Overview

An easy way to think about how Elevar's server-side tracking works with Shopify is to imagine it as a delivery truck that sends data to your marketing channel, thus enabling you to 'own' your data, for example, in Google Analytics.

How Elevar Works

Data Collection and Routing:

Elevar receives data from the following sources:

• Your online storefront
• Shopify webhooks
• Other compatible data sources

Once collected, Elevar processes and routes this data to your connected destinations based on the settings defined in your Elevar dashboard.

Elevar Hosting

Elevar is hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and is built with advanced scaling, redundancy, and data-processing safeguards to ensure maximum uptime and throughput.
During BFCM 2023, Elevar processed thousands of conversions per second with no performance degradation.

Key Hosting Architecture Highlights:

• Serverless Infrastructure: Elevar uses serverless technology, allowing dynamic control over scaling—including active regions and concurrent compute instances.
• Pub/Sub Big Data Pipeline: Elevar relies on Google Cloud Pub/Sub for message delivery. Each message must be acknowledged to be considered successfully processed. Failed messages are retried automatically until they succeed. Temporary outages do not result in data loss; queued messages are processed once systems recover.
• Google Load Testing and Enterprise Support: Elevar’s infrastructure is load-tested and supported by Google. Google Cloud Functions have no upper scale limit, allowing Elevar to handle extreme spikes in demand.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens if Elevar experiences an outage?

If it is an issue with Google Cloud (which affects all customers within Google) then we will replay webhook events from Shopify when Google comes back online. This is rare and has only happened once in the last 2+ years for ~ 2 hours. Elevar was able to successfully replay all conversion events resulting in no data loss to customer destinations.

The other scenario we've experienced is when there is an issue with Shopify webhooks. Shopify typically replays their webhooks to minimize data loss. We've seen this once in the past 2 years as well.

Our sitewide data layer javascript is a hosted CDN script just like any other script that all websites utilize today -- Klaviyo javascript, google-analytics.js, etc.

Elevar also has automated monitoring that will alert you anytime tracking falls below your target accuracy threshold (ex. if 95% of orders are not successfully sent to your destination in the last 2 hours then you will be alerted). Learn more about this feature here.

Can I use my own servers to host this data?

Elevar does not support the ability to utilize your own servers. If you prefer to go this route you can utilize Google Tag Manager server-side containers in Google Cloud.

Do I "own" the data that Elevar collects?

Elevar is not a data warehouse or business intelligence tool. We do not store data collected from data sources other than the temporary storage required to route data to your end destinations. So in essence, you still own the data in all of your data destinations, just like you would with other integrations.

Elevar does store logging and monitoring data.