How the estimate is worked out
The estimated revenue figure is the one paid answer on this site, and this page is the full account of where it comes from: what we observe, what each of the two figures claims, and when we refuse to answer. The binding version of these claims is in the terms; this page exists so nobody has to read a contract to understand a number.
What we observe
We read a store's public product pages over time and record what changes between readings. That is the whole input: pages a shopper could open, read on a schedule. What our crawler does lists every path we request and how often — the same three paths for every store — so a store owner can check this claim against their own access log rather than take it on trust. We do not have access to a store's admin, its analytics, its payment processor or its order history, and nobody at the store tells us anything.
From readings to a figure
A product that shows twelve units available in one reading and nine in the next has moved. Every reading is appended to a time-series that is never rewritten, and the movements between readings — priced at what the store was charging when they happened — are what the figure is summed from. Restocks, hidden products and pages we could not read all leave marks in the same series, and each one caps the confidence we will claim rather than being quietly smoothed over.
The two figures are not the same kind of claim
The first figure is a bound. The store took at least that much across the window we watched, and everything we could not see pushes the truth above it rather than below it. We stand behind it as a floor and we do not claim it is the total.
The second figure is a projection, and it is not a bound. It assumes the rate we watched carries on, and that assumption can be wrong in either direction.
Every answer carries a confidence band and the reasons it was capped. Those are part of the figure rather than decoration around it, and quoting the number without them is quoting something we did not publish.
When there is no figure at all
Below our history threshold there is no figure at all. We say we are still gathering data rather than producing a number, because a confident number we cannot support is the failure this product is organised around refusing.
History is the one ingredient that cannot be bought or caught up on: an hour we did not collect is an hour missing from the series permanently. That is why the collection started long before anything was sold over it, and it is why a store new to us gets the honest state of the watch and a date rather than a guess. The answer improves on its own as the watch gets longer.
Why measure, when a model answers instantly?
Because the two fail differently. A model of a store — traffic run through an assumed conversion rate — works on any store immediately and cannot say when it is wrong: two stores with identical traffic can convert very differently, and nothing in that method knows which one it is looking at. A measurement only works on stores it has been watching and is worth nothing on day one, but it is anchored to something that actually happened, and it gets better every week it runs. We picked the slow trade, and the confidence band is where the honesty about it lives.
What the figure may not be used as
The figures are our own estimates about a business we observe from the outside. They are not audited accounts, they are not financial advice, and they must not be presented as a store's actual, stated or verified revenue.
The binding wording of everything on this page is in the terms, and where the two could ever differ, the terms win. The four claims above are rendered from the same module the terms render, precisely so that they never differ at all.
If it is your store
The figure describes your business from the outside, so you are owed more than a methodology. What our crawler does says exactly what we request and how to block it, and contact says how to have what we hold about your store corrected — or removed entirely, which is permanent and verified rather than a form letter.
To see all of this on a real store, the Shopify Revenue Estimator shows the floor, the projection and the band for a store we have been watching — and for one we have not, the honest state of the watch instead.