Hi there @SK Luke ,

Welcome and thanks for sharing.

Building a custom integration varies depending on the amount of data you have to send to us and how skilled the developers you'll be working with are. I can't really say how long it will take. What I can do is provide you with all of the resources that you will need to build a custom integration and you can check with a developer to see how long it will take them to create it.

Adding a Custom eCommerce Integration is possible via our API, we have both Javascript and server-side endpoints for our Track (for sending events) and Identify (for sending profile properties) APIs.
We recommend sending orders via our server-side API because it avoids a couple of use-cases in which front-end order tracking would not work:
1) if someone is using a javascript-blocking plugin
2) if someone is on a slow computer and javascript does not load in time on their checkout page

The standard setup for ecommerce platforms that do not provide access to server-side code would be to set up an intermediary server that collects the last 5-20 minutes of orders and sends them to us as server-side Track API calls. This ensures all of the order data is complete and bypasses any potential front-end issues. If this is not an option, you can absolutely send us order information via Javascript Track calls with the caveats listed above.

Here's some more specific information on our server-side and Javascript APIs:
Javascript Track API
Javascript Identify API
Server-side Track API
Server-side Identify API

Alex, thanks for the detailed reply.  I do have developers and they have 5-6 touchpoints of data to send mostly tracking what pages customers visit and what they click and then designing campaigns around that.  I got an estimate of around 60 hours to get this up and running, just seemed like a lot to me.  I’ve had a host of other projects and not one has taken that long. Ultimately I am looking for a second opinion to say whether that sounds reasonable, more than anything.

@SK Luke I’ve just done an integration sending a lot of custom fields from a custom business system to Klaviyo. We’ve not yet done integrated tracking events around clicks becoming metrics.

60 hours seems like a lot to me for 5-6 touch points, but I don’t know anything about your site architecture or the specifics around why this is so high.

For us, we spent a lot of time getting the data (which is all disparate across our existing system) centralised, then hooking the events up to sync in the right spots. We also did transactional email conversion (moving all our existing transactions to use Klaviyo)

This took nearly 140 hours for the project, but it sounds like it’s vastly bigger than what you’re looking to do. 

@agrath  thanks for your response.  Here’s what my developer said in terms of what they are doing:

We'll  be using their integration to create tracking for:

• customers active on site
• viewed products
• added to cart
• started checkout
• Placed Order - We'll need batched order data sent every 30 minutes
• Ordered Products
• Fulfilled Orders
• Cancelled Orders
• Refunded Orders

So admittedly I was off by a few touchpoints but this is what we are looking to do. Seeing that your project took that much time helps put this into perspective. Were you doing some of these similar things above?

@SK Luke not similar at all I’m afraid

We’ve got a line of business application (account management + order processing + subscription management) and we are synchronising all our contacts from our system into Klaviyo & we also migrated the on demand transactional emails generated by the system to use Klaviyo for sending.

I appreciate all the info @agrath