Using Shopify + Segment as an alternative to Fivetran ELT

For brands wanting to get Shopify customer data into a data warehouse, Segment + Littledata can be a good alternative to an Extract, Load and Transform (ELT) tool like Fivetran.

How does Segment sync with a data warehouse?

As order events stream into Segment from Littledata's Shopify source, the customer and orders tables in your warehouse will be kept in sync with Shopify.

On a Business plan, Segment offers hourly warehouse sync.

Which tables can be extracted?

Littledata can import all the historic orders from Shopify into Segment. This also updates the customer records in Segment.

In your warehouse you will have two tables - customers and orders - and from there you can infer exactly which products were brought and when.

The customer table will have traits as the columns and orders will have order event properties as the columns.

How does Littledata extract orders from Shopify?

For brands on an annual Plus plan, Littledata can set up an order import from Shopify to Segment, typically taking a few days to transfer.

Once the historic orders are in sync, our server connection with Shopify will stream them in realtime into Segment.

How is this better than Fivetran?

Fivetran will extract the raw order and customer tables from Shopify but with native values from Shopify’s API.

Littledata transforms into Segment Ecommerce schema which is more usable, including unnesting fields.

Here's a quick comparison:

Feature	Fivetran	Littledata + Segment
Sync frequency	Daily (or less frequent)	Real-time and hourly sync (with Segment Business)
Data schema	Native Shopify API fields	Segment Ecommerce schema (unnested, analytics-ready)
Historic data import	Yes, but raw format	Yes, with enrichment and mapping to Segment schema
Event enrichment	No	Yes, with ecommerce context and calculated traits
Attribution tracking	No	Built-in multi-touch attribution via Segment
Identity resolution	No	Yes, via Segment Personas
Maintenance	User responsible for connector updates	Managed, auto-updates for ecommerce changes

Learn more

• See how the Shopify to Segment connection works

• View our Segment tracking plan & event schema

• Get started with the connection on your store

• Read Segment's source documentation