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Using Shopify + Segment as an alternative to Fivetran ELT

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

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 does Segment sync with a warehouse?​

As order events stream into Segment the tables in your warehouse will be kept in sync with Shopify.

On an Enterprise plan, Segment offers hourly warehouse sync.

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.

Fivetran is limited to daily sync or customers.

Littledata transforms into Segment E-commerce schema which is more usable, including unnesting fields.

Learn more​
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