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How EY can help
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The EY-Shopify Alliance team can help your business activate and scale e-commerce to increase the potential of online commerce. Learn more.
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Fragmented customer data is limiting retail growth. With the blending of online and offline channels, retailers have more ways than ever to collect customer data but are often left overwhelmed as they struggle to piece together data across disconnected systems. Traditional commerce processes are failing to adapt to changing shopping behaviours, hindering brands from achieving a unified view of the customer — a view essential for personalization, brand advocacy and, ultimately, growth.
Today, retailers face the challenge of creating personalized experiences at scale while managing fragmented customer data. Integrating and deploying cross-channel data effectively is the key for going beyond identity recognition to a deeper understanding of customer behaviour.
Using multiple EY frameworks, we assessed how retailers can move customers from unknown or transactional to fully known customers who become strong brand advocates. By focusing on building a strong known customer base, retailers can reduce customer acquisition costs and create broad and consistent revenue streams.
While capturing data across all touchpoints is crucial to understanding the customer, EY’s analysis focuses on the often-overlooked opportunity of in-store data capture. A robust point of sale (POS) system with a unified data model can effectively bridge this gap, improving in-store data collection and making it more comparable to online processes.
This report explores how Shopify turns retail into a powerful acquisition channel. Shopify’s investment in in-store data capture empowers retailers to seamlessly transition from transactional interactions to building a robust base of known customers. Shopify facilitates growth by centralizing customer data, helping retailers achieve an average known customer rate of 80%*. Shopify’s integrated ecommerce and POS solutions offer retailers a unified view of customer interactions, simplifying the process of building a loyal customer base.
*Data provided by Shopify as of May 2025 across all retailers using Shopify POS.