How to create a survey for your Shopify store

Nina De la Cruz Nina De la Cruz 6 min read

Of all tools, surveys are the only surefire way to find out what your customers think about your business.

  • Do they like the new collection?
  • What prevents them from purchasing?
  • Would they recommend your store to a friend?

Luckily, there is an easy way to get answers to all these questions. With Getsitecontrol, a no-code website form builder, you can add surveys to your Shopify store in the form of a modal popup, sticky bar, or a slide-in.


To make sure you collect valuable insights only, you can determine a set of rules for when and where to display your survey.

For example, the survey above is aimed to identify your customers’ objections. The best strategy would be to display it if a customer has been on a product page for too long without moving further down the funnel.

Keep reading if you want to know how to:

How to add a survey to Shopify

Before we get started, you’ll need to install Getsitecontrol on your website. Find Getsitecontrol in the Shopify App Store, then follow the steps from the guide below.

Step 1. Select a survey template

The fastest way to create a survey is by using one of the templates designed for Shopify.

Suppose you want to find out what prevents people from purchasing your new product collection. Instead of creating a survey from scratch, you can use the template featured above! Make a click on it to activate the preview mode; then follow the instructions on the right-hand side of the screen. You’ll be prompted to sign in to Getsitecontrol using your Shopify account.

Once in the dashboard, you’ll be able to customize the content:

How to customize a survey for Shopify in Getsitecontrol

To change the copy, fields, or text on the button, just click on them and proceed with adjustments. Keep in mind that you can change the color theme and font, too: design controls are located under the Theme menu at the top.

Step 2. Decide where and when you want to display the survey

If you’re trying to find out what prevents people from purchasing, there are two ways you can go about it:

  1. You can display the survey if a customer spends too long on any product page without purchasing
  2. You can display the survey in the shopping cart if a customer removes an item

Once you decide which route you want to go, open the Targeting tab 👇

Decide when and where to display your survey using targeting settings

In this tab, you need to set three rules:

  1. Find Include and remove the default value. Then select ‘Product pages’ and ‘Cart’. If you’re running research on a specific product, insert the URL of that product page.

  2. Find Start to display the widget and remove the ‘at once’ condition. Then select either ‘Time on page’ or ‘Inactivity’ and type the number of seconds that makes sense to you. To show a survey right after a customer removes an item from the cart, use the OR operator and add another condition: ‘when the product has been removed from cart.’

  3. Move on to Stop to display the widget and select the desired condition. For instance, you can stop displaying the survey after a customer submits their response or closes the form.

If you save and activate your Shopify survey at this point, it will start displaying under the conditions you’ve selected. To view real-time responses, just keep an eye on the general statistics report right in your Getsitecontrol dashboard.

How to offer a coupon as a survey incentive

Now, if you’ve ever tried to run any survey that requires effort from the respondents, you know that people tend to ignore those.

So, how do you incentivize customers to participate? The answer is simple. You offer coupons.

If you ask an open-ended question or if your survey contains multiple pages, offering an incentive is a good idea.

Coupons help to lower survey abandonment and increase survey response rates.

For example, if you’re running a multi-page demographic survey in your Shopify store, consider providing a discount to entice customers to participate:

In Getsitecontrol, you can manually add a page like this one to any survey form. Just keep in mind that you’ll also need to include the coupon code on the last page. See the example below 👇

Display the coupon code on the last page of your Shopify survey

To add a new page, use the ‘+’ sign at the bottom right corner of your Getsitecontrol dashboard. Then, generate a coupon code in your Shopify account and paste it on the last page of our survey.

Note: you can drag pages and manually change their order.

How to conduct a post-purchase survey

Satisfied customers are more likely to come back next time or recommend your product to others. One easy way to monitor the level of your customers’ satisfaction is by conducting a post-purchase survey. You can email a post-purchase survey to your customers days after the purchase, but you can also display a quick survey right after they have bought from you 👇

Add a post-purchase survey to the ‘Thank you’ or ‘Order status’ pages in your Shopify store to find out:

  • how likely they are to recommend your store to others
  • how happy customers are with their shopping experience
  • what improvements they would like to suggest for your store

To add a survey to these pages, all you need to do is select the corresponding URL presets in the Targeting tab. Once you start receiving responses, you’ll be able to see view them in the Statistics report right in the Getsitecontrol dashboard.

How to create an abandonment survey for Shopify

Right before your customers leave the store, you may want to ask them about their experience – or, most importantly, about the reasons why they are leaving. To do that, you’ll need to create a Shopify exit survey.

Here is how it works: the exit-intent detector, available in Getsitecontrol, recognizes user mouse movements toward the exit button or a different browser tab, and launches a popup right before a customer leaves.

Ecommerce marketers call these surveys abandonment surveys, and this is what they may look like:

Now, here is an idea. Instead of just one, you can create two separate abandonment surveys for your Shopify store:

  • one for those who are leaving without even adding products to their cart
  • and one for those who have added an item to their cart but decided to leave without checking out

To set the correct conditions for either case, you’ll need to use the controls available under the Targeting tab. Here is a quick cheat sheet to help you get started:

  • select target pages: shopping cart, certain pages, or your entire website
  • select whether the shopping cart should contain products or not
  • select the exit intent as a trigger to start displaying the survey form

How to set up audience targeting for a Shopify store abandonment survey in Getsitecontrol

A Shopify survey like this one can help you identify your customers’ objections and the bottlenecks in your marketing funnel. Use it to find out what prevents you from getting more sales.

Use surveys in your Shopify store to collect valuable insights

With Getsitecontrol, you can run sitewide marketing research, survey a selected segment of your audience, or measure customer satisfaction. And with an abundance of survey templates, you won’t need to create anything from scratch. Check out the survey template gallery to see it for yourself!

Nina De la Cruz is a content strategist at Getsitecontrol. She is passionate about helping small and medium ecommerce brands achieve sustainable growth through email marketing.

You’re reading Getsitecontrol usecase collection where we talk about the best practices for using website popups. This usecase is a part of Grow on Shopify section.

Get the print version

Download a PDF version of our use case for easier offline reading and sharing with coworkers.

Download PDF