Intelligems

What is Intelligems and how does it work

Intelligems is a US based experimentation and personalisation platform designed specifically for Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants. It lets brands A/B test product prices, shipping rates, theme variations, landing pages, checkout blocks, badges and offers, and personalise the experience for specific audiences. Once installed, Intelligems splits visitors into test groups, serves the right variant on the fly, and tracks the impact on conversion, revenue and profit per visitor.

From a technical point of view, Intelligems injects a JavaScript snippet into the Shopify theme and uses Shopify checkout extensions to deliver checkout level tests. Group assignment is stored in a first party cookie so the same visitor stays in the same group on subsequent visits during the test period.

What data and cookies Intelligems collects

Intelligems sets first party cookies on your store domain (typically named with the igems or intelligems prefix, for example igems_visitor and igems_test) to identify the visitor and remember the test variant assigned. The script also reads Shopify cart attributes, UTM parameters, device type, country, landing page, new versus returning status and basic event signals such as add to cart, checkout started and order placed.

This data is sent to Intelligems servers in the United States for analysis. When the merchant connects Intelligems to Klaviyo or to a customer data platform, the variant assignment and event data can be enriched with email or customer ID, which clearly qualifies as personal data under Article 4 GDPR.

GDPR and ePrivacy implications

Intelligems is a measurement and personalisation tool, so its cookies and identifiers are not strictly necessary under Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive. Even when the cookie is first party, prior consent is required because the purpose of the processing is testing, segmentation and personalisation, not pure functional behaviour. The CNIL has consistently ruled that A/B testing and conversion measurement tools require consent unless they fall within a narrow audience measurement exemption with strict conditions.

Price testing carries an additional layer of legal risk. Personalised pricing based on segmentation can fall under Article 22 GDPR (automated decision making) and under consumer protection rules that require transparency on personalised prices, especially under the Omnibus Directive in the EU.

Data transfers to the United States

Intelligems is headquartered in New York and runs its production stack on US cloud infrastructure. Any deployment on a website that targets EU or UK visitors involves an international transfer governed by Chapter V of the GDPR. The transfer must be covered by the EU US Data Privacy Framework, by Standard Contractual Clauses with appropriate supplementary measures, or by another valid Article 46 safeguard, plus a documented Transfer Impact Assessment.

How to deploy Intelligems in a compliant way

To use Intelligems on a Shopify store that serves EU or UK customers, you should: load the Intelligems script only after the visitor has consented to analytics or marketing cookies, document the lawful basis (consent), name Intelligems and the United States transfer in your privacy and cookie policies, sign the Data Processing Addendum and rely on the EU US Data Privacy Framework or SCCs, run a DPIA when prices or offers are personalised, and provide a clear reject all option in your cookie banner.

With FlowConsent, you can block the Intelligems snippet by category (analytics or marketing) and release it as soon as the visitor opts in, so attribution and group assignment work without breaking compliance.

Alternatives and risk mitigation

For merchants who want to keep A/B testing without sending personal data outside the EU, alternatives include Shoplift, VWO, Convert.com (with EU hosting options) and server side experimentation built on Cloudflare Workers or similar. If you stay on Intelligems, you can reduce the risk by avoiding the Klaviyo identity enrichment, by disabling cross domain tracking, and by limiting price testing to non discriminatory segments such as A versus B price points without personal targeting.