User Events

User events are essential data points that capture shopper interactions on a Shopify storefront. AI Commerce Search uses user event data to train machine learning models, providing personalized search results, collection pages, and product recommendations.

User Events are ingested to AI Commerce Search using the Retail Cloud Connect App Embed and App Pixel as part of the Theme Installation process.


Identifying Shoppers

Unique identities are required to enable personalization. Retail Cloud Connect uses a uniquely generated Visitor ID to identify shoppers. If a Shopify shopper is signed in, Retail Cloud Connect also uses Shopify's built-in User ID to persist personalized results across other logged-in devices, such as mobile phones.


User Event Types

Add to Cart

Signals that a shopper has added one or more products to their shopping cart. This event includes details about the products added and their quantities. These events inform purchase intent, power "Frequently Bought Together" recommendations, and help measure product popularity.

Remove From Cart

Signals that a shopper has removed one or more products from their shopping cart. This event includes details about the products removed. These events help understand changing shopper intent, refine purchase probability models, and analyze reasons for cart adjustments.

Category Page View

Indicates that a shopper has viewed a Shopify collection page, such as "Women's Shoes", "Electronics Sale", or a brand-specific page. These events capture interest in broader product collections, which is useful for personalizing collection page results and making collection-level recommendations. These events are distinct from viewing specific product detail pages.

Detail Page View

Indicates that a shopper has viewed the detail page of a product. This is a strong signal of interest in that particular item. These events are crucial for powering recommendations like "Recently Viewed Items", personalizing search rankings, and understanding product-level engagement.

Home Page View

Signals that a shopper has visited the main homepage of the Shopify storefront. These events often mark the beginning of a shopper session and provide a baseline for site traffic analysis. While less specific than other events, they contribute to understanding overall shopper engagement patterns and can help train a "Recommended For You" model.

Purchase

Signals that a shopper has successfully completed a transaction. This event includes details about all products purchased, quantities, prices, and the total transaction value. These definitive events help track conversions, revenue attribution, "Frequently Bought Together" model training, and post-purchase analysis.

Indicates that a shopper has performed a search or viewed a collection page on the Shopify store. This event includes the query containing the terms the shopper searched for or the collection details. These events are essential for understanding shopper intent, improving search relevance, training query suggestion models, and identifying popular or poorly performing search terms.

Shopping Cart Page View

Signals that a shopper has viewed their shopping cart page. These events indicate an intent to review the cart or proceed toward checkout and are useful for cart abandonment analysis and understanding the checkout funnel.

📖 Additional Documentation for User Events
https://cloud.google.com/retail/docs/user-events