Braze x Shopify: Activate Shopper Insights for Better Shopping Experiences

I've been on a quest for the perfect sectional couch for what feels like my entire adult life. You know the kind—sturdy enough for your kids, your pets, and that questionable takeout you ordered last night. I’ve spent hours browsing many of the big retailers online, visited several local furniture stores, and even asked my interior-design-enthusiast buddies for recommendations. I’ve been close to making a purchase a few times, but something always holds me back. For each of these furniture brands, I'm sure they were left wondering, "Why not our couch?"

Every eCommerce brand knows the frustration. A shopper browses, gets to know a bit more about your brand, maybe even drops an item into their cart, and then, without any warning, leaves before completing their purchase. Brands are left wondering, “What held them back? Why did our product not meet their needs?” It’s a potential miss for the shopper, who wants to solve an acute need or discover a new brand, and also a lost opportunity for the business.

Each experience presents an opportunity to learn more, connect, and engage—for both the shopper and the brand. At Braze, we help eCommerce brands like e.l.f. Beauty, Hugo Boss, Gymshark, Gap, and Overstock.com navigate all of these touchpoints and discover how to better engage shoppers with experiences that are relevant to their specific needs. And we’ve seen brands build incredible experiences—helping to forge stronger relationships that go beyond just a transaction. But getting there requires an in-depth understanding of their shoppers, and being ready with the right customer experiences in real-time for every relevant touchpoint—many of which we can help bring to life even more easily.

We’re excited to announce new capabilities to help marketers like you get some of these common use cases up and running quickly, so you can spend more time building highly relevant, memorable customer experiences. Imagine what you could create knowing that your core campaigns are rock solid: maybe a new interior design experience for couch shoppers like me, or a partnership with a detergent company that offers a special fabric solution for other couch-shopping families with young kids.

Specifically, we’re announcing:

• Strategic partnership and enhanced integration with Shopify to help enterprise eCommerce marketers more easily bring together their shoppers’ evolving preferences and activate real-time data and insights
• New native data capabilities and templates to help marketers get up and running quickly for a range of foundational eCommerce use cases, and
• Improvements to our email and WhatsApp channels to deliver richer, no-code personalized cross-channel experiences

To show you how these new features will make it easier for you to build better experiences for your shoppers, let’s walk through an abandoned cart example to show what this new experience could look like with Braze.

Easily Integrate Commerce Insights from Shopify

Ok first up: it all starts with learning your shoppers’ evolving preferences and behaviors. The Braze Data Platform makes it easy to unify and activate shopper insights—in real time—from a range of sources. Now with our enhanced integration with Shopify (Q1 2025), we’re making it even easier to incorporate commercial insights as well. In just a few clicks, you can now connect your Shopify store to Braze, choosing between a standard setup for a Shopify online store with defaults like tracking anonymous or logged-in users, or a custom setup for a “headless” Shopify store.

And, thanks to additional improvements to the Braze Data Platform, we also help you track your shopper’s new eCommerce events and user attributes (Q1 2025 for Shopify customers, Q2 2025 for Non-Shopify customers) natively in Braze. That means when a shopper views a product, updates their cart, starts checkout, or completes a purchase, you have an out-of-the-box solution to take action on these purchasing events, all in real time. With this initial setup, you can also sync your historical data from Shopify products into a Braze Catalog and create campaigns based on previous shopper behavior.

By bringing together historical and real-time Shopify insights with other cross-channel insights, you can get a view into your shoppers’ evolving preferences and behaviors—say they browsed online, favorited a product in the app, or clicked on a promotion from a text message—you can ensure shoppers are engaged at relevant moments of their unique journeys. For example, no shopper wants to be bombarded with ads for an item they’ve already purchased. With Braze, the shopper profile will be updated as soon as the purchase is made; the data then immediately flows to other parts of the customer journey, for example suppressing paid social ads through Braze Audience Sync or updating eligibility for a loyalty award program.

Finally, new support for Shopify product metafields (Q1 2025) allows for richer product descriptions, which you can use to highlight the key features and benefits of those products or services still hanging out in their carts.

Launch campaigns faster with pre-built templates

Now that you have the initial setup completed, you can quickly spin up one of those core eCommerce customer journeys using an out-of-the-box Canvas template (Q1 2025), and here we’ll choose an abandoned cart. This is one of the many native eCommerce Canvas templates available for use cases such as abandoned browse, order confirmation, and post-purchase surveys, with more to come. Next, you can leverage new pre-built eCommerce email templates (Q3 2025) to quickly create visually appealing, brand-approved emails for your abandoned cart customer journey that help improve conversions, and ultimately increase revenue. Additionally, you can also now create landing pages quickly through customizable drag-and-drop eCommerce landing page templates (Q2 2025) that help you promote your products and services and grow your email and SMS lists.

With the foundations in place, you’re now free to spend more time crafting experiences that uniquely meet your shoppers’ needs. With Canvas and BrazeAI™, you’ll be able to take the rich understanding of your shopper to create, personalize, and optimize sophisticated journeys with your brand, for example spotlighting ways to get involved with your community through an interactive, in-app experience.

Deliver engaging and personalized experiences without any code

Once you’ve got some of the basics down, then you can start building more personalized and relevant experiences tied to abandoned carts, or other steps of the customer journey. With dynamic product blocks in email composer (Q3 2025), you can now insert and format highly personalized product recommendations into your email messages—without any coding. This allows you to take further advantage of our real-time stream processor to bring relevant products dynamically into an email, quickly showcasing the exact products or services a shopper had left behind or even surfacing other relevant items.

You can also extend your experiences with a full cross-channel approach by layering in relevant mobile messaging channels, such as WhatsApp and our new WhatsApp Commerce (Q2 2025) capability. By connecting your Meta Catalogs, you can not only engage global shoppers who prefer to connect with brands via messaging apps—you can also send dynamic product messages and even include rich media (Q2 2025) like videos to create a compelling end-to-end shopping experience. Plus, with WhatsApp Lists (Q1 2025), you can better understand shopper preferences and with Click Tracking (Q2 2025) you can retarget them effectively to drive even more conversions.

Get Started with Braze for eCommerce Today

Abandoned carts don't have to mean lost revenue—or a slowdown in your work to build better end-to-end customer experiences. Our new Shopify integration, eCommerce capabilities, and cross-channel features help you more easily start your eCommerce journeys with Braze. These enhancements are designed to make it easier and faster for you to build the campaigns that are essential for running your day-to-day business, so you can spend more time focused on creating the types of experiences that drive enduring relationships with your shoppers and move your business forward.

The decision to purchase is just one of the many touchpoints brands have with their shoppers. Before that even happens, shoppers research and explore other brands’ offerings, check for social validation, or ask for more information. And there’s every interaction post-purchase: all opportunities to build loyalty, retention, and even open up to further sales.

Ready to turn lost sales into growth? To learn more about how these capabilities can enhance your customer engagement strategies. Talk to your Braze Customer Success Manager or contact our sales team.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products and features. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in the Braze Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended October 31, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on December 10, 2024, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.