What is a good email open rate for a Shopify store?
Open rate is no longer a usable metric. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches images and registers an open whether or not anyone looked. As a working rule, anything above roughly 50 percent is machines. Use click rate, revenue per recipient and average order value instead.
A real example
A client account displayed a 92 percent open rate. The underlying figures were 238 opens on 263 sends, account wide, over a month. On a small send base the auto open distortion is enormous.
What was worth quoting on the same screen
A 5.31 percent click rate and a $359.43 average order value. Both survive scrutiny. Neither is as pleasant to put in a report.
The test to apply
Before a number goes in a report, ask what would have to be true for it to be wrong. Open rate fails that test in 2026.
Real numbers from a live Shopify client account. Every result page carries the before, the after, and what the figure does not prove.