Players who browse without buying still matter a lot

Every store has far more visits than purchases. The visits that end without a transaction are treated as the denominator of a conversion rate and otherwise ignored.

They are the largest body of expressed interest in the game, and almost none of it gets read.

What a browse actually establishes

Opening the store is a deliberate act with a cost — it interrupts play. A player who does it has, at minimum, entertained the idea of spending.

That puts them in a much smaller group than "all players". Most players never open the store at all in a given week. The ones who do have raised their hand, and the fact that they did not buy tells you something about the catalog rather than about their willingness.

This distinction is the whole point. A conversion rate treats non-buyers as an undifferentiated mass of people who did not want to spend. The subset who came to look wanted to spend and did not find the thing.

The three things a browse can tell you

What they looked at. If a player opens a specific item, examines it, and closes it, they were interested in that category and rejected that instance. Aggregated across players, the items that get examined most and bought least are the clearest statement available about where your value proposition is off.

What they looked at repeatedly. A player returning to the same item across multiple visits is deciding. They want it and something is stopping them. If a lot of players do this with the same item, that item is close to right and not quite there — usually on price, sometimes on contents.

What they looked for and did not find. This is the hardest to see and the most valuable. It shows up as browsing that ranges across the catalog without settling, repeated across sessions, from players who are otherwise engaged. That pattern means the thing they want is not there.

The first two are directly measurable with an item-view event. The third requires looking at the shape of a browsing session rather than its contents, which is more work and is where the catalog gaps live.

The visits that follow a purchase

A separate and underused signal is what a player looks at immediately after buying something.

A player who buys and then keeps browsing is still shopping — the purchase did not resolve what brought them in, or it opened up a new want. That is a strong moment and it is generally treated as the end of the funnel.

A player who buys and leaves got what they came for. The transition between these two behaviours, for the same player over time, tracks how well the catalog is serving them.

The same applies in reverse: what a player looked at before buying something tells you what the alternatives were. If everyone who buys one item first examined a different, more expensive one, that more expensive item is doing work as an anchor even though it never sells. Removing it because it does not convert would reduce sales of the thing that does.

See how we read the full store session, not just purchases →

Instrumenting it without much effort

Three events cover nearly all of this and none are expensive.

Store opened, with what the player was doing immediately before. This distinguishes need-driven visits from habitual ones.

Item viewed, with the item and the player's balance at that moment. This is what makes "examined and declined" visible, and the balance tells you whether affordability was the obstacle.

Store closed, with whether anything was purchased. This bounds the session and makes the browse-without-buy pattern countable.

With those three, most of the questions above become a grouping rather than a project. Without them, the store is a black box that reports only its outputs, and the outputs are the smallest part of what happened inside it.

The reframe worth holding is that a store visit is a player asking a question. Purchases are the questions you had an answer for. The rest are the questions you did not, and they are considerably more useful for deciding what to build next.

There is also a signal in players who never open the store at all. In most games that is the majority, and some of them are simply unaware it exists — the entry point is somewhere they do not look, or nothing has ever prompted them toward it. Distinguishing "has never opened the store" from "opens it and declines" separates a discovery problem from a catalog problem, and the two are usually confused because both appear as non-purchasers. The first is fixed with placement and the second is not, and knowing the relative size of each tells you which work is worth doing.

Talk to us about reading store behaviour →