Question from Reddit user:
As so often before, I feel like I am the only one—the first one ever—to have such a need.
It’s hard to comprehend for me.
If you sell something, you want to continue the relationship or even have to build it first before the first sale—unless your product is a pure impulse buy or commodity and your relationship is exclusively transactional.
Anyway, I sell by finding leads, sorting them into suspects, qualifying them to be prospects, and finally converting them into customers.
It’s a pretty simple pipeline.
As a bonus, if I treat them right, they will continue to buy from me.
It’s essential to have some form of CRM to do this, whether on a piece of paper, in lists, or using software.
I chose PipeDrive for its simplicity in modeling your pipeline and relatively low cost to start.
But now I keep contact information in two systems, which need to stay in sync.
Shopify collects contact information when somebody uses the ‘contact us’ form and creates a ‘customer’ record (I know, it’s hilarious).
I also create customer accounts that I invite my prospects to activate directly from Shopify via the built-in account invite function.
If they do, they will have an active customer account in Shopify.
Here comes the tricky part.
Every new contact (=email) becomes another ‘customer’ in Shopify because they only have this one dimension.
When I do outreach (either planning phone calls or visits or sending emails, etc.), I need to make sure that it reaches the right person, and it matters whether they have bought before or not.
Has anybody else fought this battle, or am I the only one (and may need to abandon Shopify as a platform)?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
And again, I can’t believe that I am the first or the only one…
am I?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
You are absolutely not the first or only one with this need; it is a fundamental challenge for any growing business using separate e-commerce and CRM platforms, and you should definitely not abandon Shopify.
The discrepancy you see is because Shopify is product-centric and treats every email submission as a new “customer,” while Pipedrive is relationship-centric and focuses on a “person” moving through a sales pipeline.
The immediate solution is to use a direct integration tool from the Pipedrive Marketplace or the Shopify App Store, such as Zapier or similar connectors, to handle the basic two-way sync of contact and order data.
However, for a powerful, custom, and highly reliable integration that handles your specific pipeline stages, you need to build an API-level connection between the Pipedrive API and the Shopify API.
The long answer is:
Your challenge is the classic “CRM vs. E-commerce Platform” dilemma.
Shopify is excellent at the transactional layer (the buying process), and Pipedrive is excellent at the relationship layer (the selling process).
The reason they don’t natively align is that a Pipedrive Person can be a Suspect, Prospect, or Customer, while a Shopify Customer is simply anyone who has left an email address.
The simple one-to-one synchronization provided by off-the-shelf apps often breaks down when you need complex logic, such as updating a Pipedrive Deal stage when a customer makes their first purchase in Shopify, or creating a specific Pipedrive Activity when a Shopify ‘Contact Us’ form is submitted.
The best solution for you, which offers complete control over the data flow and logic, is a custom, server-side implementation using the Shopify API and the Pipedrive API.
This approach allows you to define exactly what happens when an event occurs.
For instance, when a new order is created in Shopify, the Shopify API triggers a webhook.
This webhook sends the order data to a secure server environment, such as one managed via a Google Cloud Platform function or a lightweight service like Stape, with tracking enabled by Google Tag Manager on your site.
A custom script in this server environment then receives the data and uses the Pipedrive API to search for the corresponding Person by email address.
If the person exists, the script updates their deal stage to “Customer,” adds a custom field for “Lifetime Value,” and logs the order details as a new activity.
If the person doesn’t exist, it creates a new Person and Deal in the “Customer” stage.
Conversely, when you update a lead to “Prospect” in Pipedrive, the Pipedrive API could trigger a webhook that calls back to the server, which then uses the Shopify API to send the customer an account activation invite.
This level of granular control over the data flow, which is not possible with basic connectors, ensures that your Pipedrive pipeline stages are always accurate reflections of the customer’s true transactional status in Shopify.
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