GA4 not tracking purchases: how to check

The likely causes

1. The tag no longer runs on the confirmation page. After a new theme, checkout or platform, the page where the purchase fired can change or disappear. Nothing fails on screen: the event stops leaving the page.
2. Consent. With consent mode's basic setup, Google's tags wait until the visitor accepts, so a visitor who declines sends nothing. With the advanced setup, a declined visitor sends a ping without cookies, which GA4 can use to model the missing data (Google's help).
3. The event's data. GA4 expects transaction_id, value, currency and items on purchase, and with a value but no currency it does not compute revenue accurately (GA4's event reference).
4. A payment that never comes back. When the payment ends on another site and the buyer does not return to your confirmation page, a tag on that page never runs.
5. The report has not caught up. A standard property usually processes the day's data in 2 to 6 hours, and some reports take about 12 (Google's help).

How to check it by hand

1. Turn on debug mode with Tag Assistant or Tag Manager's preview, place a test order and watch GA4's DebugView. The purchase should appear with its parameters (Google's help).
2. If it does not appear, accept analytics cookies and try again. DebugView shows nothing from a visitor who has not consented. If it appears only after you accept, the purchases GA4 is missing may be those of visitors who decline.
3. Check that the tag is still on the confirmation page since your last change of theme, checkout or platform.
4. Once a full day is processed, compare that day's paid orders in your store's admin with GA4's purchases for the same day.

Your store's admin is the reference here: it is the store's own record of what it sold.

What TraceLog sees and what it does not

TraceLog reads nothing from GA4 and cannot tell you what GA4 received. It keeps its own record of the conversion path you define, beside GA4. On WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Shopify, the store's server also confirms each paid order, so an order is counted even when the browser never sent it, and the Path page says how many only the server saw (why the two counts differ).

A fall in GA4 can then be read beside a second record: whether the orders kept arriving in TraceLog's record. When a step that arrived steadily stops arriving, TraceLog alerts you, on every plan. From Pro, except on Shopify, it also alerts you when the page stops requesting a GA4 tag you confirmed beside a conversion. The alert says the page stopped asking, never that GA4 lost anything (alerts).

Questions

Does TraceLog fix GA4's tracking?

No. It changes no GA4 tag or setting, and it does not say why GA4 counted less. It keeps its own record of the path you define and checks it every day.

Will TraceLog's count match GA4's?

Not necessarily. Each counts its own record with its own rules: consent, sessions, test orders and server confirmations differ (why the two counts differ).

Do I have to remove GA4?

No. TraceLog runs beside GA4, Meta and Google Ads and reads none of them.

Try it on your store

Define your conversion path, and TraceLog checks it while you install.