Salesforce is the most widely used cloud-based CRM platform. It stores all your leads, customer data, vendor data, sales and invoices, contact data, etc. Shopify is a commerce platform where you can easily set up your online store to sell your products. To carry out an in-depth analysis of your business, and to harness the opportunities that exist in the market, integrating Salesforce and Shopify data is a must.
This article aims at providing you with a step-by-step guide on integrating Salesforce and Shopify in no time! It will further help you build a customized ETL pipeline for your organization.
Through this article, you will get a deep understanding of the tools and techniques being mentioned & thus, it will help you hone your skills further.
Table of Contents
What is Salesforce?
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Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM tool that helps you maintain and manage your organization’s interactions with its customer base. Salesforce generates a lot of data from managing these interactions. It also offers cloud-based tools such as data analytics, IoT products. These generate data that provide priceless insights about customers and can be extremely useful for the organization.
Key features of Salesforce:
- Contact Management: Salesforce offers smooth contact management by providing access to critical customer data and interaction history. It provides great insights on how to use customer data to get a better understanding of their behavior using various trends and metrics and formulate strategies.
- Dynamic Dashboards: Salesforce’s interactive dashboards provide a complete view of how well the business is performing using key factors such as market trends, customer behavior, etc. You can easily create dashboards and generate real-time reports for your business.
- Opportunity Management: It is one of the best features of Salesforce. It provides you with an in-depth view of the customers’ timeline, their buying patterns, metrics, etc, and lets you strategize your next move.
- Email Integrations: Salesforce supports full integration with applications like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, etc., and lets you synchronize your calendars and schedules. It even provides offline access to important emails and lets you develop personalized templates for potential customers.
For further information on Salesforce, you can check the official website here.
What is Shopify?
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Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms that allows businesses and users to sell their products/services through the online platform.
Using Shopify, you can set up an online store and sell your products with the help of the Point of Sale (POS) system. Shopify provides users with secure payment gateways, marketing, and shipping facilities, along with various customer engagement techniques, to help you get started.
With Shopify’s interactive interface, you can also analyze various customer trends and metrics, to draw crucial insights about their customers.
Various products or services that you can sell on Shopify:
- Physical Products: Shopify supports door-step delivery of your manufactured products such as jewellery, t-shirts, mugs, etc. You can schedule the delivery of various products using Shopify.
- Digital Products: With Shopify, you can provide digital services such as e-books, audio files, course materials, etc. to your customers.
- Services and Consultation: If you provide services like Life consultation, home-cooked delicacies, event planning, or anything else, Shopify has got you covered.
- Memberships: Various memberships such as gym memberships, yoga-classes memberships, event memberships, etc. can be sold to the customers using Shopify.
- Experiences: Event-based experiences like adventurous sports and travel, mountain trekking, wine tasting, events, and hands-on workshops. You can use Shopify to sell tickets for these events as well.
- Rentals: You can also promote and advertise various types of rental services such as rental taxis, furniture, gadgets, etc. using Shopify and engage with customers in a better and more efficient way.
- Classes: You can advertise online tutorials on Shopify, allowing customers to subscribe to various online courses such as studies, fitness, yoga, etc.
For further information on Shopify, you can check the official website here.
Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline helps to integrate data from free sources like Salesforce, Shopify with various other sources and load it in a data warehouse of your choice to visualize it in your desired BI tool for free.
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It provides a consistent & reliable solution to manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data in your desired destination. It allows you to focus on key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools.
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- Secure: Hevo has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Minimal Learning: Hevo with its simple and interactive UI, is extremely simple for new customers to work on and perform operations.
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Prerequisites
- Working knowledge of Salesforce.
- Working knowledge of Shopify.
- A Salesforce account.
- A Shopify account.
Methods to Integrate Salesforce and Shopify
There are multiple ways in which you can integrate data from Shopify to Salesforce:
Method 1: Using CSV Files to Integrate Salesforce and Shopify
One way of integrating your Shopify data with Salesforce is by using the CSV files. Shopify allows users to export their data about their customers and business as a CSV file, which can then be used to import data to Salesforce, using its data import wizard.
You can implement this using the following steps:
Step 1: Exporting Data From Shopify as CSV Files
Log in to your Shopify account, using your credentials such as username and password.
