How to make a fake Shopify dashboard for a video

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First, the line you don’t cross

A fake store dashboard in a skit, a parody or a product mockup is creative work — the same as a prop cheque in a film. The identical screen shown to someone as your real sales, to sell a course, a dropshipping method or a mentorship, or to get anyone to invest, is fraud, and it stays fraud whichever tool drew it. This guide is about the first kind. Our acceptable use policy covers the rest.

What you need

• The phone you’ll film with. On iPhone you’ll need Safari to install the app; on Android, Chrome.
• About ten minutes.
• Pozer’s Shopify-style store dashboard. Building and installing it is free. The free version carries a SIMULATED · POZER.COM mark on screen, and Pro removes it.

Step 1: Open the template

Open the store dashboard in the editor. A live preview of the phone sits beside the fields (on a phone it stays pinned above them), so every change shows up as you type, and the preview works like the app, so you can tap between its screens as you go. The fields fold into sections, starting with Quick setup: the app’s name, the store’s name and logo, the day’s total sales and orders, and the currency.

You don’t start from an empty store. The Start from chips at the top load a whole one in a tap: Streetwear, Skincare, Sneakers or Home, each with its own name, logo, products with photos and recent orders. The defaults are the streetwear store, Vantle Supply. Change anything after.

Home, the screen the app opens on, starts with a black header: a round avatar, your store’s logo and name in the middle, and a bell with a notification count. Under it runs a row of figures you swipe sideways: Live visitors, then total sales, orders, conversion rate, sessions and average order value, each with its change against yesterday. Tap one and the chart beneath draws it, with yesterday dotted behind. A Today pill picks the period and View report opens the full report. Then a white sheet: a greeting, cards for the next payout, orders to fulfill and payments to capture, a suggestion from Scout, the store’s assistant, and a couple of tips. A floating bar along the bottom moves between Home, Orders, Products and Menu, with search on its left and the assistant on its right.

Name it and add your own icon

Pozer doesn’t include any brand logos. Give the app a name and upload your own icon: a logo you made for your fictional store, or artwork you have the rights to use. Skip it and the editor makes a simple letter tile from the name. Whatever you upload is your responsibility, and using another company’s logo is against our acceptable use policy.

Set the name and icon before you install. They’re fixed on your home screen at the moment you add the app, so changing them later means deleting it from the home screen and adding it again.

The header inside the app is separate. Store logo puts your own artwork beside the store name (the starter stores come with logos of their own); leave it empty and the store’s initials stand in on a green tile. Your initials fill the avatar, or leave them blank for a person icon, and Unread notifications sets the red count on the bell. 0 hides it.

Step 2: Decide what the day looks like

Before touching a number, decide the story. A launch-day spike, a quiet Tuesday and a store that’s been growing steadily for a year are three different dashboards, and a viewer reads the whole screen — the chart, the change beside each figure, the orders a tap away — not just the big figure. Pick one, and make every field serve it.

Step 3: Make sales, orders and sessions tell one story

You type three numbers — total sales, orders and sessions. The dashboard works out the other two rather than letting you type them, so they can never contradict the screen they sit on:

Average order value = Total sales ÷ Total orders
Conversion rate = Total orders ÷ Sessions

That kills the arithmetic mistake, but not the judgement one. Change only the total sales to $9,000 and the average order value recalculates to $333.33: perfectly consistent, and completely wrong for a store whose orders are a $34 cap and a $135 pair of sneakers. Most viewers won’t be able to say what’s wrong, but the screen will feel wrong. The defaults hold together: 27 orders at an average of $105.41 make $2,846.17.

So when the scene needs bigger sales, move the orders with it. Raising sales alone raises the average order value, and the orders on the Orders tab have to look like they could add up to it.

Set the three changes together

Each figure on Home carries its change against yesterday. You type three of them (Total sales vs yesterday, Orders vs yesterday and Sessions vs yesterday) and the other two follow: conversion rate from orders and sessions, average order value from sales and orders. The defaults, 18.4%, 14.2% and 9.6%, put conversion up 4.2% and average order value up 3.7%, and the row prints them rounded: +18%, +14%, +4%, +10% and +4%. Raise only the sales change and the average order value climbs with it, which says every customer suddenly spent more; move the three together unless that’s the story.

