Digital marketing as we know it was built on third-party cookies, allowing businesses to build promotional campaigns based on user behavior data captured across their web activity.  While many marketers are concerned by the death of third-party cookies, we can assure you that it isn’t actually a bad thing. Data-driven brands on platforms like Shopify Plus and BigCommerce can still capture data across the customer journey, understand their customers at scale, and build hyper-targeted marketing campaigns — they just need to shift their tactics.  And by tactics I mean both strategy and the right tools to help you get there! Instead of tracking users’ activity across other companies’ websites, brands have had to discover new sources of insights into their target market’s demographics, buying preferences, and browsing behaviors.  What better place to start than your own site? That’s where first-party data comes in.  [tip] Want to see where your ecommerce tracking can improve? Book a data audit with one of our analytics experts. [/tip] First-party data is data that you own, collected directly from your customers through your website, app, or channels like email and SMS. This includes everything from contact details and purchase history to browsing behavior on your site and more. It can be used to build powerful marketing campaigns, create precise audiences for retargeting, and guide product and UI/UX decisions, all while respecting recent privacy regulations.  Adapting to a world without cookies It’s not enough to know what first-party data is, understanding how to collect it in full and utilize it to fuel your marketing efforts is a whole other challenge. Lucky for you, our latest white paper covers everything you need to know about first-party data: What is first-party data? And what isn’t? How to track first-party data in the top reporting tools How to use first-party data to optimize your marketing and make smarter business decisions Learn what using first-party data looks like in practice with insights from industry experts in A World Without Cookies. Download your copy>>>

We are off to the races in 2023 already with Shopify officially launching Commerce Components by Shopify (CCS), an improved offering for large retailers. CCS allows enterprise retailers to access Shopify's foundational, high-performing components, such as its checkout, along with flexible APIs to build dynamic customer experiences that integrate seamlessly with a retailer's preferred existing services. But larger brands don't just want composable commerce. They also want -- actually, need -- complete, accurate, actionable data. Have Shopify's new Commerce Components been designed with the modern data stack in mind? There are lots of good things to say about Commerce Components. Enterprise retailers can take the components they need and leave those they do not, and developers are “free to build with any front-end framework they choose”, says Shopify. CCS uses Shopify's global scale infrastructure, which has over 275 network edge points to enable fast storefronts and checkouts no matter where customers are located -- and in a year where consumers are savvier than ever and demand a great experience. While we are excited about how this will attract larger brands to the Shopify ecosystem, we feel the Data Analytics component is underwhelming -- and won’t allow enterprise brands to track full server-side event data for building marketing attribution, product recommendation, or personalization data models. This component uses ShopifyQL, launched in mid-2022, as a neat query language for charting. But data analysts using ShopifyQL to query Shopify’s own data tables can only query the current state of the customer or order, and not understand the customer journey that led to that order. Popular reports such as marketing attribution by campaign or channel are just not possible from this data set. Furthermore, most enterprise brands we talk to want to own their own data warehouse and have the flexibility to use best-in-class tools like BigQuery, Looker, and dbt to store and analyze the data. Littledata provides a raw event data feed, directly sourced from Shopify’s servers to power just such a modern data stack -- and gives analysts the flexibility to build their own data models. Littledata is excited to work with brands using Commence Components (including headless stores), but we think Shopify will need to lean on its partner network to provide the breadth of functionality, especially in data analysis, that enterprise brands require. For now brands on our Littledata Plus plans are skeptical about the initial release of Commerce Components, just as they have been about Shopify's new Web Pixel and overall Shopify Theme changes.