of these stop a customer from buying today. They make the store slower, harder to find, and more fragile than it needs to be.
What this means
These aren't struggling stores. They're brands that have figured out the hard parts: product, marketing, fulfillment. The bugs we found aren't signs of neglect. They show what happens when you're running a company and moving fast.
The real problem is that nobody experiences the store the way a new customer does. Your team tests on the devices they own. You check the flows you already know. Nobody goes page by page, device by device, looking for the thing that has been hurting conversions for months.
That's the gap: nobody built the habit, or the tooling, to look.