Keep conversion believable

The same applies to sessions. Conversion rate is orders divided by sessions, so typing too few sessions quietly pushes the rate up: 27 orders against 1,108 sessions reads 2.4%, but against 190 it reads 14.2%. Most online stores convert a low single-digit percentage of their visitors, so a conversion rate in double digits is one of the quickest ways to make a dashboard look invented.

And the live-visitor count

Live, at the start of the row, is how many people are on the store right now, not the day’s sessions. The editor’s rule of thumb is about sessions ÷ 300, so the default store, with 1,108 sessions, shows 3. A busy moment can run higher and the middle of the night lower. Match it to the time your scene is set.

Step 4: Shape the sales curve

The chart draws whichever figure is selected, total sales to start with, with yesterday dotted behind it. The twelve Sales by hour bars in the editor set the shape of the day: the day’s orders are placed along it, and each hour’s sales come from the orders placed in it, so the chart and the Orders tab tell the same day. Real days have a shape: almost nothing overnight, a lift through the morning, a bump at lunch, a sag in the afternoon and a peak in the evening that falls away before midnight. The default is drawn that way, which reads as an ordinary good day. A launch or a post that went viral looks different: one spike towering over the rest. Whichever you pick, keep it consistent with the story from step 2.

On Today the line stops at the phone’s current hour, because the rest of the day hasn’t happened. A scene about a 9 PM spike has to be filmed after 9 PM, or switched to Yesterday, which draws the whole day. The two below are shown on Yesterday for that reason.

Vantle Supply

3

Live

3

Total sales

$2,404+7%

Orders

24+6%

Conversion rate

2.4%+2%

Sessions

1,011+4%

Average order value

$100.16+2%

$0$100$200$200

12:00 AM10:00 AM8:00 PM

YesterdayView report

Good afternoon! Here’s your activity

Payouts in 2 days

$2,326.95

Fulfill orders

14

Capture payments

2

Scout Insights

Restock before it sells out

Cloud Low Sneaker in US 12 has 2 left. You sold 8 in the last 7 days, so it could be gone in about 2 days.

Create purchase order

Buy labels faster with preferred carriers

Save time by customizing your carrier services list.

Manage preferred carriers

Make products interactive with 3D models

Let customers see products in their own space.

Learn more

An ordinary good day. Quiet overnight, busier through the day, a peak in the evening.

Vantle Supply

3

Live

3

Total sales

$2,404+7%

Orders

24+6%

Conversion rate

2.4%+2%

Sessions

1,011+4%

Average order value

$100.16+2%

$0$200$400$400

12:00 AM10:00 AM8:00 PM

YesterdayView report

Good afternoon! Here’s your activity

Payouts in 2 days

$2,326.95

Fulfill orders

14

Capture payments

2

Scout Insights

Restock before it sells out

Cloud Low Sneaker in US 12 has 2 left. You sold 8 in the last 7 days, so it could be gone in about 2 days.

Create purchase order

Buy labels faster with preferred carriers

Save time by customizing your carrier services list.

Manage preferred carriers

Make products interactive with 3D models

Let customers see products in their own space.

Learn more

A post that took off at night. Almost flat until late afternoon, then a climb to a spike around 9 PM.

Step 5: Write orders that fit

The Orders tab is where fake dashboards get lazy. Each order you type has a customer, its items, a total, a time and a status, and each one should make sense on its own: a $312 order for a single T-shirt gives the game away. Write the items as product titles, with ×2 for two and a comma between them, and the order’s page shows each with its photo and its price from the Products tab; whatever the total adds above the items becomes shipping and tax, and a total below them shows as a discount. The defaults do it right: Maya Okafor’s hoodie at $88 and cap at $34 come to $122.00, which ships free over $100, and 8% sales tax makes the $131.76 total.

