Understanding the sync process from Shopify to Dotdigital

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

Overview

The Shopify connector syncs six different data types to Dotdigital:

• 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.

Learn about contact data

The Shopify connector synchronizes your customers and subscribers to Dotdigital. By default, the connector synchronises subscribed customers automatically. If you want to synchronize customers, you need to map them to the appropriate address book from your connector settings.

To learn how, check out the article Choose address books for Shopify customers and subscribers.

• Customers All contacts who have entered their email address on your site, but who may not have opted in to your marketing. This also includes users who check out as a guest.
• 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.

  To learn more, check out 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.

For a full list of fields that are synchronised, check out the article Sync customer fields from Shopify.

Learn about insight data

Orders and catalog data are automatically synchronized after the connector is installed. They are stored in order and catalog insight collections in your Dotdigital 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.

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.

To learn more, check out 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 Dotdigital account you need to map them to custom data fields in your Dotdigital account.
    

    To learn how, check out the article Map Shopify customer metafields to Dotdigital 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 Dotdigital under the attributes property.
    

    To learn more, check out the article Overview of Insight data.

To find your order metafields in your insight data:

1. In Dotdigital, select a contact to open the Single customer view.
2. Select the Insight data tab.
3. Select an order from the left-side menu.
4. Find the heading Attributes to see the order metafields.