Reported findings highlighted by Search Engine Journal suggest that some e-commerce businesses may be undercounting purchases in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), with one retailer reportedly missing around two-thirds of holiday orders in analytics data. While the example comes from a limited audit rather than a broad market study, it points to a clear operational risk for online retailers entering peak trading periods.

What happened

According to the report, an audit across eight e-commerce brands compared recorded store orders with GA4 purchase data and found material discrepancies in some cases. The most striking example cited was a retailer for which GA4 reportedly captured only a fraction of total holiday orders.

The article points to a practical issue many digital teams already suspect: analytics setups can appear functional while still failing to record a meaningful share of conversions. This can happen for several reasons, including implementation errors, checkout tracking gaps, consent-related data loss, cross-domain problems, tag misfires, duplicated or missing events, or differences between platform and analytics attribution logic.

The source does not establish that GA4 itself universally fails in this way across all businesses. The reported issue is better understood as a warning that real-world implementations may be incomplete or misconfigured.

Why it matters for European businesses

For European e-commerce companies, inaccurate conversion tracking affects more than reporting dashboards. It can distort marketing spend decisions, campaign optimisation, stock planning and revenue forecasting.

If a business relies on GA4 as a primary source of truth, underreported purchases may lead teams to:

• Reduce spend on campaigns that are actually performing well
• Misjudge the return on paid search, paid social or email activity
• Train automated bidding systems on incomplete conversion data
• Make poor merchandising or peak-season forecasting decisions
• Report misleading performance figures internally or to clients

This is particularly important in Europe, where consent choices, cookie restrictions and privacy-led implementation changes often affect analytics collection. Businesses using consent banners, server-side tagging, multiple domains, third-party checkouts or platform integrations may face a higher risk of data gaps if configurations are not regularly audited.

Who may be affected

The issue is most relevant to:

• E-commerce retailers using GA4 as a key performance reporting tool
• Marketing teams managing paid media based on GA4 conversions or imported analytics goals
• Digital agencies responsible for analytics, attribution and campaign reporting
• IT and web teams maintaining checkout flows, tags, consent systems and platform integrations
• Founders and commercial leaders using analytics data for growth planning during seasonal peaks

Businesses running Shopify or other third-party commerce platforms should pay particular attention if the storefront, checkout, payment environment and tracking setup involve multiple tools or handoffs.

What companies should consider

Before peak season, companies should treat conversion tracking validation as a commercial control, not just a technical task.

• Compare platform orders with GA4 purchases: Check whether completed store orders broadly align with recorded purchase events over the same period.
• Audit the full checkout journey: Confirm that tracking continues from product page through basket, checkout and order confirmation.
• Review consent impacts: Understand how your consent setup affects analytics collection, especially in EU markets.
• Check tag deployment: Validate that purchase events fire once, with correct values, transaction IDs and currency data.
• Test cross-domain and third-party flows: If checkout or payment steps occur on different domains or systems, verify session continuity and event capture.
• Cross-check with ad platforms and back-office data: Use store, CRM or finance data to identify whether analytics underreports revenue or orders.
• Avoid single-source reporting: For commercial decisions, combine analytics with platform and order-management data rather than relying only on GA4 dashboards.

For SMEs, the key lesson is practical: if analytics data is feeding campaign optimisation, attribution or board-level reporting, a pre-season audit can prevent budget and forecasting mistakes at the moment when data matters most.