Tie's job is to recognize the shoppers your email and SMS tools would otherwise miss. Most of that work happens on our servers, not in the shopper's browser. This article explains the two pieces you will see during setup, the tracking subdomain and the Tie cookie, and how they turn anonymous visits into profiles your team can act on.

During setup you add a few DNS records that hand Tie a small subdomain under your own domain, for example zone.yourbrand.com. Nothing customer facing is ever hosted there. It exists so Tie's tracking loads from your domain instead of from a third party domain.

That matters for one reason above all. Browsers treat a cookie set from your own domain as a first party cookie and let it live for more than a year. A cookie set by a third party domain is throttled to a day or so in many browsers and is blocked outright by common ad blockers. Tie also keeps a first party record of the visitor ID on your domain and uses it to restore the cookie if a browser expires it early, so the limits that cut short third party cookies do not apply. Loading from your own subdomain is what lets Tie remember a visitor for the long term rather than forgetting them overnight.

When someone visits your site, Tie sets a cookie that carries a random visitor ID. It does not contain a name, an email, or anything a person typed. It is a stable label for that browser on that device.

The value of the label comes from persistence. If the same ID shows up again next week, next month, or next year, Tie already knows this is a browser it has seen before and can connect the new visit to everything it learned on the earlier ones.

Tie does not rely on the cookie alone. Every visit produces a handful of signals, such as the cookie ID, the network the visitor is on, an email if they enter one, a logged in account, and the products they look at. Tie's identity graph looks for signals that are confirmed to belong to the same person across sessions.

One strong confirmed signal is enough. The same email entered on two devices, or the same cookie ID across two sessions, ties those sessions to one profile. Anything Tie cannot confirm stays separate. Tie would rather leave two visits unlinked than guess and send someone a message about a cart that was never theirs.

Tie only tracks after the shopper accepts tracking on your site. If you run a consent banner, Tie loads after acceptance. On Shopify, Tie honors Shopify's built in customer privacy settings, so a correctly configured Shopify consent banner is all you need. Shoppers can opt out of Tie at any time through Tie's opt out form.