Connect your Shopify store
Install the Mailsoftly app on your Shopify store, sync customers, orders, products and segments, then tie campaign revenue back to the emails that earned it.
The Mailsoftly Shopify app pulls your store into your email program. Your customers arrive as contacts with the marketing consent they gave you, your Shopify segments become audiences you can send to, and the orders that follow a campaign are counted back against that campaign.
It reads your store and never writes to it. Every permission Mailsoftly asks Shopify for is a read permission, so nothing in this guide can change a product, an order or a customer record in your shop.
This guide takes you from the Integrations catalog to a connected store, then through each screen the app adds, and finishes with the two questions people ask last: how it is billed, and what happens to the data if you leave.
Find Shopify in your integrations
Open Integrations. Everything Mailsoftly can connect to sits in one searchable catalog, and Shopify is one of the tiles. A green check on the tile means your store is already connected.
Click the tile. Whether or not you have connected a store, it opens the Shopify app in a new browser tab, so your Integrations page stays where it was. There is no Shopify entry in the sidebar; this tile is the way in, and it stays the way back in afterwards.
Anyone on your team can open the Shopify app. It is not restricted to admins, which also means anyone on your team can disconnect it, so it is worth agreeing who owns the connection before you start.
Open the Shopify app and read what it will do
The app opens on its Dashboard. With no store connected yet, that page is an explanation rather than a report: a short pitch, four cards for the four things it syncs, and a three step summary of the connection itself.
- Customer Sync imports your Shopify customers and keeps them current
- Order Insights tracks orders and ties revenue to your campaigns
- Product Catalog pulls in your products
- Smart Segments brings your Shopify segments across as audiences
Along the top sit five tabs: Dashboard, Customers, Orders, Products and Segments. Until a store is connected the last four carry a padlock and cannot be opened. Connecting the store unlocks all of them at once.
Press Connect when you are ready. The next step is the only part that involves Shopify’s own screens.
Enter your store domain and approve the connection
The Connect Shopify Store box asks for one thing: your store domain. That is your myshopify.com address, not the custom domain your shoppers see. If your storefront is at a branded domain, the address you need is still the one that ends in .myshopify.com, and you will find it in your Shopify admin under your store settings.
The field is forgiving. Type the full mystore.myshopify.com, paste a URL with https:// on the front, or type just the store handle; Mailsoftly tidies it into the right shape before it goes anywhere.
Press Connect and Shopify takes over. You will see Shopify’s own permission screen listing what Mailsoftly is asking for:
- Read your orders, customers and checkouts
- Read your products
- Read your analytics, customer events and marketing events
Approve it and you land back on the Mailsoftly Shopify Dashboard with the store attached. The first full sync starts on its own, so there is nothing else to press.
You can also install from the Shopify App Store instead. If you are already signed in to Mailsoftly the store links to your account straight away. If you are not, Shopify sends you to Mailsoftly to sign up first and the store attaches as soon as your account exists.
One store per account, and one account per store. If Shopify tells you the store is already linked elsewhere, or Mailsoftly tells you this account already has a different store, disconnect the old pairing first. Neither side will quietly reassign a store you are still using.
Watch the first sync land
The Dashboard becomes a report the moment the store is attached. While the first pass runs you will see a sync banner across the top; when it settles, the store name, a green status dot and the time of the last update sit in the header.
Four cards give you the month at a glance: Total Revenue, Orders, Emails Sent and Total Subscribers, each with the change against the previous period. Under them, two charts split your revenue between email driven and organic orders and plot orders against revenue over time. A Revenue by Campaign card ranks your campaigns by the money they brought in, and an Audience Insights panel counts new subscribers, unsubscribers and active subscribers.
The footer is the one to check while things are still settling. It shows the time of the last sync and how many customers, products and orders have arrived, with a Sync Now button beside them. The header carries the same thing as Refresh, and each tab has its own button for that one data type, so you can re-pull just your orders without touching anything else.
You do not have to keep pressing these. After the first sync, Shopify tells Mailsoftly about new and changed customers, orders and products as they happen. The buttons are there for a backfill or when you want to be certain you are looking at the current picture.
One banner is worth acting on immediately. Revenue tracking needs a small piece called Mailsoftly Tracker switched on in your theme. The banner links straight to your theme editor: open App embeds, turn on Mailsoftly Tracker, then come back and press I’ve enabled it. Until that is on, orders still sync but none of them can be traced back to a campaign.
Read the marketing consent that came with each customer
The Customers tab lists everyone who came across from your store, newest first. Beyond the name, email and location it carries the two columns that matter most: Email Subscription and SMS Subscription. Each reads either a green subscribed badge or a grey Email Not Subscribed, taken directly from the marketing consent recorded on that customer in Shopify. Two more columns, Orders and Amount Spent, come from the same sync, so you can see who buys as well as who agreed to hear from you.
