Mailchimp: Email & SMS

Hi there, if you installed the ShopSync app prior to 4/4/19, our app was engineered to include past customers who "Accept email marketing", orders, and products in Shopify. If they showed unsubscribed in Shopify, we ignored the email. In other words, we looked at Shopify as the "truth" and nothing else.

Although our intentions for this were done for all the right reasons, it, unfortunately, didn't work for everyone as you saw with your subscriber counts going up. With how we used to perform the initial sync, it would have been possible to re-subscribe users if they had opted out from a Mailchimp list previously. Or, it's also possible the old integration missed real subscribers with how it was designed.

Now, we've changed up how we handle the data from Shopify to Mailchimp on the initial sync. Here's more information on how it works:

Before any data is processed by ShopSync, we perform integrity checks with Mailchimp to ensure these customers can be sent to the list that is connected.

For example, if someone opted out of a list in the past, we won't add the email again. We'll also update Shopify with the correct status that Mailchimp shows. That way, the most current subscriber status in Mailchimp is synced with the store.

After the initial sync is complete, we'll continue adding customers, orders, and products from your store to Mailchimp as transactions occur. We'll add customers that visit your store who are deemed transactional as well. That way, you can use Mailchimp's automations to trigger abandoned carts and order notifications. If someone unsubscribes from a Mailchimp campaign or automation in the future, we'll sync the opt-out status back to Shopify and vice versa.

If you're concerned that the store subscribers won't match up with Mailchimp, we recommend comparing customers from your store with Mailchimp unsubscribe data. You could then manually unsubscribe customers in Shopify. Another option would be to send out a light email after the sync - maybe something to the effect of "We're updating our customer preferences, click here to opt-out".

We're very sorry for any inconvenience.

Hi there, we saw your review and wanted to get in touch. You can reach us anytime through “Contact Support” within the app. Please note, you do not have to be paid user of Mailchimp to get basic troubleshooting or set up help.

In order to route you to the proper support team, please ensure you are logged in. Again, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and frustration and will help all that we can.

Thank you for your review. We've reached out to you via email to provide a way for you to get some help with your account and billing.

Hi there, thank you for your feedback. After extensive testing, we've figured out how this could be happening after finding a bug in Shopify during checkout. We've been in contact with their technical team, and they have acknowledged this is a glitch on their end. They are working hard to deploy a fix for this problem.

Here's why you are having the previous subscribers moved to unsubscribed (or transactional).

1. Let's say jim@gmail.com checks out in your store and opts out of marketing on their first checkout. In Shopify, this customer is NOT subscribed at this point.
2. Later on, you decide to connect ShopSync with an existing Mailchimp Audience.
3. jim@gmail.com IS currently subscribed in Mailchimp in this example - perhaps you gathered their email address previously via another platform or curated them from a pop-up/landing page or social media.
4. With ShopSync now connected, jim@gmail.com comes back to place an order for the second time, and this time they opt-in at checkout.
5. Here's the bug...Shopify doesn't update that customer to be subscribed to marketing on the second order.
6. Because the user is still deemed to be opted out of marketing, Shopify passes this information to Mailchimp as unsubscribed; if they don't complete the checkout, they would be marked as transactional.

The only workaround we can advise is to resubscribe the customer via the Shopify admin manually. This action will POST a customer update to Mailchimp with the correct subscriber status to your Audience.

Thanks again for the feedback, but please understand the unsubscribe behavior is not because of ShopSync specifically. Because of the bug, any app listening to a customer update from Shopify would pass the wrong information at this point on the customer's marketing status.

We don't have visibility into Shopify's product release or bug fix roadmap, but I'm happy to reach back out directly when this issue is patched. In the interim, please let us know if there's anything else we can do to help.

Hi there, I'm sorry if you had trouble getting in touch with our support team in your preferred time frame. We looked up your tickets for frippoutdoors.com and itsa-girl-thing.com, and it looks like we responded to your initial questions in less than 5 hours. As a free service, our best response times can range anywhere from 24 to 72 hours depending on volumes.

Also, we saw your review while we were actively troubleshooting the connection with Mailchimp. As noted in our response back, the frippoutdoors.com store had something under the hood that wasn't configured correctly in Mailchimp. We were able to work with their team and get things resolved for you. itsa-girl-thing.com shows that it is also installed correctly and processing data.

If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to reach back out to our support team.

Hi System76, we appreciate the feedback. We're trying to get our heads around how the app was sending spam to your customers as described. The integration between Mailchimp and Shopify syncs data from your store to a Mailchimp Audience; we don't send any emails on your behalf. The domain "shopsync" is a company we acquired last year, whose technologies are still the fundamentals around the app. We'd welcome further dialogue about this matter by contacting us via support.

Hi there, we saw your review and wanted to confirm you had seen the support response that we sent back. We had only received your question a short time ago and responded as fast as we could. We are under hefty volumes with installs (and questions) so please allow some time for us to respond to inquiries.

As noted in the support ticket back to you, this error is a permissions issue, and it will be necessary to reach out to the owner of the Shopify account so they can grant you access to view and use the ShopSync application.

Let us know if you have any follow up questions. Feel free to reach back out to us at support@shopsync.io.

Hi there, we responded to you via a support ticket, but we'd like to also post something publicly here for others to digest if they're trying to use something else other than the customer shipping information for their Mailchimp contact.

When a customer checks out from Shopify, the shipping address is saved as the customers "default address" which is used for the customer update coming to Mailchimp. Unfortunately, Shopify does not allow the store owner to change this setting, forcing us to push that over as the customer's address.

We could temporarily override the customer address by using the order's billing address. However, the problem with this approach is that the customer's data in Shopify will still be using the shipping address. If we get another hook for the customer for any reason, it will then switch it back to the shipping address, making this a challenging process to support.

At the moment, our hands are a bit tied with how the Shopify data is coming to us, and we would recommend this to be fixed by Shopify. We hope that this API logic will change in the future.

We understand this technical matter may need clarification for various use-cases. If users have additional questions, please reach out to our support desk at mc4shopifysupport@mailchimp.com.

Hi there, here at ShopSync we can answer all of your questions regarding our application. We are not affiliated with Mailchimp and are unable to provide support for their app or how to use Mailchimp.

We're sorry to pass you off, but you can reach out to their excellent customer service team over at https://mailchimp.com/help/. You should be able to chat with them and take things from there.

We'd greatly appreciate an updated review reflecting the experience with ShopSync's capabilities and what it is designed to do.