Overview

ProofNudge adds real-time social proof messages to your Shopify product pages. These messages show real data from your store — live visitor counts, purchase notifications, cart activity, low stock alerts, and best seller rankings — to help shoppers feel confident in their purchase decisions.

Here's what happens technically: when you install ProofNudge, it adds a theme embed (a small script) and a web pixel to your store. The theme embed reads product context from the page and requests messages from our edge servers. The web pixel tracks anonymous page views, cart additions, and purchases in the background. All of this data is aggregated and used to populate your message templates in real time.

No customer PII is ever collected. ProofNudge tracks anonymous events only — page views, cart actions, and purchase counts tied to product IDs.

Step-by-step setup

Install from the Shopify App Store

Find ProofNudge on the Shopify App Store and click "Add app." Approve the required permissions. ProofNudge needs read access to products, orders, and your Online Store to function. Your 14-day free trial starts automatically — no credit card needed.

Enable the theme embed

After installing, go to your Shopify theme editor (Online Store > Themes > Customize). In the left sidebar under "App embeds," find ProofNudge and toggle it on. Click Save. This adds the ProofNudge initialization script to your storefront — it's lightweight (under 8KB) and loads asynchronously, so it won't slow down your pages.

Create your first campaign

Open the ProofNudge app from your Shopify admin. Click "Create campaign." Give it a name (e.g., "Product page social proof") and choose your targeting: all products, specific products, collections, or tags. Campaigns are containers that group related messages together.

Add messages

Inside your campaign, click "Add message." Type your message template using variables like {{viewer_count_current}} or {{order_count_pastweek}}. For example: "{{viewer_count_current}} people viewing this right now" or "Purchased {{order_count_pastweek}} times this week." You can browse all available variables from the variable picker.

Optionally add conditions: show the message only when a variable meets a threshold. For example, only show the viewer count message when viewer_count_current > 5.

Choose placement and styling

Select where the message appears: as a theme block (inserted via theme editor), a CSS selector (injected at a specific element), or a product image overlay. Configure positioning for desktop and mobile separately. Style the message with your preferred colors, fonts, padding, border radius, and animation.

Preview and publish

Use the preview button to see how your message looks on a live product page. When you're happy, toggle the campaign to "Active." Messages will begin appearing on your storefront immediately, populated with real data from your store.

What happens next

Once your campaign is live, ProofNudge begins tracking events and populating messages automatically. Here's what to expect:

  • Viewer counts update in real time — within seconds of a new visitor arriving on the page.
  • Cart and purchase counts begin populating immediately from new events. Historical data builds over the first few hours and days.
  • Collection rankings are calculated automatically based on sales data within each collection.
  • Stock levels are read directly from your Shopify product data — no setup required.
ProofNudge only shows real data. If a product has 0 orders this week, the variable {{order_count_pastweek}} will resolve to "0." Use conditional logic to hide messages when counts are below a meaningful threshold.

Next steps