Questions merchants ask us

No. The core script is about 10 KB with zero dependencies, loads deferred, and hydrates sections lazily as they scroll into view. Feature add-ons (Shop the Look, recommendations, the variant picker, the carousel) load only when that feature is actually enabled — merchants who don’t use them ship zero extra bytes. Images lazy-load by default with an “above the fold” eager option.

Hotspot Studio is a standard Online Store 2.0 app block — it works with any OS 2.0 theme, from Dawn to Horizon to premium third-party themes. The cart drawer opens out of the box on Dawn- and Horizon-family themes and on Broadcast and Palo Alto, custom themes get their cart refreshed, and event and selector fallbacks cover everything else. Nothing is injected into your theme code, and uninstalling leaves no trace.

Yes. Paste a section’s embed snippet into the builder’s code element — HTML/Liquid in PageFly, Custom Code in GemPages, Code in EComposer — and publish the page. PageFly and GemPages also take our app block through their own elements — App blocks in PageFly, Shopify App in GemPages — with the theme editor. We tested all three on published pages, popups and add to cart included. Step-by-step guides: PageFly, GemPages, EComposer.

Yes — every image slot has separate desktop and mobile media (image or video), and every hotspot has independent coordinates per device, so dots sit exactly on the product in both crops. You can also hide captions or navigation on phones and set per-device marker sizes.

Yes — every image slot has a built-in crop & rotate editor: draw a crop box (free-form or fixed ratios: 1:1, 4:5, 3:2, 16:9) or turn the photo 90°. The result is saved as a new file — your original stays untouched in your store files — and all hotspots on the image are repositioned automatically to match the crop.

Yes, on Starter and up. Build the look as a section with the Single layout and publish it, then add it to any gallery from its In galleries card, or from inside a gallery with Add linked image. Each gallery shows a linked copy: edit the original, publish, and every gallery that shows it updates. A copy can be unlinked when one gallery needs its own version. Step by step: the linked images guide.

Product pages get them automatically via assignments (specific products, specific variants, or whole collections), and you can assign a section to specific pages, blog posts or the home page (one checkbox) too — so two pages sharing one template each carry their own. One page can show several sections, each in its own block, and one checkbox puts a section on every page that uses a template. Anywhere else — a landing page, a custom template — takes the app block plus a one-click Experience ID, or a copy-paste snippet right in the content of a page or blog post. You can even map different variants of the same product to different experiences.

Yes. Buttons, Shop the Look and the other texts shoppers see come in your store’s language, and switch when a shopper picks another one, with 12 languages built in. Product names, descriptions, options and links follow along. Anything you type yourself shows exactly as written, unless you give it your own wording for a language with the translate button in its field.

Yes. The app creates genuine Shopify automatic discounts applied at checkout by a discount function, scoped so they only apply to items added from your section. Shoppers see honest struck-through prices, and you control how deals stack with your other discounts.

No. Analytics are anonymous and aggregate — no cookies, no identifiers, no cross-site tracking. Revenue attribution works through order line-item properties, not shopper profiling. Events sent to your own Google Analytics or Tag Manager follow the choice a shopper makes in Shopify’s cookie banner.

Yes, on every plan, and it’s on by default. If Google Analytics 4 or Google Tag Manager is installed in your theme, your sections send it hotspot_section_view, hotspot_click, hotspot_product_click and hotspot_add_to_cart, each with the section’s Experience ID and the product as a GA4 item. In GA4 they show up in the real-time report within a minute; in Tag Manager, trigger on these event names and read the data layer variable hotspot_studio. A shopper’s refusal in Shopify’s cookie banner is respected, and one switch in the app’s Settings turns it off, for example on a development store. With GA4 connected only through the Google & YouTube app, adds to cart from your sections already count there as add_to_cart.

Yes — the storefront fires public JavaScript events when a popup opens and after every add to cart, and exposes a re-render hook for AJAX and quick-view setups. The in-app developer guide has copy-paste recipes for driving a custom cart drawer and enriching popups with your own data; Google Analytics and Tag Manager events need no code at all.

The app blocks stop rendering immediately, app-created discounts are removed, and your data is deleted in line with our privacy policy and Shopify’s GDPR requirements.

Email lands directly with the developer — no ticket wall. Growth-plan merchants get priority handling, and their feature requests genuinely shape what gets built next.

It suggests them. AI reads your photo, matches products from your catalog and proposes pins and captions — you review and approve every pin before anything is saved.

The image you choose, plus product titles, product types and store tags from your catalog, small images of candidate products, your store’s language and any catalog notes you add, sent to the Anthropic Claude API (caption drafts also include where your hotspots sit); and your product titles and types, a short description of each item found in the photo, your catalog notes, cropped regions of that image and your product images, sent to Voyage AI to match them. Both are used solely to generate suggestions — never to train AI models — and are not retained.

Development stores get every paid plan free with test billing, so the AI allowance there is capped at the Free tier’s 10/month to keep real processing costs sane. The cap lifts on a real, non-development store.