You always get the count
How many stores the number came out of, which month they were counted, and which slice it covers. A percentage missing those three does not get published.
About Oriorn
Where these numbers come from.
Oriorn is an independent research project on what Shopify stores are actually doing. Everything published comes out of the same monthly count — including the months where not much happened.
How it works
Once a month, every Shopify store with real traffic gets counted again on the same set of things. What changed between one month and the next is the research — everything published starts there.
Miles runs it. The count comes first and the explanation second, and one piece of analysis becomes a chart, a written note, and a video — the same evidence in three formats, not three different stories.
What you can expect
Four rules the numbers follow.
Every store counts, not just the interesting ones
The quiet categories and the flat months go into the number too. Leave those out and you are not measuring a market, you are picking examples.
The count and the opinion stay apart
What the data says is one kind of sentence. Why it probably happened is another, and it is marked as a judgment — so you can take the first and disagree with the second.
You can check it yourself
The query behind a chart is published with the chart, and the crawl data underneath is public. Ask the same question of the same data and you should get the same answer.
Where this goes
What gets published, and when.
Narrow on purpose: get the monthly picture right before adding anything to it.
- 2026
Get the count running
Close the first full month, then keep counting and publishing every month without skipping one.
- 2027
Benchmarks worth comparing to
Enough months behind each number that your own store has something real to sit next to.
- Beyond
An open index
A public, versioned view of how Shopify retail is changing, updated on a fixed schedule.
FAQ
Questions we get asked.
- What is Oriorn?
- An independent research project that counts what Shopify stores are actually doing — every store with real traffic, worldwide, counted again every month — and publishes what changed. The output is a monthly note, benchmarks by category, and deeper reports on shifts that last.
- Where does the data come from?
- Two places. Open, public web-crawl data — the monthly HTTP Archive crawl and the Chrome UX Report behind it — gives the list of live stores and what each one is built with. Then each store's own public pages are read directly for the things a crawl archive never stored: how many products it carries, what it charges, which currencies and countries it sells in, and how many locations it lists.
- What counts as a store with "real traffic"?
- A storefront with enough real visitors to appear in the Chrome UX Report, which is Google's public record of pages people actually load. Stores that exist but nobody visits stay out — a shop no one shops at still moves a percentage. Every published number says which cut it was taken on.
- How do you stop a number from drifting month to month?
- Two rules. A month-over-month comparison only uses stores that were successfully counted in both months — the same cohort, in other words. And a store that could not be reached in a given month is marked stale and left out of that comparison, never filled in with the previous month's value. Without those two, a change in who got measured looks exactly like a change in the market.
- What is deliberately not measured?
- Revenue, traffic, and employee counts. There is no free, reliable source for any of them, and one estimated column quietly contaminates every chart it touches. Quality scoring of search, checkout and navigation is designed but not running yet.
- Can I check a number myself?
- That is the point. Each chart is published with the query behind it, the store count, and the month it was taken, and the crawl data underneath is public and free. Same question, same data, same answer.
- Has anything been published yet?
- Not yet. The first full monthly count is closing now and the first report follows it. Email hello@oriorn.com and it goes to you the day it is out.
- Can I ask about a specific trend?
- Yes — email hello@oriorn.com. This is an early project, so replies take a while, but every message gets read.