How Dataships Differs from Shopify's Default Checkout Consent

Shopify's latest privacy update gives brands more control over marketing consent at checkout. You can now pick between two consent settings by region — a welcome improvement for baseline compliance.

But for brands looking for growth, that baseline compliance isn't enough. While this new default option covers the basic compliance rules, it doesn't optimize for high-quality list growth.

This guide breaks down how optimizing consent collection at checkout can do more than meet compliance requirements. It can drive engagement, multiply retention, unlock long-term LTV growth, and ultimately, drive incremental revenue. Learn how Dataships combines compliance expertise and accountability with a powerful rules engine to maximize list growth from checkout.

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Consent ≠ Conversion: Where Shopify's Update Falls Short

Historically, Shopify has allowed email consent to be collected via a single checkbox — either pre-ticked or unticked. With the new update, brands can now configure which version to show their customers depending on the shopper's region. While the choice is ultimately up to you, Shopify does offer some recommendations:

- Untick consent checkboxes in all regions except the United States, where pre-ticked remains the default suggestion.

- For Germany, enable double opt-in to remain compliant with stricter legal standards.

Shopify's new consent settings are an improvement over the old static version. Region-based checkboxes provide a level of flexibility that can keep international stores compliant. However, the options they provide (pre-ticked and unticked) are still limited from a conversion perspective.

Although SMS consent is technically possible within Shopify's checkout, the implementation leaves much to be desired. Like many default setups, it relies on post-checkout "Reply Y" text flows, which consistently produce low opt-in rates, often lower than 1% according to Dataships' internal benchmark data from Shopify checkouts. There's no built-in strategy for converting high-intent buyers at the moment they're most likely to subscribe.

The reason conversion optimization isn’t Shopify's focus comes down to a simple fact — Shopify is a commerce platform first and foremost. While it will provide baseline coverage for marketing capture at checkout, it doesn't stand to gain much from focusing on the minutia of international privacy law to provide the most optimal options for merchants for every region. That requires an in-depth understanding of the laws, the ability to sync subscribed or not-subscribed status across platforms to maintain compliance, and most importantly, the willingness to take accountability for those compliance decisions.

This limitation may seem minor, but for brands running thousands of checkouts each month, it adds up fast. A slight drop in opt-in rate, even by a few percentage points, can translate into thousands of missed email or SMS subscribers. At scale, that's hundreds of thousands in lost LTV.

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What Growth-Focused Brands Actually Need at Checkout

If you're serious about growing your list at checkout, the challenge isn't just legal — it's operational.

Privacy laws do change, and most teams aren't built to monitor updates, build them into their consent mechanisms, and maintain compliance across markets. These brands don't have a dedicated legal team, spare developer, or marketer fluent in privacy law, and Shopify's defaults weren't built to bridge that gap.

Instead, you need a plug-and-play solution that handles legal logic dynamically, adjusts consent configurations in real time based on location, and ensures ongoing compliance, without slowing down your team.

Dataships delivers exactly that. Our platform automatically applies jurisdiction-specific legal standards at checkout, updates with regulatory shifts, and runs holdout A/B tests against Shopify's default to show lift in list growth. Plus, we don't outsource responsibility — Dataships fully takes ownership of the consent mechanism at checkout, ensuring it is both legally sound and conversion-optimized.

Even better, Dataships carries indemnity insurance in the rare event a brand receives a complaint from one of our audiences. We provide all records to prove no laws were violated and support our brands in combating complaints.

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Dataships Offers Consent Configurations That Shopify Doesn't

When we say that Shopify's pre-ticked and unticked options don't allow for increased conversion to email and SMS lists, we mean they don't allow you to choose the consent option that converts best. These options differ by region:

- In the United States and Canada, brands can rely on implied consent or no-consent-required. While you can simply not give shoppers the option to opt out when passing through checkout, you do need to link your privacy policy to remain compliant in Canada and some US states.‍

- In the UK and EU, brands can rely on the "soft opt-in" configuration when the tickbox reads something like: "I'm okay with receiving marketing information from you. Tick this box to opt out."

