Using Segment Consent Management with Shopify

This article explains how Littledata works with Segment's Consent Management.

What is Segment Consent Management?

Segment Consent Management accepts signals from your Consent Management Platform (CMP) to capture and enforce user consent preferences, routing events only to destinations approved by the user.

Segment requires every event from your sources to include end-user consent preferences, captured by your CMP or application logic, in the form of the consent object.

How does Littledata work with Segment Consent Management?

Littledata uses Shopify's Customer Privacy API to track customer consent. Most Shopify cookie banners and some Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) support this Customer Privacy API.

For Consent Mode to work, you must have a cookie banner. You can set it up from your Shopify Admin by going to Settings -> Customer Privacy -> Cookie Banner.

If your store uses another CMP, your CMP will need to update the customer privacy API with the given consent, or use a plugin for OneTrust.

Mapping of Shopify consent types to Segment

Shopify’s Customer Privacy API supports four consent types, and Littledata maps these onto Segment Consent.

Segment Consent Type	Shopify Consent Type
Advertising	marketing
DataSharing	sale_of_data
Functional	preferences
Analytics	analytics

For all consent types a true value equals a 'yes' value on Shopify.

Segment Consent value	Shopify Consent value
true	yes
false	no

This consent object is sent with all events within the event context object.

Configuring Segment destinations to use consent

You must configure the Segment destinations to decide which ones are Advertising, Analytics, Functional or DataSharing.

You can ignore step 2 (integrating your CMP) because Littledata has already done this for the Shopify source.

Blocking all client-side events based on consent

If you prefer not to collect non-consenting customer data in Segment, then you can exclude client-side events using source middleware for Segment’s AnalyticsJS library.

This example middleware script would drop events from being triggered if context.consent.categoryPreferences.Advertising is not true.

window.analytics = window.analytics || [];
// Temporary implementation before the real script loads
if (!window.analytics.addSourceMiddleware) {
  window.analytics.addSourceMiddleware = function () {
   const e = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments);
   e.unshift('addSourceMiddleware');
   window.analytics.push(e);
   return window.analytics;
  };
}
window.analytics.addSourceMiddleware(({ payload, next }) => {
    if(payload?.obj?.context?.consent?.categoryPreferences?.Advertising) {
        next(payload);
    }
});