How to make a fake Shopify dashboard for a video

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. The fields run down the side and a live preview of the phone sits beside them, so every change shows up as you type. From top to bottom the dashboard has the store name and a live-visitor count, revenue today with its change against yesterday, a sales-by-hour chart, a row showing orders, conversion rate and average order value, and a feed of up to six recent orders.

Name it and add your own icon

Pozer doesn’t include any 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.

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 orders, the change against yesterday — not just the big figure. Pick one, and make every field serve it.

Step 3: Make revenue, orders and average order value agree

These are three separate fields, and nothing stops you typing values that contradict each other. It’s the first thing anyone who runs a store checks. The rule is simple:

Revenue ≈ Orders × Average order value

The defaults already agree: $68,420.50 across 1,284 orders is $53.28 an order, exactly the average shown. Now change only the orders to 300 and leave everything else alone. 300 orders at $53.28 comes to about $15,984 — less than a quarter of the revenue on screen. Most viewers won’t be able to say what’s wrong, but the screen will feel wrong.

So change one of the three, then adjust another to match. If the scene needs more revenue, raise the orders or the average order — don’t just type a bigger number into revenue.

Keep conversion believable

Conversion is orders divided by visits. The dashboard doesn’t show visits, but a sharp viewer can work backwards: 1,284 orders at 4.8% conversion means about 26,750 visits that day. 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

The live count is how many people are browsing right now, not today’s total. A store with around 27,000 visits a day might show a few hundred at a busy moment and far fewer in the middle of the night. Match it to the time your scene is set.

Step 4: Shape the sales-by-hour chart

The chart is a row of bars whose heights you set. Real days have a shape: quiet in the early hours, building through the afternoon, strongest in the evening. The default climbs all day, which suits a strong day or a launch. A post that went viral looks different again — one or two bars towering over the rest. Whichever you pick, keep it consistent with the story from step 2.

Step 5: Write orders that fit

The recent-orders feed is where fake dashboards get lazy. Each order has a customer, an item, an amount and a time, and each one should make sense on its own: a $312 order for a single T-shirt gives the game away.

Recent orders are a handful out of hundreds, so they don’t need to average out exactly. But if every order you can see is several times your average order value, the screen stops agreeing with itself. The defaults lean high — $46 to $312 against a $53.28 average — so for a close-up, bring a couple of them down. Keep the times in order too: “just now”, “2m ago”, “6m ago”, not a random mix.

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.
• Scroll the recent orders with your thumb. The live-visitor dot pulses on its own, which helps a still shot feel live.
• Leave the period on Today. Tapping 7 days or 30 days only changes which pill is highlighted — the figures stay on today’s — so switching on camera shows the same numbers under a different label.
• Change numbers between takes from the phone with the Edit button only you can see, instead of going back to a computer.

Mistakes that give a fake dashboard away

1. Revenue that isn’t roughly orders × average order value.
2. Round numbers. Real revenue has cents; $50,000.00 on the nose looks typed.
3. A conversion rate in double digits.
4. Orders that don’t fit their item or the average.
5. A chart that doesn’t match the story.
6. A currency that doesn’t match where the store is supposed to be.
7. A notification or a low-battery warning sliding in mid-shot.
8. 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, it scrolls, and it responds to a tap. That’s why a prop that works for a thumbnail often doesn’t survive a video.