Shopify integration

Introduction

Many potential customers, particularly retail customers, use Shopify to run their online businesses. Many of these brands don’t have significant development resources and Shopify provides a low-effort eCommerce solution. Currently, other platforms similar to Braze provide low-touch direct integrations with Shopify. As a result, we typically lose out on deals to our competitors.


The Problem

Braze doesn't have a turnkey integration with Shopify, and loses deals because of it.

Customers do not have an easy way to get Shopify data into Braze to better target and understand users. Braze is also failing to capture eComm prospects whose main line of revenue is an online shopping experience because we do not offer a turnkey integration like our competitors do.


Process



Goals

Our ultimate vision was to provide brands the ability to seamlessly integrate their Shopify storefront with Braze in order to drive meaningful, real-time, customer engagement.

Mutual Shopify and Braze customers would be able to easily bring in Shopify data around the order/purchase lifecycle to segment, personalize, and trigger messages across channels like email, in-app messages, push notifications, and more.

Eventually, our goal will be to differentiate our Shopify integration offering to enable customers to seamlessly integrate Braze's web SDK on Shopify storefronts to enable customers to get value of the integration much faster.


Research

Desk Research & Existing Knowledge

**** win/loss reports, productboard, workarounds

competitive analysis

Initial Interviews

PM and I wrote a script, recruited, and spoke with internal folks, as well as customers.


Use Cases

General

  • Cross-channel communication around order lifecycle

Lifecycle Campaigns

  • Abandoned Cart

  • Utilization of discount or promo codes Upsells

  • Retarget from past purchases


MVP

The ultimate goals for the MVP will be to solve for the "data-in" portion of the integration. Specifically,

  • Providing a way for customers to integrate Shopify seamlessly

  • Ability to ingest Shopify data

  • Process Shopify data to align with Braze's data schemas and user syncing

Within the MVP, we'll focus on primarily ingesting the key order lifecycle events that customers will need to:

  • target messaging

  • personalize the content of the messaging

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Success: stable integration, data coming through, able to integrate new shop.


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Future Considerations

  • Historical Backfill

  • ScriptTag Support for additional (top- of-funnel) events

  • More webhook events: customer groups, themes, collections, fulfillment events customer (enable/disable cart and order update)

  • Viewing Shopify event data over time on partner page

Final Design

Reflections & Outcomes

  • Launching a Shopify integration in-and-of itself was a major win for the business and the team. It proved to be a viable first solution, as customers were now able set up the integration in a matter of minutes.

  • Because we built a small MVP, we left a lot of ideas and insights for the team to consider moving forward. Adoption for the integration might be slow, as numbers will increase over time as more Shopify-using customers sign with Braze. But, value will consistently grow as new features are released and the integration becomes more robust and differentiated from competitors.

  • I was pulled off my in-app message projects when that team hit some technical snags and faced reprioritization decisions. Because I now had nearly-full time available bandwidth, I joined the Partnerships product team for the summer. Joining a new team, and one that hadn’t had a dedicated designer before, was a challenge, but not a major one. The team was very receptive to design and research needs and ideas, and were happy participants in collaboration sessions.

  • I would have liked to talk to more prospects and non-customers, but recruiting wasn’t successful and we had enough confidence in what to build and why that we moved forward using insights from internal folks and customers.

  • This project uncovered lots of technical constraints and issues, which kicked off a multiyear initiative to rewrite large parts of the broader partnerships product area.