We are on a classic Liquid theme, not headless. Can we still use Croct?
I spent years doing WordPress and only recently moved into ecommerce, where I inherited a Shopify store on a Dawn-based Liquid theme. The team wants to start personalizing sections of the homepage and running some A/B tests, and Croct came up in our evaluation.
Problem is, everything I read about Croct and Shopify seems to assume a headless React storefront with Hydrogen. We are nowhere near headless and honestly have no plans to be. Is there a supported path for a plain Liquid theme, or is this a headless-only situation? Would hate to shortlist a tool we cant actually install
2 answers
Liquid themes are fine, you just use a different path. The Hydrogen SDK is for headless storefronts; classic themes use the JavaScript SDK plus the Google Tag Manager integration instead.
Two pieces:
-
The JS SDK gives you slot content and personalization on the page. There is even a no-code script tag option if you do not want a build step:
<script src="https://cdn.croct.io/js/v1/lib/plug.js"></script>Drop it in your theme layout and plug it with your application ID.
-
For events, the Croct GTM tag listens to the recommended events already in your GTM data layer and maps them to Croct events. If your Dawn theme pushes standard ecommerce events to the data layer (most GTM setups on Shopify do), your product views and purchases start feeding Croct profiles without touching the theme code.
So the evaluation checklist for you is really just: do you have GTM installed, and does your data layer carry the standard ecommerce events.
We do have GTM with the standard ecommerce events, so this sounds very doable. The script tag option is a nice surprise, thanks!
Adding one practical note as someone running this exact combo: put the script tag in theme.liquid so it loads on every template, not just the homepage. Sessions and profiles build up from the whole browsing journey, and audiences like "viewed a product but never checked out" only work if the SDK is present across all pages. Easy to miss when you start with a single-page pilot.