5 Ways to Improve Your Shopify Store's Product Pages with Hotjar

At StoreHero, we help Shopify stores maximize revenue, and one of the first things we typically tackle is improving product pages.

Beyond its direct contribution to revenue, improving product pages often reveals insights into how to sell more effectively — which is why we recommend getting started on this early.

When optimizing product pages, we frequently use a tool called Hotjar. The Shopify app Lucky Orange offers similar functionality, but we tend to prefer Hotjar for its snappy, responsive dashboard.

In this article, we'll share five proven methods for using Hotjar to improve your product pages.

StoreHero leverages a proprietary growth platform to support business growth through granular operations that manual management can't achieve, as well as large-scale execution of growth initiatives.
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The Recording Feature Is By Far the Most Useful

Hotjar offers many features for analyzing your store's UI and usability, but the one we use most — by a wide margin — is the recording feature.

The recording feature captures video of how customers scroll and move their mouse while browsing your store.

There's also a similar feature called heatmaps, which highlights sections where visitors spend the most time.

In most cases, watching recorded videos reveals improvement opportunities without even needing to look at heatmaps, which is why we center our Hotjar usage around the recording feature.

Below, we'll walk through how we analyze these recordings.

Compare How Visitors Who Added to Cart Browsed vs. Those Who Didn't

First, we examine how visitors who ended up adding to cart browsed the product page.

In Hotjar's recording screen, use the Visited URL filter to filter for the cart page, then add another Visited URL filter for the product page.

This lets you view recordings only from visitors who viewed the product page and then navigated to the cart page.

Next, filter for visitors who viewed the product page but did NOT visit the cart page.

This gives you recordings of visitors who viewed the product page but never made it to the cart.

Watching around 10 to 20 videos from each group gives you a clear sense of the general patterns. We recommend focusing especially on sessions with longer viewing times.

By comparing visitors who added to cart against those who didn't, you can start to infer which parts of the page — when carefully reviewed — are most likely to lead to a purchase.

Fix Content That You Want Visitors to See but That Gets Skipped Over

Next, pay attention to any content on the product page that you want visitors to notice but that tends to get glossed over.

This includes product selling points and product photos — content that purchasers carefully review, but that non-purchasers tend to scroll past.

Once you identify content that's being skipped, reposition it to be more visible or modify it so it's easier to engage with.

High-priority content can be moved further up the page, or even incorporated directly into the product image gallery.

Check What Other Pages Non-Buyers Are Visiting Besides the Product Page

There are also clues in the other pages that non-buyers visit beyond the product page.

For example, if visitors are navigating to the legal notice page or the shipping information page, adding a brief explanation of shipping and payment methods on the product page itself may help put their minds at ease.

You can also infer what information is missing from a product page by looking at the keywords driving traffic to that page in Google Search Console. This is another useful approach worth trying.

Make It Easier for Visitors to Compare Products They're Considering

When watching recording videos, you may notice that some visitors are comparing products by color or type.

Creating a comparison table for frequently compared products makes decision-making easier and can increase conversion rates.

When products differ by model or type, a comparison table works well. But for color comparisons or outfit coordination, a format better suited to that type of comparison is needed.

The fashion and cosmetics brand Dior, for instance, makes it easy to compare shades with a dedicated shade comparison feature.

Similarly, the luggage brand Away makes great use of diagrams and icons to clearly communicate size differences.

Turn Long Text Sections Into Diagrams, Illustrations, Images, or Videos

When watching recording videos, you may notice that visitors spend a long time reading a particular section of text.

When you find such a section, think about whether the text can be transformed into a diagram, illustration, image, or video to make it intuitively understandable.

For example, the mattress brand Casper makes effective use of videos to explain the elasticity and features of their mattresses.

Thorough Growth Operations with StoreHero

StoreHero helps merchants who are struggling to grow sales on Shopify by executing growth initiatives at scale. Using the StoreHero growth platform, we support continuous business growth across advertising, storefront, CRM, and inventory management — achieving a level of precision and volume of initiatives that manual operations simply cannot match.
We are currently offering free store diagnostics. If you have challenges related to Shopify or growth initiatives in general, please don't hesitate to reach out. Learn more about our free store diagnosis here

Summary

We've covered five ways to use Hotjar to improve product pages on your Shopify store.

In practice, our Shopify consulting engagements involve a broader range of analyses, but the methods introduced here form the foundation.

As mentioned at the outset, the insights gained through product page optimization often inform how to position and sell products — and sometimes even inspire new product ideas — making it a high-priority activity.

We hope this serves as a useful reference when you're working on improving your product pages.