Customers expect smooth shopping experiences across all shopping channels, whether online, in stores, or through wholesale accounts. To deliver this, companies must understand their customers and provide personalized, consistent service everywhere.
Many businesses connect customer information from different systems to achieve this. In fact, 78% of brands now consider their own customer data most valuable for personalization, up from just 37% in 2022.
This article explores how brands can effectively integrate customer data across channels, the challenges they might face, and strategies for creating a unified customer view without overwhelming your team or budget.
What is customer data integration (CDI)?
CDI is about gathering all customer data from different channels and bringing it together in one spot.
Customers create data when they buy things online, visit your store, send emails, or join rewards programs. CDI combines all this scattered information into one clear picture of each customer, or a “single source of truth.” This helps you better understand what customers like, how they behave, and what they need.
Shopify is the only commerce platform that natively integrates these data streams into a unified model. This allows brands to manage everything in one place without relying on disjointed apps or costly middleware, which is why Shopify’s total cost of ownership (TCO) is up to 36% better than its competitors.
Keeping all data in one central spot allows you to understand customers’ shopping journeys and create more personalized online and in-store experiences.
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With all our sales unified in Shopify, from Facebook and Instagram to TikTok, Amazon, and even B2B, Lull is able to deliver exceptional sleep experiences to new audiences.
The hidden costs of “piecemeal integration”
- Slower time to market: Rolling out new sales channels or marketing campaigns is slower if you must spin up integrations from scratch.
- Higher maintenance overhead: Every integration point introduces new testing, version control, and potential security vulnerabilities.
- Risk of errors: A single misalignment in field mappings or data formats can result in inaccurate inventory levels, pricing errors, or incomplete purchase histories.
Why a natively unified platform eases the burden
Shopify’s approach differs by offering many core commerce functions in a single, extensible platform, rather than forcing merchants to piece together standalone systems. Benefits include:
- Fewer custom connectors: With checkout, inventory, and order management already under one roof, there’s less “plumbing” for your engineering team to build and maintain.
- Shared infrastructure: Shopify continuously updates its infrastructure for performance, security, and compliance, reducing the onus on in-house devs.
- Faster store launches: Brands can spin up multiple storefronts and integrate existing tools far more quickly than on platforms requiring large-scale custom builds.
👉 Case study: Daniel Wellington migrated from a heavily composable solution to Shopify, consolidating 59 storefronts into 12 in just five months. The brand built a process that cut down technical complexity and allowed their teams to focus on customer-facing innovations rather than patching integrations.
