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Understand sync process from Shopify to Marketing

Learn about the data that’s synchronised from Shopify to Marketing, such as contact, insight, and cart data.

Written by Gareth Burroughes

The Shopify connector syncs six different data types to Marketing:

  • Customers

  • Subscribers

  • Orders

  • Catalog

  • Cart

  • Metafields

Typically, synchronisation occurs every five minutes after the last sync has finished, but times can vary based on the amount of data that is being synchronised at a given time. We’ve broken the different data types into four different categories.

Shopify customer accounts update
​Shopify is deprecating legacy customer accounts and recommends upgrading to the new version.

Learn about contact data

The Shopify connector synchronizes your customers and subscribers to Marketing. By default, the connector synchronises subscribed customers automatically. If you want to synchronise customers, you need to map them to the appropriate list from your connector settings.

  • Customers

    All contacts who have purchased from or entered their email addresses on your Shopify store, regardless of whether they have opted into your marketing or checked out as guests.

  • Subscribers

    All contacts who have an account and opted into marketing communication on your website. These contacts need to have the Shopify Accepts Marketing box checked.

Learn more in the Shopify article Collecting customer contact information.

In addition to the contact’s email address, the connector synchronises additional information, such as name, addresses, tags, and more.

How contacts are matched

Every customer in Shopify has a unique customer ID. The Shopify connector uses this ID to match each customer to their existing contact in Marketing.

When Marketing syncs a customer, it first checks whether that contact already has a Shopify customer ID stored. If they do, Marketing uses the ID to find the matching contact. If they don't, Marketing matches on the email address. If no email match is found, it then tries the mobile number. Once a match is made, Marketing stores the customer ID against the contact for future syncs.

Once the customer ID is stored, a customer can change their email address or mobile number in Shopify without losing their contact record. Marketing uses the stored ID to update the existing contact rather than creating a new one.

This means:

  • Contacts aren't duplicated when someone changes their email address or mobile number.

  • Order history, behavioural data, and engagement history stay attached to the same contact.

  • Contacts remain in any automations or programs they're partway through.

Marketing stores this ID as a contact identifier data field on the contact. The field name follows the format Shopify_[store name]_[unique ID].

You can search for a contact by this field, as well as by their email address or mobile number.

Find a Shopify customer ID

To find a customer's ID in Shopify:

  • In Shopify, go to Customers.

  • Select the customer whose ID you want to find.

  • Check the URL in your browser's address bar. It looks similar to this:

https://admin.shopify.com/store/your-shop-name/customers/123456789

The number after /customers/ is the customer ID. In this example, it's 123456789.

To find the stored identifier in Marketing:

  • In Marketing, go to Audience > Contacts.

  • Search for and open the contact.

  • Select the Data fields tab.

The Data fields tab lists the Shopify contact identifier field.

Learn about Insight data

Orders and catalog data are automatically synchronised after the connector is installed. They are stored in order and catalog Insight collections in your Marketing account.

  • Orders

    All current and historical orders. This includes the purchase date, which items have been purchased, and the current order status.

  • Catalog

    All current products stored within your Shopify catalog. This includes product names, descriptions, SKUs, stock, status, and price.

Product import requirements

Catalog synchronisation runs automatically, but products are imported into Marketing only if all required fields are present by default.

If a product is missing any of the following fields, it isn’t imported:

  • ID

  • URL

  • SKU

  • Image

  • Name

  • Price

Products that don’t meet these requirements are skipped during sync.

Learn about cart data

Cart data is stored against a CartInsight collection which is used to trigger and send abandoned checkout or abandoned cart emails. Data is sent once an identified contact adds an item to their cart and then leaves before completing a purchase. This data includes the product names, descriptions, images, URLs, prices, and much more.

Learn about metafield data

Shopify’s metafields are unique in that they let you save specialised information that isn't usually captured in the Shopify admin. Metafields can be created in your Shopify account and used to record additional data from your customers and their orders.

Learn more in the Shopify article Metafields.

  • Customers
    Customer metafields allow you to gather more detailed information from your customers that isn’t usually captured by Shopify by default, like:

    • Region

    • Gender

    • Age

    • Favourite colour

    All this data can be collected using metafields. For customer metafields to sync to your Marketing account you need to map them to custom data fields in your Dotdigital account.
    ​

    • How customer metafield keys are handled
      When syncing customer metafields, Shopify connector matches fields by key only and does not use the namespace. If your Shopify store contains multiple customer metafields with the same key, for example, custom.birthday and profile.birthday, Marketing:

      • displays that key once in the mapping menu, and

    • syncs only the first value created for that key in Shopify.
      ​
      To avoid conflicts or missing data, create customer metafields with unique keys, especially when using apps that generate metafields automatically.

Learn more in Map Shopify customer metafields to Marketing custom data fields.

  • Orders
    Order metafields can be used to collect more data about your customers’ orders, such as:

    • Product part numbers

    • Product colour

    • Product weight.

    • Order metafields are automatically synced to the Orders Insight data collection in Marketing under the attributes property.

  • Product
    Product metafields are captured automatically in Marketing under the attributes property. Additionally, Marketing captures the namespace for product metafields. This ensures that if you have two metafields with the same name, both can be captured. Separate namespaces can be used to group metafields together.
    ​
    For example, you might have a metafield named material for both metals and plastics. Using namespaces like metals and plastics allows Marketing to capture both metafields separately.

To find your order metafields in your insight data:

  1. In Marketing, go to Audience > Contacts and select a contact to open the Single customer view.

  2. Select the Insight data tab, then expand the collection type drop-down menu in the top left and select Orders.

  3. Select an order from the left-side menu.

  4. Find the heading Attributes to see the order metafields.

Delete a customer

Deleting a customer or their information from your connected store does not delete the customer data in Marketing. To delete customer data from Marketing, you must do it manually within Marketing. Learn more.

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