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Once you’ve logged in, your Shopify dashboard will now open up on your screen, where you need to click on the data export option. Once you’ve clicked on the data export option, a new window will now open up on your screen, where you can select the different categories and specify the fields that you want to export.
Here you can choose between orders, products, discounts, fulfillments, etc.
Image Source: 2B
Click on the export option to download your CSV file. Ensure that you keep the first row of your CSV file, containing the headings intact. You can download your CSV files in two ways, either as a plain CSV file or as a CSV file for Excel and other spreadsheet programs.
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Step 2: Loading Data Into Salesforce from CSV Files
Once you’ve exported your Shopify data as a CSV file, log in to your Salesforce account with your credentials such as your username and password.
Go to the Salesforce setup section, and click on the data import wizard option, found in the quick find box. Carefully read the information about the import wizard on your screen and click on the launch wizard option.
Select the CSV file containing your Shopify data, and load it into the data import wizard. You can either map the data to standard Salesforce objects such as contacts, leads, accounts, etc. or map it to your custom objects.
Image Source: Salesforce Developers
The Salesforce Wizard will now check the CSV files’, header row, to understand the fields, you are going to import. When you map your data, ensure that you keep the title/salutations fields as blank as Shopify doesn’t support them, further the first and last name should match the verbatim.
This is how you can use CSV files to integrate Salesforce and Shopify data.
Limitations of this Method
- Using CSV files, you can import 50,000 records at max into Salesforce. In case you have more data in your Shopify account, you will have to import it in the form of chunks of 50,000 records or less.
- The process of importing data using CSV requires users to manually input data, and hence, it can’t be automated.
- It doesn’t allow users to perform any transformation or pre-processing on their data, thereby, supports importing basic data only.
Method 2: Using API-Based Custom Scripts to Integrate Salesforce and Shopify
Shopify and Salesforce both support importing and exporting data using their RESTful APIs. To use the APIs, you must write custom code snippets that fetch your Shopify data, making use of the Shopify Admin API and then makes use of the Salesforce Bulk API, to import the data into Salesforce.
To do this, first retrieve the API password for Shopify. Go to your Shopify dashboard, and click in the apps option, found in the panel on the left. Click on the “Review disabled Admin API Permissions” and set all permissions to read and write, then uncheck the storefront API option.
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The API password will now appear on your screen.
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Use code snippets to fetch data from Shopify using the ShopifyQL (Shopify Query Language) and obtain the result as JSON or XML. ShopifyQL will query data based on schemas like sales schema, payments schema, etc.
You now need to convert your JSON or XML file into the CSV format and make use of the Salesforce Bulk APIs, to ingest your Shopify data.
Limitations of this method
- Knowing programming languages and Shopify Query Language is a must.
- Using APIs to fetch data, results, in having to pay additional data costs.
- Shopify APIs return only 1 page at a time. To overcome this, you will need to incorporate pagination in your codes.
- To meet the dynamic data requirements, you must set up a CRON job, that will allow exporting data at regular intervals of time.
Method 3: Using AWS EventBridge to Integrate Salesforce and Shopify
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Using AWS EventBridge is one such way of integrating Salesforce with Shopify data. AWS EventBridge acts as an intermediary stage, that loads data into AWS from a source of your choice and then loads it into Salesforce or any other destination.
AWS EventBridge makes use of Shopify Webhooks to access data, and pipe them into your desired targets such as Salesforce. Shopify supports this using its in-built Shopify EventBridge connector.
Limitations of this Method
- Knowing GraphQL programing language is a must.
- It requires users to pay additional charges to make use of the Shopify’s EventBridge integration.
- It doesn’t allow connecting to multiple SaaS applications, to bring in data from a variety of sources.
Conclusion
This article teaches you how to integrate Salesforce and Shopify. It also provides in-depth knowledge about the concepts behind every step to help you understand and implement them efficiently. These methods, however, can be challenging especially for a beginner & this is where Hevo saves the day.
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Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline, helps you transfer data from a source of your choice in a fully automated and secure manner without having to write the code repeatedly. Hevo with its strong integration with 100+ sources (free sources like Shopify, Shopify Webhook, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, etc & other paid sources like Salesforce) & BI tools, allows you to not only export & load data but also transform & enrich your data & make it analysis-ready in a jiffy.
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