Ecommerce Analytics Tools: 7 Compared by Job for 2026

Ecommerce analytics is the practice of measuring how people find a store, what they do there, what they buy and whether they come back. No single tool does all of that well, and most stores end up paying for overlapping dashboards that answer the same easy questions while the hard one, which campaigns actually produce profitable customers, goes unanswered. This guide splits the field into six jobs and compares seven ecommerce analytics tools on what each is built for, with prices read from vendor pages on 24 September 2026. One of the seven, Arktis, is ours, and the section says so.

The short answer: pick tools by job, and Arktis is the clear winner for attribution plus recordings

Ecommerce analytics covers six jobs: traffic, conversion, attribution, behaviour, product and retention. Your store platform's own reports and a free tool such as Google Analytics 4 or Microsoft Clarity cover traffic, conversion and behaviour at no extra cost. Attribution, meaning which campaign produced which order and at what cost, is the job the free tools do least well.

For a store that needs attribution and session recordings at a published price, Arktis is the clear winner. It captures ad click identifiers on landing, matches Shopify orders and Stripe customers back to the visitor, counts conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform from matched orders next to the Meta spend it syncs per campaign, compares first-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay and position-based credit per ad platform, and lets you watch the session recordings of visitors who converted, filtered by source. Starter is $49 a month, Growth $149 with recordings, Scale $349, and Growth has a 7-day free trial. The attribution specialists below either keep paid prices off their own websites or start at $1,500 a month.

Key takeaways

Start with what you already have: Shopify Analytics comes with every Shopify plan, GA4 is free, and Clarity is free, recording up to 100,000 sessions per project a day, so traffic, conversion and behaviour are covered before you spend anything. Note that Shopify changed how it counts sessions on 21 September 2026, so session-based metrics before and after that date are not comparable. Attribution is where you pay: Triple Whale and Polar price by revenue and neither publishes a price on its own site, Northbeam starts at $1,500 a month, and Arktis publishes $49 to $349 a month with recordings included from Growth.

What ecommerce analytics covers

Traffic analytics answers where visitors come from: channels, campaigns, referrers, landing pages. Every tool here does some of it, and a disciplined UTM habit matters more than which tool reads the tags.

Conversion analytics answers what share of visitors buy and where the rest drop out: add-to-cart rate, checkout starts, checkout completion. Store platforms are strongest here because they own the checkout.

Attribution answers which marketing produced which order, and at what cost. It needs the ad click captured on landing, the order matched back to that visitor, and spend matched to the same campaign. It is the job that decides where next month's budget goes, and the one the free tools handle least well.

Behaviour analytics answers why: session recordings, heatmaps, rage clicks. It turns a drop-off figure into something a designer can fix.

Product analytics, in the e-commerce sense, answers which products are viewed, added and bought, and which ones attract attention without converting. Retention analytics answers whether customers come back: repeat purchase rate, cohorts and lifetime value.

The 7 ecommerce analytics tools compared

1. Arktis, the winner for attribution plus recordings

Arktis is an attribution and user journey platform built for online stores. The tracker captures click identifiers on landing, including gclid, gbraid and wbraid for Google, fbclid for Meta, msclkid for Microsoft, ttclid for TikTok and li_fat_id for LinkedIn, plus UTM parameters, and holds them against the visitor across sessions. Shopify orders arrive through Shopify's order webhook and are matched to a visitor on email, where the visitor has been identified, or on the UTM tags in the landing URL against a session from the previous 24 hours, and Stripe customers through a four-pass waterfall. It counts conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform from matched orders, next to the Meta spend it syncs per campaign, and compares first-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay and position-based credit per ad platform for visits that carried an ad click identifier, so you can see how much each answer depends on the model. It also has an AI referrer report counting sessions and conversions from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude and Gemini.

Session recordings come with Growth and above, with capture buffered in the browser and discarded unless the visitor gives consent, and data is hosted in the EU by default. Starter is $49 a month for up to 50,000 monthly tracked visitors, Growth $149 for up to 250,000, Scale $349 for unlimited visitors with API access and raw export.

2. Shopify Analytics, the reporting you already have

Shopify Analytics is included on every Shopify plan and is the source of truth for orders, sales and customers, because the checkout is Shopify's. Its marketing reports offer five attribution models, last non-direct click, last click, first click, any click and linear, with last click selected by default when a report combines sales with a marketing dimension.

On 21 September 2026 Shopify changed how sessions are counted, focusing the default view on human visitors where its human-or-bot filter is available and classifying bot traffic more consistently. Sessions, conversion rate, add-to-cart rate, checkout rates, bounce rate and online store visitors may all look different, while orders, sales and customer counts are unchanged. Shopify's own advice is to treat 21 September 2026 as a new baseline for session-based metrics. Session replay is not built in; the Shopify App Store has a whole category of third-party apps for it. Shopify analytics beyond the default dashboard covers how to get more from it.

3. Google Analytics 4, free and broad

Google describes Google Analytics as free of charge, and it remains the default for traffic and behaviour reporting. Standard properties keep event data for up to 14 months, against up to 50 months on the paid Analytics 360, which requires a contract. For attribution the limitation is structural: first click, linear, time decay and position-based models were removed in November 2023, leaving data-driven attribution and two last-click models. Our Google Analytics alternatives guide documents the free-tier limits in detail.