Every Shopify customer who has an email address is imported, whichever way that consent flag points. That is deliberate: a shopper who declined marketing email is still a real customer, and their orders still count towards your store reporting. But it puts a decision in your hands.
Importing a customer who reads Email Not Subscribed does not, by itself, keep them out of a Mailsoftly send. The consent that came from Shopify is recorded and shown to you, it is not applied as a filter to your campaigns. If your store’s marketing consent is the permission you rely on, send to a segment built on that consent rather than to your whole Shopify audience. Step 6 is exactly how to do that.
Clicking a name opens the full Mailsoftly contact profile, with a back link that returns you here. From the row menu you can edit, archive or delete a contact like any other. Changes made in Shopify come back to you on their own: an updated customer updates the contact, including the consent flags, and a customer deleted in Shopify is deleted from Mailsoftly too.
Your Shopify customers also appear in your normal Contacts screen, so segments, automations and imports treat them like any other contact from here on.
Send to a Shopify segment
The Segments tab mirrors the segments you have already built in your Shopify admin. Mailsoftly does not define them; it copies them, and it keeps the membership in step with your store.
Here is the round trip, end to end:
1. In your Shopify admin, build the segment you want to mail. A common one for a first send: customers whose email subscription status is subscribed and who have placed at least one order. 2. Back in Mailsoftly, open the Segments tab and press Sync Segments. 3. The row appears with a Processing badge while the members are pulled across, then flips to Synced with a member count. 4. Create a campaign and pick that segment as the recipient list. From the campaign’s point of view it is an ordinary Mailsoftly list.
Because the dimensions live in Shopify, you get everything Shopify’s segment editor offers: order count, amount spent, products purchased, subscription status, location, dates. Build the audience where the data is, then send it from here.
Two things to know so nothing surprises you. Each sync replaces the membership of the list rather than adding to it, which is what keeps a lapsed customer from lingering in a segment they no longer qualify for. And only customers who have already synced can join a segment, so if you are setting everything up at once, let the customer sync finish before you press Sync Segments. The Refresh button on the Dashboard runs them in the right order for you.
Tie revenue back to the campaign that earned it
The Orders tab is your store’s order history inside Mailsoftly: order number, customer, date, total, payment status, fulfillment status, item count, sales channel and delivery method. Filter pills across the top narrow it to Paid, Pending or Refunded, and the search box finds an order by the customer’s email address.
The totals are net of refunds, so a partly refunded order shows what you actually kept rather than what was originally charged. That is also the figure the Dashboard uses, which is why its revenue cards can move down as well as up.
This is where the theme embed from step 4 pays off. When someone clicks through one of your campaigns and buys, the tracker marks that order with the campaign it came from. Those orders are the ones counted under Revenue from Email on the Dashboard; everything else is counted as Organic. The Revenue by Campaign card then ranks your campaigns by the money they brought in, and you can sort it by top revenue or by most recently sent.
The button on this tab is labelled Sync Last 1 Month’s Orders, but the backfill actually reaches back six months. Press it once after you connect and you will have half a year of order history to compare against, without waiting for new orders to accumulate.
Understand billing, disconnecting and your data
Two housekeeping matters, both worth knowing before you commit.
Billing moves to Shopify. Once your store is connected, your Mailsoftly subscription is handled through your Shopify account rather than through a card held by us. The plan pages inside Mailsoftly redirect to a Shopify subscription page showing the plans available to connected stores, and approving one sends you through Shopify’s own confirmation screen. Charges appear on your Shopify invoice, recur every thirty days, and can be cancelled either from that page in Mailsoftly or from your Shopify admin. Cancelling returns you to the free plan and only takes effect once Shopify confirms it, so you are never showing as cancelled here while still being charged there.
Disconnecting and uninstalling are not the same thing. The Disconnect button in the Shopify app header revokes the connection and then removes the synced data: the customers that came from Shopify, their orders, your products and the contact lists built from Shopify segments. Removing the app from your Shopify admin instead stops the sync at once, and Shopify asks us to erase the store’s data about two days later. Either way the erasure is thorough, so if you want to keep any of those contacts, export them first.
One more point for anyone who answers privacy questions on your behalf: when a shopper asks your store to erase their data through Shopify, that request reaches Mailsoftly too and their contact record is deleted here as well. You do not have to remember to do it twice.
With the store connected, the consent visible, a segment syncing and the tracker on, your campaigns stop being a guess and start being a line item.
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