Shopify Analytics with a storefront API frontend

Retired Boards Appdev Custom Storefronts

Topic summary

Problem: Integrate Shopify Analytics, including Live View, into a Shopify Plus store using a custom frontend built on the Storefront API.

Early status: No documented way to enable Shopify Analytics from a headless frontend; the thread saw bumps seeking a solution.

Resolution and developments:

  • Community solution: The OP reverse‑engineered the pre‑Hydrogen analytics API and released react‑shopify‑analytics (used on sweetsideofsweden.com) to send analytics events from a custom storefront.
  • Official solution: Shopify later introduced Hydrogen React utilities, including sendShopifyAnalytics, providing an endorsed method to emit Shopify analytics from headless storefronts.

Recommendations: Prefer Hydrogen React for an official, maintained approach, unless avoiding its additional utilities/components is a priority; then the community package is a viable alternative.

Key terms:

  • Storefront API: Shopify’s API for building custom (headless) storefronts.
  • Hydrogen React: Shopify’s React library for custom storefronts, with analytics helpers like sendShopifyAnalytics.

Outcome: Resolved with clear implementation paths; no outstanding questions noted.

Summarized with AI on January 24. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hey,

We’re currently running a Shopify Plus store with a custom frontend using the Storefront API. We haven’t been able to find a way to integrate Shopify Analytics into it to get the live view etc working.

This is a requirement since we’d like to get all the tracking working.

Thanks.

2

Going to bump this since there still doesn’t appear to be any solutions for this.

3

bump

4

This has now been resolved first by me reverse engineering the analytics API (pre-hydrogen) with the package https://github.com/sweet-side-of-sweden/react-shopify-analytics for https://www.sweetsideofsweden.com and then finally by Shopify themselves with hydrogen-react, see https://shopify.dev/docs/api/hydrogen-react/2023-04/unstable/utilities/sendshopifyanalytics

I’d recommend going with hydrogen-react unless you really want to avoid the additional utilities and components that hydrogen-react comes with :cowboy_hat_face:

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