Hi there,

I hope you’re doing well ?

I believe that the option “Update Shopify customer profiles with Klaviyo data” only update Shopify data like Email Adresses, First name and last Name of a profile.

I think you will maybe have to delete manually people who are not registered. How big is your database?

Kindly

Hello there It does not only update Shopify data, but it also made people “new” email subscribers that were currently unsubscribed. Some for years! This is such a mess. I have over 1200 people on my email newsletter list and don’t know all of them personally. There is no way that I could go through them all and manually delete those who unsubscribed at one time because I have no way of knowing that. 

Hey @The Striped Cat,

@Tomb would be correct in this case that the option you’ve enabled of Update Shopify customer profiles would not actually opt users in or out of a list. In fact, this setting doesn’t pertain to one’s consent. As mentioned in our How to sync fields from Klaviyo to Shopify Help Center article highlighted next to that setting:

Existing Shopify profiles will now be updated with Klaviyo data. New profiles from within Klaviyo will not be synced to Shopify.

The fields that are updated in the Klaviyo to Shopify sync include:

• Email
  The email address of the contact
• First name
  The contact's first name
• Last name
  The contact's last name

I’d be curios to learn how you’ve synced your Shopify contacts to Klaviyo. I ask because, consent details are not synced to Klaviyo automatically from Shopify as part of the integration. As called out in the About the Accepts Marketing Property subsection of the Guide to Integrating with Shopify Help Center article,

Klaviyo will not automatically sync historical subscribers to a list when a customer checks Subscribe new customers to a Klaviyo list. If you need to add historical subscribers to your newsletter list, you can do so with property and flow editing as outlined in How to Add or Combine Lists Without Triggering a Flow. You can also add subscribers to a list manually by following How to Add Subscribers to an Existing List. 

From your experience, it sounds like you may not have imported your unsubscribed users from Shopify to be suppressed within Klaviyo. If you haven’t already, I would also recommend taking a look at the How to Migrate Existing Email Subscribers (and Unsubscribes) into Klaviyo Help Center article to learn more about how to migrate both existing email subscribers and unsubscribed users to Klaviyo. Migrating unsubscribed users from both your previous ESP and your ecommerce platform into Klaviyo is imperative to ensure you’re following various spam regulations, maintaining your email deliverability and keeping clean lists, and keep your subscribers happy by not contacting users who have unsubscribed. 

I hope this helps!

David

Hi David! The only change that I made was clicking over that switch before starting to make a newsletter the other day. As soon as I did that, and then clicked “Update Settings” my husband got an email automatically sent to him asking for his consent to send emails to him. He was laughing because he knew I unsubscribed him years ago. I also got a message from someone that I took off my email subscriber list YEARS ago because she was a problematic customer. That was embarrassing. Both my husband and this woman weren’t even listed as email subscribers when I signed up with Klaviyo. It shouldn’t have needed to update anything to do with them. Within my Shopify customer list, I unsubscribed them, and they haven’t gotten any of my emails since. After this happened I went into my Shopify newsletter subscribers and I saw MANY other people that were now signed up again that I know for a fact have not received emails from me in years because I unsubscribed them, or they unsubscribed themselves. I will attach a screenshot of the slider I clicked. Where it says Advanced, I clicked on Update Shopify customer profiles with Klaviyo data. 

I had a friend actually help me connect my Shopify to Klaviyo that works for Klaviyo. He was with me when I did it, but to be honest, he was a tiny bit unsure of everything but it has been working just fine until I clicked that stupid box! 

Hey @The Striped Cat,

That is an odd behavior, as mentioned prior, selecting that advanced setting of Update Shopify customer profiles with Klaviyo data would not impact the consent of your existing contacts. 

