The oldest question in ecommerce, asked at the one moment the answer is still in the buyer's head. Nine channels, a free-text box on Other, and every answer welded to the order that produced it — so the question is not just where they came from, but what that channel was worth.
This is the wording and the option order a buyer sees. Publish it unchanged, or edit any line before you do.
Five of them are places you can buy attention. Four are places you cannot, and those are the ones nothing else in your stack can see.
TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Google search and YouTube are the channels most stores already have a dashboard for. Naming them explicitly is not redundant — it is the control group. When your ad platform claims forty conversions and eleven buyers say they found you there, the gap is the interesting number, and you only get it by listing the channel you already measure.
The other four are the point. Friend or family, Podcast, News or magazine, Other — word of mouth, a sponsorship read, a press mention, and everything nobody thought to list. None of them sets a UTM. None of them shows up as anything but direct or organic. Before you ask, they are invisible; after you ask, they are a ranked list.
This is a memory, not a measurement, and it is worth being clear about what that costs. People name the touchpoint they remember, which skews toward the most recent and the most recognisable — a buyer who found you through an affiliate blog and then searched your name will often say Google, because searching is the bit they did on purpose. Offering an option also makes it easier to pick; a list of nine will always produce a tidier distribution than reality.
So read it as a ranking, not a ledger. It is reliable about which channels matter and roughly in what order, unreliable about exact percentages, and genuinely excellent at surfacing channels you were not tracking at all. Used that way it answers a question no attribution model can: not which click closed the sale, but which thing made someone want the product.
Publish to the Thank You page and the Order Status page and you get both moments — the one right after payment, when attention is highest, and the one a few days later when they come back to check tracking. Same question, one survey, two chances to be answered.
If your category cannot buy ads at all, this is not the template you want: five of its nine options are channels closed to you. There is a community version built on Reddit, forums, Discord, creators and affiliates instead, with a follow-up on every option that has a name. And if you would rather ask how the order went than where it came from, start with CSAT or NPS. The rest of the template library is here, and every template is on every plan.
Shopify reports the last click it can see — the referrer or UTM on the session that converted. That is a different fact from the one this question asks. A buyer who saw a TikTok in March, searched your name in September and bought shows up in Shopify as organic search, correctly, and tells you Google when you ask. Neither number is wrong; only one of them tells you where the demand came from.
Other opens an optional free-text box, so the answer is a sentence rather than a dead end. That box is the part worth reading often — a channel you never listed turning up twelve times in Other is the signal to add it as a real option, which you can do by editing the published survey.
Rarely. Every extra option is another line to read before tapping, and a long list pushes people toward whichever answer they see first. Nine covers most stores; if a tenth keeps appearing in the Other box, swap it in for an option nobody ever picks rather than growing the list.
Yes, because the answer is stored against the Shopify order rather than a browser session. Every response carries the order behind it, so the same question that tells you thirty people came from a podcast also tells you what those thirty orders were worth — which is the comparison a click-based tool cannot make.
No. It renders as optional, and it should stay that way — a survey that blocks the Thank You page is a survey people learn to resent. Buyers who skip it are simply not counted in the breakdown.
toldby is live on the Shopify App Store. Install free, publish this question, and have a ranked list of channels by the end of the week.
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