As part of our series on connectors and how to use them, we take a look at eCommerce platform Shopify to see how online sellers can best leverage Shopify data to gain new and interesting insights into their eCommerce business.
eCommerce has hit an all-time high, and online retailers need to use every tool at their disposal to cut through the noise. Fortunately, the data that can help marketers make better decisions is more abundant than ever - but the potential of this data is often left untapped. By combining Shopify data with data from other platforms, retailers can gain practical insights into which ads are converting, when certain inventory is more likely to sell out, and which products are causing problems for customers.
Shopify is an all-in-one cloud-based eCommerce platform that enables businesses to easily create an online storefront where they can sell their goods and services.
Because of its flexibility and ease-of-use, Shopify is one of the world’s most popular eCommerce platforms, with approximately 20% of the global market share.
Shopify provides a wealth of marketing data that can help merchants optimize their online store's promotional efforts and track the effectiveness of their marketing strategies. Here’s a detailed overview of the types of marketing data you can access through Shopify:
- Traffic Sources
Data on where your store’s traffic is coming from, such as direct visits, search engines, social media platforms, referrals from other websites, and marketing campaigns. This helps in understanding which channels are most effective at driving visitors to your store.- Customer Acquisition Details
Information on how new customers are finding your store, which can be tied back to specific marketing activities or campaigns.- Conversion Rates
Conversion data includes the percentage of visitors who make a purchase, segmented by various factors like traffic source, campaign, or time period. This is crucial for measuring the effectiveness of sales strategies and marketing campaigns.- Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Metrics from ads or email campaigns indicating the percentage of viewers who clicked on a link relative to the total number of viewers. This helps in evaluating the attractiveness and effectiveness of your marketing messages.- Email Marketing Metrics
Data on email campaigns, including open rates, click rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates. This can also include the performance of automated email sequences, like welcome emails, cart abandonment emails, and customer re-engagement emails.- Social Media Performance:
Analysis of how your social media posts and ads are performing in terms of engagement (likes, shares, comments) and conversions. This is particularly useful for merchants using Shopify’s integrations with platforms like Facebook and Instagram.- SEO Performance
Insights into organic search performance, including keyword rankings and organic traffic levels. This data can help you optimize your site's content and structure for better search engine visibility.- Ad Spend and ROI
Detailed information on advertising spend across different platforms and the return on investment for each ad or campaign. This allows for more strategic allocation of marketing budgets based on what’s driving the most profitable traffic.- Customer Segmentation Data
Information on customer behaviors, such as purchase history, browsing behavior, and product preferences, which can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns.- Promotions and Discounts Performance
Data on how different promotions and discount strategies contribute to sales. This includes tracking which promotions lead to more conversions and whether they are profitable after accounting for the discounted amounts.- Abandoned Cart Data
Insights into the number and value of abandoned carts, which can help in crafting effective cart recovery strategies like targeted emails or ads.
While the data you can get from Shopify is good, you can take this to a whole new level when you start by combining it with data from other platforms. This is where you can start getting some really advanced eCommerce analytics and insights that can help grow your business.
One of the biggest questions for eCommerce marketers is, “Which of my promotional channels is leading to sales?” It’s a simple question, but it’s often not so simple to answer. However, by combining your sales data from Shopify, with your promotional data from other sources in a data visualization tool; you can apply Attribution, or Marketing Mix Models to easily see which promotional channels and creatives are performing. From here, you can adjust your ad spend to maximise your return on investment, and ultimately drive more sales.
If you really want to get ahead of the competition, you can compare your sales data, customer session information, and product inventory with historical weather information (check out how the Philadelphia 76ers did this). By doing this, you can analyse the correlation between the seasons, days, and climate on your customer behaviour, to learn when certain products are likely to be popular. Take sunglasses for example. By comparing the weather and sales data, you’ve noticed that when the weather gets warmer, sunglasses sales tend to pick up on Thursday - ready for the weekend. With this knowledge in mind, you can get proactive, and promote these products on subsequent Thursdays when it is predicted to be a sunny weekend. You can even target these adverts down to the exact city where the sun will be shining. This creative use of your data can protect you from lost revenue due to low inventory, and enable you to be proactive in your promotion of these products for maximum return on investment.
Customer reviews are one of the greatest contributors to brand reputation for an eCommerce business. It’s great to optimise your promotions and inventory, but if you don’t have visibility on what your customers are saying about your products, brand, or user experience, then it’s your bottom-line that suffers. To identify these potential pain-points, you can compare your customer feedback, (from Shopify and other review aggregation sites, social media, and feedback forms) with your historical Shopify order, refund, and cart abandonment data. By doing so, you can turn this data into actionable feedback: discover which products are not up to standard, and where friction points lie in your user experience; ultimately improving your brand reputation and customer lifetime value.
If you want to combine your Shopify data with data from other sources, you'll first need to extract that data - and there are several ways to do that.
You can manually extract Shopify data by simply downloading a CSV or Excel file. However, manual data integration can be a labor-intensive task, especially if you have a lot of data sources, and also can result in major errors in your data.
Alternatively, you can have a go at extracting data via the Shopify API. Be warned however, this does require a certain level of technical knowledge as well as at least some Python knowledge. What's more, maintaining your own API connection can be time-consuming. Like any other platform, Shopify frequently releases updates to their API which means your connection will need constant monitoring to avoid anything becoming broken after each update. Nonetheless, if you're willing to give this a go, you can check out the various development guides from Shopify here.
Probably the most common solution, especially when dealing with multiple data sources at scale, is to use a data integration platform to automatically extract your data from Shopify. This means you don't have to worry about maintaining your API or about generating errors from manually extracting the data yourself. Moreover, the best tools will make it easy to standardize all your Shopify data sto make it easy to combine with the data from other sources so you can build a more complete picture of your cross-channel marketing performance.