You type up to ten, and the app fills the rest of the list with older orders from your own products. When the day is small enough to list in full, Today holds exactly the day’s order count and those orders add up to the total sales at the top, so a viewer who scrolls and adds them gets the same figure. That only works if the orders you type look like the store’s average rather than several times it: the defaults run $80.39 to $145.80 against a $105.41 average. Keep the times in order too. Relative times like 6m ago and 2h ago are worked out from the phone’s clock, so they read as recent whenever you film; Today at 9:41 PM stays as written.

Each order’s status shows as two badges: Unfulfilled or Fulfilled, and Paid, Authorized or Refunded. The list keeps itself in step with Home: the older orders it adds stay unfulfilled or authorized until they match the Fulfill orders and Capture payments cards, and one order from an earlier day is refunded, because a store with only good news is the one nobody believes. Set Orders to fulfill and Payments to capture to at least the number of unfulfilled and authorized orders you typed.

Products works the same way. Each one has a title, a photo, a price, a status (Active, Draft or Archived), an option such as Size with its variants and their stock, and a category. Without a photo, a tile in its colour stands in. A product at 0 available shows in red, and a sold-out variant adds (some out of stock), which suits a sell-out story and gives any other away. Scout reads the stock too: a variant down to its last few becomes the restock suggestion on Home.

Step 6: Publish it and put it on your phone

Publish from the editor, then open your app’s link on the phone you’ll film with.

iPhone

1. Open the link in Safari. It has to be Safari — Chrome and the browsers inside Instagram or TikTok won’t install it properly.
2. Tap Share.
3. Tap Add to Home Screen.

Android

1. Open the link in Chrome.
2. Tap the ⋮ menu.
3. Tap Install app.

It then opens from your home screen fullscreen, with your icon and no address bar.

Step 7: Film it

• Turn on Do Not Disturb. A real notification sliding down mid-take breaks the illusion, and it can show something private.
• Turn the brightness up and angle the phone away from windows and lamps so the glass doesn’t flare. Wipe the screen — close-ups show every fingerprint.
• Open it from the home screen, not a browser tab, so there’s no address bar to crop out.
• Move around the app. Tap Orders and open an order, swipe the row of figures and tap one to chart it, or tap Live for Live View, whose green dot pulses on its own and helps a still shot feel live.
• Switch the period on camera. Tap the Today pill and pick Last 7 days or Last 30 days, and the figures, their changes and the chart all move to that range: a good beat to shoot, and a good reason to check the weekly and monthly figures look sane before you roll. The defaults come to $18,215 over 7 days and $74,854 over 30.
• Fulfill an order on camera. Open an unfulfilled order and tap Fulfill items, then Fulfill items again on the sheet with the carrier and tracking number: the order switches to Fulfilled and the Fulfill orders card on Home counts down by one. Both last until the app is closed, so every take starts from the same place.
• Change numbers between takes from the phone. In the installed app your Edit button stays hidden while you film; hold two fingers still on the screen and it appears for five seconds. If the installed app doesn’t know it’s yours yet — on iPhone it keeps its own sign-in, apart from Safari’s — the same hold asks you to sign in once instead.

Mistakes that give a fake dashboard away

1. An average order value that doesn’t fit what the store sells.
2. Round numbers. Real sales have cents; $50,000.00 on the nose looks typed.
3. A conversion rate in double digits — that means too few sessions for the orders.
4. Orders that don’t fit their item, the product’s price or the average.
5. Changes that disagree: sales up far more than orders means every customer suddenly spent more.
6. A chart that doesn’t match the story.
7. A currency that doesn’t match where the store is supposed to be.
8. A notification or a low-battery warning sliding in mid-shot.
9. A screenshot held up to the lens: nothing scrolls, nothing responds, and the glare is wrong.

Why film an app instead of a screenshot

A screenshot is a picture of a phone. The moment the camera moves, a thumb touches the glass or someone tries to scroll, a still image behaves like a still image. An installed app behaves like an app: it opens from the home screen, its tabs switch, and it responds to a tap. That’s why a prop that works for a thumbnail often doesn’t survive a video.