- In Germany, Brazil, and other double-opt-in countries, there isn't much flexibility or room for growth in email sign-ups. Both Shopify and Dataships can help on the compliance side here.

A prime example of this defining difference in action? Just ask Sculpted by Aimee. The beauty brand integrated Dataships into their Shopify checkout to move beyond one-size-fits-all consent checkboxes. The new checkout flow automatically detected shopper location and applied region-specific legal logic, ensuring compliance and a seamless, native opt-in experience. The result was a 61% increase in email marketing consent, more than 16,000 net-new contacts, and a 49x ROI over 21 months.

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How We Turn Consent Into a Growth Lever

Brands often invest heavily in top-of-funnel list growth through discount popups, quizzes, and visitor IDs, to name a few. However, most overlook one of the most valuable places to capture high-quality subscribers: the point of purchase. That's where Dataships comes in, with a solution purpose-built for checkout optimization.

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Target the Most Opportune Moment

Where most brands are still offering pre-ticked or unticked consent boxes, Dataships replaces them with dynamic, region-aware configurations. These adapt to local legal requirements and surface-optimized language right when users are ready to engage.

This is what we call the "magic moment" — when customers are already entering their information to purchase, and brands have the highest degree of leverage from a data privacy perspective. This leads to higher-quality subscriptions, stronger remarketing performance, and better customer lifetime value (CLV).

Take it from IQBAR, a leading functional nutrition brand. Their default Shopify checkout setup was falling short, especially for SMS, where post-purchase "Reply Y" flows produced opt-in rates below 1%. With a high repeat-purchase product and 10,000+ monthly orders, every missed subscriber was a missed revenue opportunity.

Dataships transformed their checkout into a list growth engine by embedding region-specific consent flows that adapted to local laws in real time. They also replaced post-purchase SMS flows with in-checkout SMS verification via Dataships' Easy Opt-In feature, allowing IQBAR to confirm compliance while removing friction.

The results: email opt-ins jumped from 60% to 96%, SMS opt-ins rose from 0.36% to 6%, and nearly 20,000 new subscribers were captured. This amounted to 2x more SMS opt-ins in the span of two weeks than the brand had collected the entire previous year. On the revenue side, those subscribers drove over 6,000 repeat purchases, with a 36% repeat rate and a staggering 491% ROI in just 12 months.

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Optimize What's Most Important: Consent

Dataships isn't an email platform — we're not trying to rebuild your CRM. We focus solely on optimizing the moment of consent, so the list you're growing is made up of actual buyers, not low-intent leads.

These subscribers don't just open emails. They come back and buy again. Customers subscribed to email or SMS deliver significantly higher CLV, with gains ranging from $30 to $80, depending on the vertical.

Eric Javits experienced these benefits firsthand. Their consent rate hovered at 49%, meaning half their potential audience was inaccessible. After implementing Dataships' region-aware consent flows, opt-ins jumped to 92% — unlocking nearly 4,800 new Klaviyo contacts. Over the next seven months, that shift drove a 43% consent rate increase, a 27x ROI, and enabled high-performance remarketing campaigns that turned new buyers into long-term customers.

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Unlock More Revenue From the Traffic You Already Have With Dataships

The takeaway? Dataships works with the traffic you already have. So you don't spend more on paid campaigns, new campaigns, or a complicated setup. It's "like creating money out of thin air."

Dataships doesn't just collect consent — it automates the logic behind it. We continuously monitor global privacy laws, adapt in real time, and log every interaction for compliance. Best of all, the setup is plug-and-play. Everything runs natively on Shopify, requiring no custom development or backend engineering, and your subscriber data flows directly into Klaviyo. Ready for segmentation and retention.

Ready to make checkout consent your next source of LTV growth? Book a demo to start your A/B test.