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 synchronise customers, you need to map them to the appropriate list from your connector settings.
Learn how in Choose lists for Shopify customers and subscribers.
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.
See a full list of fields that are synchronised in Sync customer fields from Shopify.
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 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.
Automatic catalog sync
Once the connection is set up, there are no options to turn off or on order and catalog synchronisation – this is done automatically.
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 Dotdigital account you need to map them to custom data fields in your Dotdigital account.
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
OrdersInsight data collection in Dotdigital under the attributes property.
Product
Product metafields are captured automatically in Dotdigital under theattributesproperty. Additionally, Dotdigital 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 Dotdigital to capture both metafields separately.
To find your order metafields in your insight data:
In Dotdigital, go to Audience > Contacts and select a contact to open the Single customer view.
Select the Insight data tab, then expand the collection type drop-down menu in the top left and select Orders.
Select an order from the left-side menu.
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 Dotdigital. To delete customer data from Dotdigital, you must do it manually within Dotdigital. Learn more.