4. Triple Whale, attribution with an AI operator

Triple Whale positions itself as an AI operating system for e-commerce, with Moby, its AI assistant, answering questions on every plan and acting on ad accounts from the Automate tier. The Free plan includes the Triple Pixel with first-click and last-click attribution, ten users and twelve months of data. Foundation adds multi-touch attribution with all models, dashboards and a SQL editor. Enterprise adds Compass, which combines multi-touch attribution with marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing.

On 24 September 2026, triplewhale.com showed no prices for paid plans, only "Book a walkthrough", and its FAQ says prices depend on annual GMV and the package, with paid plans on 12-month subscriptions. Its Shopify App Store listing showed Foundation at $219 a month and Automate at $749 a month. Session recordings are not among the features on its pricing page. More detail is in Triple Whale pricing.

5. Northbeam, for large ad budgets

Northbeam sells first-party multi-touch attribution to brands with serious ad spend, with plans matched to annual marketing budget. Starter, for brands spending under $1.5 million a year on ads, is listed at $1,500 and is sold month to month on usage-based pricing for Shopify brands. Professional is from $3,500 a month on an annual term and adds non-Shopify platforms. Growth and Enterprise are quoted, and Enterprise can add MMM+ and incrementality. Northbeam says the final price is sized by pageview volume. See Northbeam pricing for the full breakdown.

6. Polar Analytics, for business intelligence

Polar is a data platform first: every plan includes a dedicated Snowflake database, an e-commerce semantic layer, a first-party pixel, unlimited users and unlimited historical data. Its Business Intelligence product includes multi-touch attribution, a dashboard library and custom reporting, and its Custom plan can add incrementality testing with a dedicated data scientist. Polar's own pricing page lists no prices, only demos. Its Shopify App Store listing showed the Core Plan from $750 a month, based on online GMV, with discounts for annual terms.

7. Microsoft Clarity, free behaviour analytics

Clarity gives away session recordings and heatmaps with no paid version, recording up to 100,000 sessions per project a day before it samples. Recordings are kept for 30 days, with favourites and a random sample kept for up to nine months. It can link Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising accounts so that each campaign, identified by its UTM campaign value, sits next to its recordings and heatmaps. That is useful context, but it is not attribution in the order-to-campaign sense: there are no switchable models and no Meta connection. The Microsoft Clarity alternatives guide covers the rest of the behaviour field.

Where Arktis is not the right tool

Arktis has no free plan. If the budget is genuinely zero, Shopify Analytics, GA4 and Clarity together cover traffic, conversion and behaviour for nothing, and that is the right stack until ad spend is large enough for attribution errors to cost real money.

Data retention is short by comparison: 7 days on Starter, 30 on Growth and 90 on Scale, against unlimited on Triple Whale's paid plans and Polar, and 14 months on GA4. If multi-year trend analysis inside the tool matters, Scale's raw data export or a warehouse-first tool such as Polar fits better.

Meta Ads spend syncs through a direct connection, per campaign; spend for Google, TikTok and other platforms is entered manually in the Ads Analytics dashboard per platform and period, which gives customer acquisition cost per platform and one blended ROAS. Arktis does not send events to Meta's Conversions API or Google enhanced conversions; it is a measurement layer that sits alongside them. And it has no experimentation platform, no on-site surveys and no marketing mix modeling, so a brand that needs incrementality tests or marketing mix modeling in the same tool should look at Triple Whale Enterprise, Northbeam or Polar's Custom plan.

How to build the stack

Without meaningful ad spend, run your store platform's reports, GA4 and Clarity, and spend nothing. Once paid acquisition is a real line in the budget, add a tool that ties orders to campaigns with published pricing, and keep Clarity if you want recordings on every visitor. Warehouse-first platforms and enterprise attribution earn their price when a data team will use them daily and ad spend runs to six figures a month.

To see attribution and recordings on your own store, start the 7-day Growth trial, or compare the tiers on the pricing page. For the attribution side in more depth, read ecommerce attribution software, and for the recording side, session replay tools.

Sources

Shopify Changelog: Shopify Analytics session measurement improvements, 21 September 2026

Shopify Help Center: marketing reports, the five attribution models and last click default, accessed 24 September 2026

Google Analytics Help: Analytics 360 and standard property limits, 14 versus 50 months of retention and the 360 contract, accessed 24 September 2026

Google Analytics Help: attribution models, models removed in November 2023, accessed 24 September 2026

Triple Whale pricing page, plans, features and FAQ with no paid prices shown, accessed 24 September 2026

Triple Whale on the Shopify App Store, Foundation $219 and Automate $749 a month, accessed 24 September 2026

Northbeam pricing page, Starter, Professional, contract terms and pageview-based quotes, accessed 24 September 2026

Polar Analytics on the Shopify App Store, Core Plan from $750 a month based on online GMV, accessed 24 September 2026

Microsoft Clarity FAQ, free with no traffic limits and 30-day recording retention, accessed 24 September 2026

Microsoft Clarity: getting started with the advertising dashboard, Google and Microsoft Ads integration via UTM campaign values, accessed 24 September 2026