The Cookieless Future: Future-Proof Your Business with Clerk's Cookieless Personalization Platform

The cookieless future and what it means for e-tailers and marketers 🍪

The digital landscape is dramatically shifting now under growing customer concerns and government regulations on data and privacy issues.

As a matter of fact, 86% of people claimed that they felt growing fears and concerns about the abuse of their data privacy. To regulate potential privacy abuse from cookie tracking, governments around the world issued a number of cookie laws and privacy regulations, such as ePD and GDPR in Europe and CCPA in the US.

In response, Google and Apple have been making changes to create a cookieless future. In March 2020, Apple released major ITP (Intelligent Tracking Prevention) updates, making Safari capable of blocking all third-party cookies. In addition, starting in mid-2023, Google Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three-month period.

Cookie tracking is adopted as today's most common approach to identifying users online. They contain the information which serves as the basis for targeted advertising and personalized shopping experiences.

So, what does a cookieless future mean to you as e-tailers or marketers?

Because of increasing regulations, cookies are en route to becoming a thing of the past.  Most e-commerce businesses will then struggle to achieve the perfect personalized shopping experience for their customers. With that being the case, cookieless personalization will soon become a competitive differentiator in the e-tailing world.

When GDPR meets personalization: not a paradox, but your recipe for success🏆

Data privacy regulations like GDPR, plus changes surrounding Google Chrome's third-party cookie deprecation, give more control back to consumers over how their data will be used by brands and advertisers.

Many might say that these changes are great, but they come at a price: Consumers' online shopping experience can become poorer and less personalized.

You know what? It doesn't have to be a dilemma. With Clerk, you can find a happy medium: Your customers will gain more control of their privacy while continuing to benefit from a personalized online experience. Bear in mind that despite increasing demands and expectations for privacy, customers still want personalization.

While others are sprinting to develop privacy-centric solutions, Clerk has already solved the puzzle! Today, Clerk's personalization AI goes fully cookieless. Not only does the service achieve a privacy-centric solution for e-tailers, it also provides precise cookieless personalization that doesn't compromise the online experience of customers.

Building this privacy-centric personalization platform is the fruit of years of hard work. You will surely get the recipe for e-commerce success by choosing Clerk, as we provide stronger GDPR compliance and ensure perfect personalization without any limitations.

Discovering cookie compliant data 🔍

For a long time, advertising platforms and businesses relied on cookies as the primary way of targeting customers and personalizing their online shopping experience. This is because they contain the information needed to show the most accurate products and ads to consumers. Including browsing history, purchase information, and website referrals.

It is indeed because of this information that cookies are becoming increasingly regulated. Information collected by cookies is considered sensitive, as it leads back to personal information. Many internet users are becoming skeptical of cookies because of the potential misuse of their personal information.

As a solution, Clerk already utilizes sophisticated technology as an alternative to cookies, which allow e-tailers to achieve personalization, while preserving online customers’ anonymity.

Better business outcomes at lower costs 💰

One of the first breakthroughs that made us launch Clerk was being un-reliant on website tracking cookies to provide our personalization services.

Why so? Because it can be tedious to rely on website data (cookies) to generate product recommendations. First off, no business has time to wait for traffic on a new product or for better data, such as order history, to present the best recommendations.

Secondly, we know consumers struggle to remember all the websites and products they browse - even the ones they just visited 30 minutes ago. However, if a consumer purchases a product, it is obvious that the consumer has a much stronger relationship with the product and website.

Therefore, ClerkCore bases its predictions on store purchases rather than website tracking. Purchase data provides more valuable information, as it consists of a customer’s genuine interest, in contrast to sporadic browsing history that is collected from website tracking.

In all simplicity, Clerk’s AI provides a better personalization experience by understanding and cultivating shopping patterns, rather than browsing patterns.

While delivering better personalization results, our solution reduces the need to extensively collect privacy-invasive data and limits the extra costs associated with a long list of targeting parameters. In short, Clerk’s cookieless personalization solution helps your e-commerce business achieve better outcomes at lower costs.

The secrets behind Clerk’s privacy-centric analytics tool 🤖

Clerk's personalization AI goes completely cookieless while providing a best-in-class and fully private personalized shopping experience. We guess you’re asking: How can Clerk's AI achieve this without cookie tracking?

Catching the new technological wave, Clerk is fundamentally a privacy-centric analytics tool. Our analytics use a technology called rotating hashes to identify events that belong to the same session. The hashes are done without storing a cookie on the consumer's device, therefore, limiting access to personal information otherwise contained within a cookie, like online identifiers, login information, etc. Of course, this technology requires some smart mathematics. If you're interested in learning more, check out this detailed support article.

We choose to disclose this secret here, not only for the sake of transparency, but also to contribute to creating a bright cookieless future together! By making our tracking technology open source, we are dedicated to helping other providers build a more private internet.

As mentioned above, Google prolonged their timeline to phase out third-party cookies (to mid-2023) to give everyone a chance to land on the right cookieless solution. So you can either sit and wait for the moment to come and risk implementing last-minute fixes, or act now by turning to Clerk for a flawless, long-term solution. With easy integration, Clerk allows you to instantly start a cookieless personalization journey without limitations!

Still unsure?

Get started by talking to one of our experts.