How Shopify Contact Syncing Works in Audienceful
Once you've connected Shopify, Audienceful keeps your customers and contacts in sync two ways: Shopify customers become Audienceful contacts, and new Audienceful subscribers can become Shopify customers, with email-marketing consent kept aligned in both directions.
Inbound: Shopify customers → Audienceful contacts
As customers and orders come in from your store, Audienceful upserts a contact for each one (matched by email). New contacts are tagged with a Shopify source, and their email marketing consent is mapped from Shopify:
- Shopify subscribed → consent granted
- Shopify pending → pending (e.g. awaiting confirmation)
- Shopify not subscribed / unsubscribed → consent denied (won't receive marketing email)
This is what makes order data available for automations and audiences.
Outbound: new Audienceful subscribers → Shopify customers
When someone subscribes in Audienceful (through a form, an import, the API, or a manual add), Audienceful can create them as a customer in Shopify with subscribed consent. Contacts that originally came from Shopify are never pushed back, so nothing loops.
Consent changes propagate outbound too: if a contact unsubscribes, bounces, or is cleaned in Audienceful, that suppression is pushed to Shopify so you don't email someone there who opted out here. (A consent change for someone who was never a customer of your store is simply skipped. It won't create a new customer.)
Consent stays consistent both ways
Audienceful tracks the marketing state Shopify is known to hold, so an inbound consent update never boomerangs back out as a redundant change. The result: a customer's subscribe/unsubscribe status stays consistent whether they change it in your store or in Audienceful.
Only email and consent sync outbound. Audienceful creates customers and keeps consent aligned, but it doesn't overwrite your Shopify customers' profile fields. Profile syncing is inbound only.
What you can control
Each direction is a separate toggle on the Shopify integration's settings, and all are on by default:
- Sync email subscribers (inbound): create/update contacts from Shopify.
- Push new contacts (outbound): create Shopify customers from new Audienceful subscribers.
- Push consent updates (outbound): propagate unsubscribes and resubscribes to Shopify.
Turn any of them off if you'd rather one direction stay manual. With inbound syncing off, Audienceful still recognizes existing contacts (so orders attribute and automations fire) but won't create new ones.
A note on privacy
For privacy compliance, Audienceful syncs email, name, and general location (city / state / country). It does not import customer phone numbers or street addresses.