If your Shopify store serves customers in the EU, then being GDPR compliant is a must. However, simple solutions like banners are sadly never enough. Fear not: Analyzify is integrated with all the major solutions in the market and provides you with full compatibility! Let’s dive in.
If you wish to get more information about how Shopify & GDPR works, you may want to check out our comprehensive guide.
What is GDPR & do you really have to be compliant?
General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR in short, is a type of privacy law to ensure the protection and privacy of data in the European Union. According to GDPR, if a user doesn’t give their consent, then data cookies and tracking of that user are simply not allowed.
Sadly, privacy policies or simple consent banners do not cut it for your store to be GPDR-compliant. What’s more is that if you violate these regulations, you are at risk of being fined, so making sure of your store’s compliance is really important.
In short, even though you are not located there, if you serve any customer who are located in the EU, your Shopify store needs to be GDPR-compliant!
Common Mistakes
As we’ve mentioned, being GDPR-compliant requires some additional effort. Here are the most common mistakes done by Shopify merchants that count as GDPR violations:
Privacy Policy
More often than not, most stores’ privacy policies don’t include all the needed details. Another mistake is that privacy policies are not linked through the consent banner clearly for the user to take a look.
Consent Banner
Most consent banners don’t have the proper categories (such as personalization, security, analytics, ads, etc.) Additionally, “Accept” and “Don’t Accept” options are often not equally visible, and all the options come pre-checked.
Tracking
The most common issue with tracking is that it starts before consent is even provided. Other issues include the tracking still working on some of the pages even if the user doesn’t provide consent, or that it carries more data than the user has given consent for.
Note:
Google Analytics and Google Ads integrations allow sending data without waiting for the user's consent preference. At this point, it is important to correctly send the user's consent preference with the Google request. This situation makes it mandatory to properly push Google Consent Arguments to the dataLayer. For example, if the data is sent as denied, Google processes this data without violating user privacy. Analyzify considers the Google Consent setup in Advanced mode.Learn more information about Google Basic and Advanced mode.
Note that when your store is fully integrated with a GDPR app, you will only be able to track the data and conversion rates of the customers who gave their consent. For example, if only %60 of your customers gave their consent, then the data regarding the visit/conversion rates, etc. on your Google Analytics or Google Ads will only be accurate as %60.
Which GDPR apps does Analyzify work with?
Analyzify is designed to integrate smoothly with your consent management tool, ensuring that we respect user privacy choices effectively. This integration allows you to maintain compliance with GDPR regulations while still leveraging valuable analytics data.
For optimal performance, we recommend using a consent management tool that supports Google Consent Mode V2 and includes the Shopify Customer Privacy API. These features allow for an enhanced user experience by enabling your website to adjust how it collects and uses data based on the consent preferences set by users.
To better understand and implement consent mode settings, as well as to verify if the CMP you're using is compliant, we've prepared a comprehensive tutorial for you: Implement Consent Mode & GDPR-Compliant Setup .
If you're unsure which consent management platform (CMP) to use with Analyzify, please don't hesitate to reach out to our support team. Our expert team is ready to guide you in selecting the best solution for your needs.
How does it work?
Analyzify offers a tracking setup that is completely GDPR compliant and uses the Google Consent Mode. You will be asked about your GDPR preference, and at the setup phase, if you choose the Do-It-Yourself GDPR option, our comprehensive setup tutorials (for the apps mentioned above) will be here to guide you on the next pages.
Please note that this setup is relatively complex and requires a few technical steps. We provide all the guidance possible, including detailed documentation, but if you don't have any experience with editing your theme and adjusting the app settings, this might be hard for you.
If that’s the case, you can always ask for help from our experts to handle your setup for you at no extra cost.
