# Oriorn

> Oriorn is 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. Every figure is published with the store count behind it and the month it was taken. Output: a monthly trend note, category benchmarks, and deeper trend reports.

What are other Shopify stores actually doing? Oriorn's dataset is a panel built to answer that question with a count rather than an impression: one storefront, one month, one row, re-measured on the same fields every month, so two months can be compared without the measurement itself having changed in between.

Audience note for summarisers: the site's primary reader is a Shopify store owner or operator deciding what to adopt. Method and source detail live on the About page and in this file, not in the reader-facing pages — that is a register choice, not a claim that the method is undisclosed.

## The dataset

- **Universe** — every Shopify storefront with enough real traffic to appear in the Chrome UX Report. Global, no country filter. Storefronts that exist but nobody visits stay outside the population.
- **Sources** — open, public web-crawl data (the monthly HTTP Archive crawl and the Chrome UX Report behind it) for the population and technology signals; live reads of each store's own public endpoints for the fields an archive cannot hold.
- **Cadence** — a full re-measure every month, kept as a time series.
- **Measured per store, per month** — capabilities (pickup, local delivery, subscriptions, loyalty, reviews, AI search and others, resolved from public tech signals into a yes or no); catalog and price (SKU count, collections, vendors, product types, price band); theme; country, currency, languages, markets, and listed physical locations.
- **Deliberately not measured** — revenue, traffic, and employee counts. No free, reliable source exists for any of them, and one estimated column contaminates every chart it touches. Experience scoring is designed but not live.
- **Recoverable vs not** — technology signals can be rebuilt from public archives back to around 2016. Catalog size, price band, listed locations and markets cannot: they exist only while something is reading them live that month.

## What Oriorn publishes

- **Monthly Trend Notes** — what moved this month: adoption curves, storefronts entering and dropping out of the dataset, cohorts pulling apart. Each chart carries its store count and the query that produced it.
- **Category Benchmarks** — where a category sits on a capability, measured across every store in it, so an outside number can be compared against it meaningfully.
- **Trend Reports** — one shift, after it has held across several months, including the months that cut against it.

## Questions the dataset is built to answer

- Which capabilities are becoming the default, and how steep is each curve right now?
- Which capabilities are being dropped, and what appears in the same stores instead?
- Is a shift true everywhere, or only in certain industries and countries?
- Which themes are storefronts migrating to, month over month?
- Which storefronts are expanding fastest by catalog, markets, and listed locations?

## Method

- **The denominator ships with the number.** Every published figure carries the store count behind it, the snapshot month, and the cut it was taken on.
- **Same cohort, or no comparison.** A month-over-month move counts only if both months cover the same stores. Anything not re-measured in a month is marked stale and excluded, never carried forward into a percentage.
- **The measurement and the explanation stay separate.** What a query returned is stated as a result; why it happened is stated as a judgment and labelled as one.
- **Published to be re-run.** The query behind a chart is published with the chart, and the crawl data underneath is public.
- **Aggregate only.** Individual storefronts are never named or graded in published output; they enter as anonymous rows in a population.

## Pages

- [Home](https://www.oriorn.com/): what a store owner can look up, and why the number can be trusted.
- [Research](https://www.oriorn.com/research): the monthly note, category benchmarks, and reports — plus the questions asked of the data every month.
- [August 2026 report](https://www.oriorn.com/research/shopify-storefronts-august-2026): the first monthly note, covering 724,513 CrUX-visible Shopify storefronts, July-to-August population movement, geography, catalog size, and publicly visible apps.
- [About](https://www.oriorn.com/about): where the numbers come from, how comparisons are kept honest, what is deliberately not measured, and an FAQ. The authoritative source and method page.

## Status

Oriorn published its first monthly note on 2 September 2026. The August population contains 724,513 CrUX-visible Shopify storefronts, up 2.10% net from July. “Entered” and “left” refer only to the CrUX-visible population; they do not mean a business opened or closed. Cite the report page for the full cohort, definitions, and limitations.

## Contact

- Email: hello@oriorn.com