Shopify Theme Installation

User Events

Retail Cloud Connect™ uses two Shopify components to capture storefront user events correctly: an App Embed and an App Pixel. Enable both to collect model training data, segment visitors into Shopify markets, and capture conversions.

Click both Enable buttons in the Shopify app to activate the components:

User Event Enable Buttons on the Theme Installation Page

When you click Enable App Embed you will be taken to the Theme Editor for your current theme
Confirm that the User Events App Embed is activated, then click Save to exit the Theme Editor

Shopify uses App Pixels to create strict, isolated environments on your online store. Retail Cloud Connect™ uses Shopify-controlled APIs to ensure performance, security, and privacy for you and your customers.
You can see all pixels, including the Retail Cloud Connect™ App Pixel, in the Customer events page of your Shopify settings.

Train on Existing Shopify Traffic

The User Events app block also supports optional training on your existing Shopify storefront traffic before you fully switch to Nimstrata search and browse results.

Current options include:

Track Shopify Search Results
Track Shopify Collection Pages

This can be helpful when you want to:

Prepare for an A/B test
Let Vertex AI learn from existing shopper behavior
Gather training data before launching a new search experience

Cookies

Enabling the Retail Cloud Connect™ App Embed and App Pixel places up to three cookies on your Shopify storefront:

rcc-identity - The prefix of your myshopify.com domain, used to identify your Shopify store
rcc-market-id - The ID of the market users are shopping from, used to provide location-specific search results
rcc-visitor-id - An anonymized UUID for each Shopify store visitor, used to provide personalized search results

These cookies support personalized product discovery on your first-party Shopify storefront, so merchants typically classify them as functional cookies. Without rcc-visitor-id, personalized results do not work.

Shopify merchants are responsible for accurately classifying cookies within their designated cookie management tools.

Vertex AI Search for Commerce personalization is limited to your Shopify storefront. It is not used for external ad targeting. For more details, review the Google Cloud terms also referenced in our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions:

Vertex AI Search for Industry terms for data use

https://cloud.google.com/retail/data-use-terms

App Blocks

Each App Block requires a Serving Configuration ID which can be found in Google Cloud.

Published Theme Status

The Shopify app dashboard checks installation status on your published theme. If you configure an unpublished theme first, the dashboard may still show a component as incomplete until the published theme matches your changes.

Search Results and Collection Pages

Retail Cloud Connect™ ships dedicated App Blocks for the Shopify Search and Collection templates.

Both blocks support:

Serving Configuration ID
Style
Show Search Bar
Content Position
Results per page
Results per row
CSS Wrapper Class
Pagination Style

The Search Results App Block installs on Shopify's default search template.

The Product Grid App Block installs on Shopify's default collection template and additionally supports Show Collection Description.

Recommendations AI

The Recommendations AI App Block can be installed on more than just product pages. The current extension supports:

Product pages
Collection pages
Cart pages
Home page
Blog posts
Articles
Standard pages

The default serving configuration is recently_viewed_default.

Common settings include:

Serving Configuration ID
Header Text
Sub-Header Text
Show Sub-Header Text
Number of Recommendations
Results per row
Style

Autocomplete

Autocomplete is enabled separately from the main search results App Block and is designed to enhance your primary search box.

The Shopify extension includes an Enable Shopify Autocomplete setting that can use your existing Shopify search traffic to help train the model.

Autocomplete can take a few days to start learning from existing search traffic and typically one to two weeks to mature on active stores.

Product Card Builder and Styling

Use the following pages to customize how App Blocks look and behave:

Product Card Builder to design the storefront product card
Styling App Blocks to apply custom CSS
Custom Components for advanced product card behavior
Custom No Results Page for branded search empty states

Theme Compatibility

Retail Cloud Connect™ works best with Shopify Online Store 2.0 themes that support App Blocks.

If your current theme does not support App Blocks, please contact us for assistance with deploying Retail Cloud Connect™ on that theme.

Online Store 1.0 Theme Assets

Nimstrata hosts static assets on Cloudflare's CDN for Shopify merchants using Online Store 1.0 themes that leverage our Shopify App Blocks.

Asset	URL
Search & Collections JS	https://assets.retailconnect.app/shopify/latest/search-react.js
Search & Collections CSS	https://assets.retailconnect.app/shopify/latest/search-react.css
Autocomplete JS	https://assets.retailconnect.app/shopify/latest/autocomplete.js
Autocomplete CSS	https://assets.retailconnect.app/shopify/latest/autocomplete.css
Recommendations JS	https://assets.retailconnect.app/shopify/latest/recommendation-react.js
Recommendations CSS	https://assets.retailconnect.app/shopify/latest/recommendation-react.css

Additional Guidance

For best performance, only include assets when they are required to render App Blocks, for example:

{% # Your theme.liquid file %}

{%- if request.page_type == 'search' or request.page_type == 'collection' %}
    <script defer src="https://assets.retailconnect.app/shopify/latest/search-react.js"></script>
{%- endif %}