Thankfully, you should be able to identify your unsubscribed users from either your previous ESP or directly from Shopify and import them to your suppression list to ensure you aren’t emailing them again accidentally. In addition to the How to Migrate Existing Email Subscribers (and Unsubscribes) into Klaviyo Help Center article which highlights this, I would also recommend taking a look at our Guide to Suppressed Email Profiles in Klaviyo and How to bulk delete or suppress email contacts in Klaviyo articles which goes over how to import suppressed users to Klaviyo in more details. 

If you are sure you haven’t taking any other actions that may have caused this behavior, I would encourage you to reach out to our wonderful Support colleagues who can investigate this oddity further. Would love if you could follow up on this post once you find out what the cause was!

David

This SAME THING happened to me! I was so distraught and frustrated. I had around 3,000 customers in Shopify with around 650 UNSUBSCRIBED and when I clicked that dumb checkbox I noticed a few hours later that everyone, all 3,000 in Shopify were marked as SUBSCRIBED. So frustrating!

I’ve been in contact with both Shopify and Klaviyo support nonstop for days trying to figure this out. Finally, yesterday someone at Klaviyo finally told me the reason for this was that “Update Shopify profiles with Klaviyo data” was checked. However, the screwup didn’t happen until I actually went in and also checked “Sync SMS Subscription status to Shopify”. THAT’S when email subscribers were all marked as SUBSCRIBED. Ironically, SMS subscribers remained the same. A nightmare!

Lucky for me, about a week previously I had exported a list of my “Unsubscribed” Shopify emails, so I was able to bring that back into Klaviyo as a suppression list. Thank goodness!

I feel your pain. This has caused a lot of stress for me over the past few days. Klaviyo should be more clear about what data is synced back to Shopify and I have no idea why anyone who was Unsubscribed/Suppressed in Shopify should ever have that status changed. Also I believe that Shopify and Klaviyo use different forms of marking a customer as “Subscribed” so I have no idea why this would happen anyway. Ugh! Honestly I’m so upset about this, I would just quit Klaviyo right now but I feel like I’m already in too deep to leave, now that my most “accurate” data exists with them. 

No, this is not true. I talked to Shopify and they do NOT keep backups of custom databases, so there is not back to get these unsubscribed people back and suppress them again. I didn’t use an ESP either, I just used Shopify’s native email marketing tool.

Hey @lmsburroughs,

You should be able to identify users within Shopify who have subscribed for email or sms by filtering your customers using the email_subscription_status and sms_subscription_status options. In fact, Shopify actually offers their own example of these segment filters in their Shopify-based filters reference guide under the Email subscription status and SMS subscription status options. 

Once identified, you should have the capability to export this segment and suppress them within Klaviyo. You can also find Shopify’s help article on exporting customers here: Importing and exporting customers

If you haven’t had a chance, I would also suggest taking a look at some of our helpful articles on understanding how Klaviyo manages subscription and consent from your profiles from our Understanding explicit vs. implicit consent and Understanding Consent in Profiles Help Center articles.

David

Hi David,

Thank you for your answer. I am aware of how to export a subscribed or unsubscribed segment from Shopify. I was referring to the fact that once Klaviyo overwrites all that subscriber status data--which is what happened in this user’s case, and they DID NOT have that previous unsubscribed segment already exported and saved somewhere-- there is no way to retrieve that unsubscribed segment it if you had not exported this segment previously.

Luckily, I had already exported that segment about a week BEFORE Klaivyo changed all my subscriber status’ to “subscribed” and I lost all account of everyone who had unsubscribed, which is also what seems to have happened to @The Striped Cat. This was very distressing for me, but I was able to upload said “unsubscribed” segment as a suppression list in Klaviyo to fix the problem. But, it still caused some serious stress for me!

I’m still trying to understand why that happened and have been emailing with Support frequently about the issue. It seems to have something to do with the fact that I was syncing my Klaviyo data back to Shopify, but the problem occurred when I also clicked on the “Sync SMS subscription status back to Shopify”. Also strange because SMS subscription status remained in tact, only email subscription status was changed within Shopify.

Thank you,

Lisa