What Is Zero-Party Data? A Shopify Store Owner's Guide
Zero-party data is the preference a shopper gives you on purpose. Here's how it differs from first-party and third-party data, why it's the most useful thing you can collect on Shopify, and how to start.
Your Shopify store is already collecting a lot of data. Sessions, page views, add-to-carts and abandoned checkouts, all of it piling up in your analytics. The problem is that almost none of it answers the one question that would change what you send next, which is what this particular shopper came to your store looking for in the first place.
That answer is what people mean by zero-party data. Below we'll look at what it is, how it differs from the analytics you already have and how you can start collecting it without paying for another tool.
The four types of marketing data
There are four types of marketing data and they get mixed up often, usually by whoever happens to be selling you the worst one.
| Data type | Where it comes from | How much you can trust it |
|---|---|---|
| Third-party | Bought from a data broker | Low, and dropping as the rules tighten |
| Second-party | Someone else's first-party data, shared or sold on | Depends entirely on how carefully they collected it |
| First-party | Behavior you watch: pages, carts, orders | Solid, though you're still inferring intent from clicks |
| Zero-party | What the customer chose to tell you | The best you'll get |
On the top row our honest advice is not to buy it. Third-party data was mediocre even back when it was cheap and legal nearly everywhere, it has become steadily more restricted since then, and whatever file you end up paying for is available to your competitors as well. Second-party data is a different situation and occasionally worth it, if you know the company you're getting it from and how they collected it, but that's a longer conversation than this post.
First-party vs zero-party data
These two are the ones that get confused most often. First-party data is what you observe: the pages someone viewed, the cart they abandoned, the order they placed.
It's useful information, however it's still inference because you're reading intent off behavior and hoping you've read it correctly. Zero-party data is what someone tells you directly. When a shopper taps "dry skin" or "shopping for a gift", there's nothing left for you to guess at. Behavior can tell you what a person did, a stated preference tells you why they did it.
Accuracy is the obvious advantage there, and you can act on it the same afternoon, since reading a single tap doesn't need a data team. But consent is the part that matters more every year and it's worth being clear about why. Tracking-based personalization runs on data the shopper never really agreed to hand over, which is why so much of it keeps getting restricted, and why the workarounds tend to get shut down a year or two after somebody invents them. A preference that was tapped deliberately doesn't carry that problem. It was given knowingly, so it keeps working regardless of what Safari or the regulators do next.
What it looks like on Shopify
The standard welcome popup trades 10% off for an email address and it works well enough as a way to grow the list. What it doesn't do is tell you anything at all about the person who just signed up.
Every subscriber arriving through that popup looks identical inside your email tool, so the welcome flow has no real option other than sending all of them the same "here's your code" message. Now add a single question to that same popup, something like "What are you looking for?". The answer arrives on the subscriber's profile as a property and at that point the flow can split on it. The dry skin subscriber gets a barrier repair starter, the gift subscriber gets your bestsellers, and both of them still receive the discount you were promising.
You haven't changed the popup much. You asked for one more thing on the way past.
How to start collecting it
You need three things and none of them is a new email platform or a developer.
- A question worth answering, meaning one tap about what the shopper wants rather than whatever you happen to need to move this month.
- Somewhere to put the answer. Klaviyo stores it as a custom property, Mailchimp uses merge fields or tags, Omnisend also calls them custom properties, and Shopify Email keeps you closer to customer segments. The differences matter far less than picking one naming convention and then not quietly changing it later, because every segment you build afterwards will point at that exact string.
- A welcome email that actually uses it, which is the step nearly everybody ends up skipping.
That last one is where this usually breaks down. Stores set up the question, watch the answers arrive for a few weeks, feel good about having collected them, and then never go back to branch the flow on any of it. In Klaviyo that branch is a conditional split and it takes about ten minutes to build. Our suggestion is to build the branch first, even a rough version with two paths, before you spend any time on the wording of the question.
That gap is what we are building Zeropartly to close. It asks the question on the way in and syncs the answer through to Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp or Shopify Email, so that the flows you are already running have something useful to work with. We're launching soon, and you can join the waitlist if you would like to hear when it opens.
Either way the question is the place to start. You can add one to the popup you're already running in an afternoon.