Connect Letterhead to Shopify

Overview

Connecting your Shopify store to Letterhead brings two things together, both managed from one panel:

• Purchase activity — what a reader buys appears on their contact profile, next to how they read your newsletters.
• Product sync — the things you sell flow into your curation library, so you can feature them in a newsletter as ready-made content blocks.

Both are opt-in, and Letterhead only reads from your store — it never creates, changes, or removes anything in Shopify.

If you sell through Stripe rather than Shopify, see Connect Letterhead to Stripe instead. The two work much the same way.

Before you start

• You’ll need to sign in to your Shopify store during the connection process — the account you use must be able to install apps on the store.
• Connecting integrations is an administrator task — if you don’t see the option, ask a company administrator.

How to connect

1. Go to Integrations in your company settings.
2. Find the Shopify card and open it.
3. Choose Connect with Shopify.
4. Shopify asks you to sign in and approve the connection. Approve it, and you’re returned to Letterhead with the store connected.

Two optional toggles appear in the same panel once the store is connected.

What your readers buy, on their contact profile

Once the store is connected, orders start arriving in Letterhead as they happen. Go to Audience → Contacts, open a contact, and their purchases sit in the Activity feed alongside their opens and clicks — so you can see what a reader buys and how they read, in one place.

Two things shape what you’ll see:

• It starts from the day you connect. Orders placed before then aren’t imported, so the feed fills up over time rather than arriving complete.
• A purchase needs a contact to belong to. If the buyer is already in your audience, their order lands on their profile. If they aren’t, it’s only recorded when you turn on Add purchasers as contacts below — otherwise that order isn’t kept.

Add purchasers as contacts

The Add purchasers as contacts toggle brings buyers who aren’t already in your audience in as contacts, along with their purchase history, so their purchases aren’t lost.

1. In the Shopify panel, turn on Add purchasers as contacts.
2. New orders from people who aren’t in your audience will add them as contacts from that point on, bringing their prior purchases with them.

Worth knowing:

• Purchase history comes with them. When someone is added as a contact, any past orders they placed are brought in alongside the new one that triggered adding them.
• Anyone already in your audience is left alone. No duplicates are created.
• Adding someone as a contact isn’t the same as subscribing them to a newsletter. Their subscription status stays yours to decide.

Feature the things you sell in newsletters

The Sync Products toggle brings your catalog into your curation library, where products behave like any other content block.

1. In the Shopify panel, turn on Sync Products.
2. Letterhead confirms it’s importing. Products usually appear in your curations within a few minutes — a large catalog takes a little longer.

What lands in your curation library

Each item you sell arrives as its own content block, listed with Shopify as its source and tagged shopify and product so you can filter your library down to just your store’s items. Each block carries the product’s name, description, photo, and price.

A few things worth knowing about what you’ll see:

• Products with options appear once per option. If a shirt comes in three sizes, you get three blocks — one per size, each named for its option, like Cotton Tee — Large, with its own price and its own link. Where an option has its own photo in your store, the block uses it, so the blue one looks blue. Pick the one you want to feature; the option’s name travels with it, so a reader sees which one you meant.
• Only products you’re actively selling are synced. Drafts and archived products stay out of your library.
• The price is a custom field, which means you decide whether to show it in your newsletter — see displaying custom fields from curated content.

Featuring a product

Add a product to a newsletter exactly as you would any other curation: find it in your library and drop it into your edition. Its call-to-action takes readers to that product in your store, ready to buy — the exact option you featured, at the price your newsletter showed them.

Staying current with your store

Letterhead re-checks your catalog once a day, so your newsletters keep pace with your store without you doing anything:

• New products show up in your library after they appear in your store.
• Price and description changes are picked up, so a newsletter you build tomorrow quotes today’s price.
• Products you stop selling — deleted, archived, or renamed — drop out of your library.

One thing this doesn’t do is rewrite a newsletter you’ve already sent. A sent edition keeps the price it was built with, so if you change a price it’s worth glancing at anything scheduled but not yet out the door.

Disconnecting, and turning syncing off

You can disconnect the store from the same panel, or turn either toggle off on its own.

What you’ve already gathered stays: purchases already on contact profiles remain, contacts already added remain, and products already in your curation library remain. What stops is the flow of anything new.

One thing to keep an eye on if you turn product syncing off: the products already in your library stop being refreshed, so a price that changes in your store afterwards won’t follow. If you feature one of those blocks in a newsletter months later, check the price still matches your store.

Troubleshooting

“Failed to connect your Shopify store.” Check that the account you signed in with can install apps on the store.

A purchase isn’t showing on a contact’s profile. Purchases are only recorded from the day you connected — there’s no backfill. If the order is recent, check whether the buyer was in your audience at the time: a purchase by someone who isn’t is only kept when Add purchasers as contacts is on.

Someone who bought from me isn’t in my audience. They’re only added when Add purchasers as contacts is on, and only for orders that arrive after you switch it on.

A product isn’t in my curation library. A large catalog takes a few minutes to import — wait and refresh. If it’s still missing, check the product in Shopify: drafts and archived products aren’t imported.

A product’s price in my library doesn’t match my store. Prices refresh once a day, so a very recent change may not have come through yet. If it’s been longer, check that Sync Products is still on — with it off, what’s already in your library stops updating.

If anything doesn’t match what you see, contact support.