The popular Shopify e-commerce service has everything you need to create, market, and manage an online business. The platform’s in-app payment platform works on websites, social media platforms, and even as a mobile POS. To make it all happen, Shopify processes and stores massive amounts of data: inventory data, customer data, customer acquisition data, and more.
With all that data available, you can get business-expanding insights by analyzing your Shopify data it with your favorite BI tools. Before you can get to that in-depth analysis, though, you need a way to load, organize and make your data available to those tools. This blog talks about some of the best tools for powering the extract, transform, and load (ETL) data flow for Shopify. To learn more, check out our other post on top ETL Tools.
Build or buy your ETL process
Many ETL tools work with Shopify. Some manage every step of the ETL process, while others are good at just one job. Paid ETL tools give you professional support, time-saving UIs and dashboards, secure cloud storage, and powerful transformations. If you prefer a more hands-on, technical approach, open source ETL tools are a low-cost solution that can be tailored to fit your needs. This blog explains the pros and cons of several ETL choices for Shopify, so you can pick the best one for your online business.
Paid ETL tools for Shopify
Designed for everyone
1. Panoply
If you need a user-friendly platform, Panoply combines high-performance ETL with a cloud data warehouse to handle ingestion and storage with minimal configuration and maintenance. Users can manage the whole data pipeline through a user-friendly dashboard. With one click, you can combine your Shopify data with tons of major data sources including social media apps and BI tools.
Panoply’s all-in-one platform makes a perfect self-service cloud data warehouse for Shopify. With its partners Stitch, Fivetran, and Blendo, retailers can cover the entire vast ecosystem of e-commerce, digital marketing, social media, and analytics data sources.
Panoply offers the same power as Amazon Redshift, but it’s much easier to manage and has a much simpler pricing scheme.
Designed for developers
2. Stitch
Stitch is a high-speed ETL tool that can process billions of records a day and automatically scale data volume up or down. Stitch loads Shopify data into major database and data warehouse platforms including Panoply, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and PostgreSQL. This ETL tool also connects a massive suite of BI tools that can help you take the built-in basics of Shopify and generate complex insights and predictive analysis. Beyond Shopify, Stitch also offers a number of other features. For example, Stitch collects, transforms, and loads Google Analytics data into its own system, where it can automatically provide business insights on your raw data.
3. Blendo
In minutes, Blendo’s cloud-based ETL tool moves data from Shopify into major warehouses including Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Panoply. If you need to collect and analyze data from other sources to get insights on your Shopify data, Blendo also pulls data in from S3 buckets, CSVs, and e-commerce platforms like Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Salesforce, and many others. To get insights beyond what Shopify provides out of the box, Blendo connects all your data to major BI analytics tools like Chartio, Power BI, and Looker.
The Blendo ETL tool is a fast and safe way to load data from Shopify, store it, and get down to data-driven analysis on your e-commerce business. Its powerful capabilities and simple configuration make it a solid ETL choice for Shopify.
4. Fivetran
Fivetran’s time-saving features for programmers include data pipelines that can be set up in minutes, built-in query schemas, automatic transformations, scalable architecture, and over 100 data source connectors. The Fivetran data pipeline extracts Shopify source data and connects it to cloud and on-premises databases and data warehouses like Amazon S3, MongoDB, and Panoply. Fivetran can also help integrate your Shopify data with other data sources like Salesforce, Mailchimp, and more. You can measure the success of your social media ads with connectors for Facebook, Twitter (soon), and others.
The developer-friendly Fivetran ETL tool uploads and preps all your current and historical data, but you can select data to exclude from replication. To lighten the load on your systems, Fivetran reads change logs instead of querying live data. Then it streams the updates in near real time to your output and data warehouse.
Free and open source ETL tools
5. ShopifyETL
ShopifyETL by GitHub contributor datamafia is a Python library that pulls Shopify data down from the cloud and loads it into JSON, either as objects or files on your local system. With this ETL tool, you can perform complex, tailored transformations and queries on specific data you request from Shopify’s backend. Examples are custom data collection for products, orders, and locations.
ShopifyETL’s own API speeds up design work when you need to use the Shopify API. ShopifyETL prevents feature creep with a subclass job system that decouples your work into agile microsystems. See Top Python ETL Tools if you want to learn more about ETL options for Python.
6. singer-io/tap-shopify
tap-shopify is an open-source tap for Shopify for the Singer ETL-scripting tool. With Singer’s taps—data extraction scripts—you can build custom ETL tools that upload data from non-standard sources, formats, and APIs. With tap-shopify, you can write scripts to extract, transform, and upload raw data from all eight Shopify API endpoints, including Customers, Orders, and Transactions. This ETL tool puts all your data types into JSON format and loads the combined data--using a Singer target--to a cloud warehouse. If you want, you can Learn more about Singer taps and targets in this Singer tutorial.
Building a data pipeline for your Shopify data
Panoply’s end-to-end ETL solution makes it easy to get your Shopify e-commerce data into your favorite BI tools like Looker Studio, Power BI, or Looker. In just minutes, you can connect Shopify to a Panoply data warehouse and get it flowing to popular analytics tools.
With Panoply, it’s easy to blend your Shopify data with Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Facebook Ads, and Google Ads data and store it together in one place. Panoply automatically updates the stored data in real time with your latest processed uploads.
To learn more about what Panoply can do for your Shopify store, get a personalized demo!
