How will Chrome's third party cookie block affect websites in 2024?

[Jamie_Grove]

Hi, folks.

This year Chrome will begin blocking third party cookies in Q3 (supposedly).

https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/3pcd#report-issues

If you use the INSPECT tool within Chrome now, you can see which cookies on your site will be impacted. There are a lot of Shopify calls with cookies on all of our sites, including most image requests. I looked but couldn't find any discussion from Shopify on how they plan to address this so I thought I'd start a thread here.

Any news?

[peasquared]

I feel like this is a landmine waiting to happen. Definitely feeling lost on what to recommend to my clients who are on Shopify.

[Lightinglegends]

I don't understand why there's not more information from shopify about this massive change. Speaking to Meta they are advising to move to Woocommerce as shopify has not got a solution. Surely big shifts like this need to be communicated to Shopify store owners? 

[Imogen]

Hi there, @Jamie_Grove. Thanks for taking the time to reach out to the Shopify Community Forums with your questions and concerns around these third-party cookies changes!

Our Team here took some time to speak with other folks at Shopify about the situation you've brought up here. We do have some information to share with you based on what we were provided, so I hope this is helpful!

First, Shopify as a platform doesn't require third-party cookies, so nothing native on your Shopify Store should be impacted by these changes. Secondly, as these are changes being made by Google, and not changes made by Shopify, Google is the entity meant to be informing it's users on these changes. They have created an FAQ page that has information you can refer to for how these changes impact using chrome. Lastly, third-party cookies have been unavailable on other popular browsers for years, so these changes with Google Chrome are not something Shopify hasn't seen before. With that being said, Shopify is aware of these changes, and is monitoring things internally in order to evaluate how these changes may impact our merchants.

Hope this sheds some light into things for you!

[hp05]

To me, this is not a great answer, it just blames it on google and other browsers, but does not bring up any of the issues or recommendations that there may be with advertising tracking on our shopify sites or anything

[guest4]

We were troubleshooting an unrelated issue, but noticed recently that when we open Chrome Developer Tools from within Shopify, while using our embedded app, there are 10s of thousands of notifications regarding this issue. It's happening on our app, random 3rd party app we sampled, as well as the Shopify built Shopify GraphiQL App.

Our app isn't using cookies, so we started expanding the problem domain and found it happening in these other apps. This issue negatively impacts the performance of Chrome and can negatively impact the development and/or troubleshooting process of embedded apps.

Figure 1

Random 3rd party app. See 80,000+ Third-party cookie notifications

Figure 2

See 40,000+ Third-party cookie notifications in the Shopify GraphiQL App.