Fake Shopify store prank ideas, and how to build the reveal

What the fake store is

The fake store in this prank is only ever the owner’s side of one: a dashboard on your phone showing sales, orders and visitors. There’s no shop behind it. Nobody can visit it, nothing can be bought, and nothing is connected to Shopify or any other platform — every figure on it is one you typed. If you’re here about a store you think took your money, that’s a different problem, and your bank or card issuer is the place to start.

Where a prank stops being one

A prank is a setup with a reveal. Take the reveal away, or aim it at the wrong person, and the same screen becomes something else.

• The reveal is in the video. If the clip ends before it, or the caption says the numbers are real, you haven’t posted a prank. You’ve posted fake results, and your audience is the one being fooled.
• It’s revealed before anyone acts on it. Nobody lends you money, invests, quits a job, pays for anything or tells anyone else on the strength of it.
• It asks for nothing. The moment the dashboard is used to get something from someone, it isn’t a prank.
• It’s on someone who knows you and will laugh, and you ask before you post their reaction. Not strangers, not customers, not an employer, not anyone you owe money.

Using the dashboard to get anything from anyone — money, a loan, a job, a deal — is prohibited by our acceptable use policy, however it’s framed.

Build the screen in two layers

Every good dashboard prank is built the same way. There’s what the person reads in the first two seconds, and there’s where the joke is waiting.

The glance

Home, as the app opens: the header, the total sales and the ↗ change under it, the shape of the chart, the visitors pill. This layer has to be believable at a glance, because the reaction you’re filming happens here. Cents on the total. A change in the tens of percent rather than 999%. A conversion rate that doesn’t give it away. A chart that goes quiet overnight, like the default one. The main filming guide covers how those figures fit together.

The detail

Everything that only gets read on a second look or a tap: the task cards, the Orders tab with its customers, badges and order numbers, an order’s own page, the Products tab. This is where the reveal lives.

Keep to one joke in one place. If the total is also a joke, the setup never works; if every field has a gag in it, nobody knows where to look. The glance sells it and the detail pays it off.

Where to hide the reveal

• The items. An order’s item shows on its own page — Signature Hoodie, $89.00 each, ×2, by default — and the Products tab lists what the store sells. Swap them for the joke: Bottled Air ×12, a Left Sock (Single). Keep them short: names are cut off with an ellipsis when they run out of room, and a punchline that ends in “…” isn’t one.
• The customers. Every order from the same person: the one you’re pranking, or their mum.
• The statuses. Each order carries badges — Paid and Unfulfilled, Paid and Fulfilled, or Refunded and Fulfilled; a plain Paid reads as fulfilled. An Orders tab where every order reads Refunded tells a story nobody needs explained.
• The tasks. Set Orders to fulfill to the same number as Orders today and Home shows a card reading 1,284 Orders to fulfill: the store has sold a great deal and shipped none of it.
• The stock. On the Products tab a product at 0 in stock shows in red, and a Draft badge can sit beside it: the best-seller that isn’t for sale.
• The tap. An order’s own page only appears when someone taps the order, which makes it a natural home for the punchline: the customer, the item, a payment that reads Refunded.

Set the numbers for the person, not the internet

The glance layer has to be big enough to get a reaction and small enough to be believed for a few seconds, and what’s believable depends on who’s looking. A parent who knows you opened a store a fortnight ago won’t buy $68,420.50 in a day. They might buy this:

Total sales today 2140.35 · Orders today 41
Sessions today 1630 · Visitors right now 23
Total sales change % 64.8 · Sessions change % 58.9 · Orders change % 61.2

Home works out an average order value of $52.20 and a conversion rate of 2.5%, and the total’s change reads ↗ 64.8%. Set the three changes together: leave Sessions and Orders at their defaults and average order value shows ↗ 25.4%, which says every customer suddenly spent a quarter more; with the figures above it reads ↗ 2.2%. Set Latest order number low as well — something like 1163 — because a young store hasn’t taken many orders. Nothing on that screen is outlandish, which is exactly what lets the reveal land.

Let the date pill escalate

The Today pill is the one control that changes the totals on camera, and the first two taps only make them grow. Tap it once and the same store shows $13,698.24 from 262 orders over Last 7 days, ↗ 29.2%. Tap again and Last 30 days shows $56,291.21 from 1,078; a third tap takes it back to Today. Both are worked out from today’s figures, so they climb every time. That’s a good “wait, how much?” beat, as long as the reveal still comes after it.

Three set-ups that work

The overnight success

Tell someone close that the store you mentioned has taken off, and hand them the phone. The glance layer above gets the reaction; the Orders tab gets the laugh when they tap into it and find every order is from you, or every item is a single sock. Film their face, not the phone. The phone can be shot afterwards.

The guru

A staged skit rather than a real prank. A self-styled ecommerce expert flexes a huge day at the camera, and the camera finds a card reading 1,284 Orders to fulfill, or an Orders tab full of Refunded. It’s parody of fake-results content, and because everyone in it is in on the joke, it’s the easiest of the three to film well. Here the glance layer can be as big as you like: the bigger the flex, the harder the fall.

The escalation

Start modest on Today. Each tap on the date pill gets a bigger reaction than the last, and the reveal waits in the one place nobody has looked yet, usually an order’s own page or the Products tab.

Filming it

• The reaction is the content. Put your best camera on their face. Nothing on the dashboard changes unless you edit it, and a closed and reopened app starts back on Home at Today, so the phone insert can be filmed an hour later and match.
• Cut to the phone for the reveal, so the audience reads the line the person just read. Hold the insert long enough to read it — a second or two for each line of text.
• Get one clean take of the joke. Whatever happens in the room, the edit needs one steady shot of the reveal on screen.
• Know what the free version shows. Apps published free carry a SIMULATED · POZER.COM mark as fine print on screen. In a staged skit it costs nothing, and it tells your viewers the store is a prop — which, in a video about a fake store, is no bad thing.

The dashboard itself is the Shopify-style store template. If your prank is really a scripted skit about a first order, the first-sale skit guide breaks that format into shots.