Integrating your Shopify or Shopify Plus account with Bloomreach Engagement enables you to analyze Shopify data, execute omnichannel marketing campaigns, and use Bloomreach Engagement's AI-driven capabilities on your Shopify store – all that without the need to rely on hundreds of ad-hoc plugins.

Bloomreach Engagement loads customer base, historical orders/purchases, and product catalogs from Shopify and then imports delta product catalogs from Shopify Products API every 4 hours. Bloomreach Engagement also subscribes and listens for new updates on customers and orders from Shopify backend.

Whether it is sending email campaigns, push notifications, creating experiments, or just analyzing your Shopify data, the Bloomreach Engagement Shopify Integration helps the whole process to be as simple and efficient as possible.

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Time to complete

Initial Integration: less than 10 Minutes
Web Integration: A few days

Setup process

1. Log in to your Shopify account and click on the > symbol next to Apps.

2. Click on App and sales channel settings.

3. Click on Develop apps.

4. Click on Allow custom app development and re-confirm in the next window by clicking on Allow custom app development again.

5. Now go and click Create an app.

6. Complete the field App name with a descriptive name (we recommend Bloomreach Engagement). Choose a responsible technical person as the App developer and insert their email address. Then click on Create app.

7. Go to API credentials and click on Configure Admin API scopes.

8. In Admin API access scopes, select the required user permissions. Then in Event version under Webhook subscriptions, choose 2022-7.

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Required user permissions

Required user permissions are: read_customers, read_orders, and read_products.

9. Now, click on Install app. Make sure to keep your tab with Shopify open for completing the following steps.

10. Open Bloomreach Engagement App and go to Data & Assets > Integrations > + Add new integration and look up Shopify. Next, click on + Add integration.

11. On the next screen, you will see 4 IDs that need to be set up in your project. Make sure these are set up before you continue and match exactly; ID names are not customizable.
    You do not need to fill anything in here – just be sure these IDs have been set up. The integration will automatically use these IDs once it starts working.

12. Now, go back to your Shopify tab and copy & paste the Admin API access token, API key, and API secret key from your Shopify account to the matching fields in Bloomreach Engagement under the section Connect project with Shopify.

13. Now, you can move on to web integration. You will need a technical person to complete the integration by making a few front-end modifications. This will take less than a few hours to complete.

14. After the web integration is complete, the data will start coming in. Events from the API should appear instantly after the setup is finished (remember to click Save integration). Regular catalog imports and customer and historical purchase data can be found in Bloomreach Engagement under Imports.

15. Take a coffee break before all the imports are visible, as it might take a while before the whole import is finished.

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Shopify Front-end integration for Bloomreach Engagement

This repository contains .liquid snippets that can enable standardized front-end tracking of e-commerce events on your Shopify Plus website.

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Using Shopify instead of Shopify Plus

Using the non-Plus version of Shopify does not allow you to customize your checkout page, thus not allowing you to add checkout tracking. This means that Bloomreach Engagement cannot track the checkout steps.
Bloomreach Engagement script runs only on the final checkout step; therefore, Bloomreach Engagement cannot personalize the previous checkout process steps.

SMS Marketing

You can add sms_marketing_consent customer property to your existing Shopify integration. The sms_marketing_consent is tracked when a customer subscribes or unsubscribes to SMS consent.

To track this new customer property in real-time, you need to:

1. Upgrade Shopify API webhook version to 2022-07
   1. In your Shopify Admin account, go through the following steps: Settings > Apps and sales channels > Develop apps > Select your existing private app > Review configurations > Edit > Select '2022-07' under Webhook API version > Save changes.
2. Go to your Shopify integration page in your Bloomreach Engagement project and click the red button Upgrade Shopify integration.

Once you have finished the setup, the sms_marketing_consent customer property is available for all your customers.

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Relevance for new clients

This action is only relevant for existing Bloomreach Engagement clients as for it is automatically integrated for new clients.

How to transform customer attributes sms_marketing_consent or email_marketing_consent into consent events in Bloomreach Engagement?

Shopify manages consents on a profile level. That is the reason why in Bloomreach Engagement, you can see sms_marketing_consent or email_marketing_consent as a customer attribute and shopify_consent event (automatically triggered by Bloomreach). In order to transform them into Bloomreach Engagement consent events (accept or reject) you should set up a transformation scenario in your project to turn shopify_consent events into Consent Management events. It is advised to double opt-in customers with approved sms_marketing_consent, what can be done using the shopify_consent event made for this purpose. You can see the example of this action below.

Alternative 1: Single opt-in

1. Define shopify_consent as:

2. Consent event as:

Alternative 2: Double opt-in

It is recommended to always use a double opt-in approach to follow market regulations and best practices.

To use the double opt-in approach it is required to use opt-in keyword specified in the outbound SMS (e.g. Bloomreach: Reply YES to receive automated marketing messages and cart reminders.) and set the grant action for the specified opt-in keyword in Project Settings > Campaigns > Channels > SMS/MMS > 2-way SMS / MMS messaging.

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Manually deleting phone for customers in Shopify Admin view

When a customer's phone is removed from Shopify Admin, the shopify_consent event is not tracked. This means that the consent scenario is not triggered in Bloomreach Engagement. Unsubscribed customers still have the sms consent given in the Bloomreach Engagement, even if the SMS consent has been removed in Shopify. Note that if you manually remove the phone number or consent in Shopify Admin view, you must also manually do so in Bloomreach Engagement.

Limitations

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Service worker not supported

Shopify does not support using a service worker as it prevents installing the service worker into the root folder of Shopify. The root folder is required to install the service worker for web push notifications and non-flickering experiments. Therefore, those two features are not supported out-of-the-box for this integration.

Technical detail

What is the latency between an order happening and an order appearing in our app when using our Shopify integration?

The sync is near real-time - Bloomreach Engagement subscribes and listens for new updates on customers and orders from the Shopify backend, resulting in near real-time webhooks.

Removing Shopify integration

If you decide to remove Shopify integration, please do not remove the webhook from the integration manually before removing the integration in the application, as you will not be able to remove the integration afterward. Instead, use only the 'Remove Integration' button in the application. It will take care of all steps required to remove the integration, including deleting the webhook.