We're all familiar with the emails that land in our inbox after buying something from a brand's website. Within the first minute, you'll get a "thank you for your order." The next week, you get an offer for an item that pairs well with the one you bought. A month after that, you get a reminder to restock or a request to leave a review.
These email sequences are critical for your brand. Customers are engaged and intent is high. And it's the best opportunity to convert a one-time buyer into a repeat customer.
But what happens when someone buys your product from a third-party retailer?
The same customer buys on Amazon
Same person, same product, different checkout, and the sequence vanishes. Why should a brand miss the chance to engage a customer just because they bought through a different channel? We don't think they should.
Brands have tried to work around this for years: upload a receipt, scan a QR code. Both are high friction for the shopper, and the data that comes back is only as good as what the shopper bothers to submit.
Subtotal offers brands a new way to solve this problem.
What's possible with linked accounts
Most shoppers have accounts with retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Sephora. And the purchases they make are tied to these accounts.
Subtotal makes it easy for shoppers to securely link their accounts to your brand's loyalty program and share their purchases with you directly.
When a shopper shares a purchase, that data becomes actionable and can be used to send events that power marketing emails and rewards.
Some Subtotal terminology
Let's define a few key terms that are relevant to the integration.
- Connections are the permissioned links between shoppers' retailer accounts and your brand. These are created by the shopper when they link their account.
- Purchases are exactly what you might expect: completed orders pulled from a connected account that include totals, timestamps, items and product names, etc.
- Events emit when something happens: an account is linked, a purchase is shared, etc. Events feed your marketing stack and can be used to trigger actions when a condition is met.
Events flow into Klaviyo
As soon as you install the Klaviyo app in Subtotal, you can configure which events are sent to Klaviyo.
Our events land as metrics on customer profiles, matched by email to the profile that already exists in your account. From there, you can use events to trigger flows and create segments.
A purchase made at Walmart becomes actionable just like an order on your own website:
{
"purchase_id": "01KEVN1ZPM9H19JSHGN5NF0M69",
"retailer": "walmart",
"date": "2025-05-31T14:48:23Z",
"item_count": 15,
"subtotal": 43.04,
"tax": 1.6,
"total": 44.64,
"brands": ["frenchs", "heinz", "spam", "jif", "yogi-tea",
"cheerios", "m&ms", "goya", "coca-cola"],
"upcs": ["040000476528", "016000124790", "041331027878",
"013000001243", "049000031171", "049000040869",
"076950450363", "037600138727", "049000067231",
"041500007007", "051500255162"]
}Check out the full event reference in our documentation.
Flows triggered by retail purchases
Any Subtotal event can trigger a flow in Klaviyo, and the Subtotal app ships with flow templates that are available directly in Klaviyo's flow library.
Our templates make it easy to build flows that send a confirmation when an account is linked or a thank you when a purchase is made.
Any flow in your Klaviyo account triggered by a Subtotal event is listed in the Subtotal dashboard too, with its trigger, status, and creation date, plus a link straight into Klaviyo.
Segments built on retail data
Every event also works as a segment condition, so you can build audiences out of what people actually bought, at the retailer they bought it from.
For example: shoppers who bought your product at Amazon in the last 90 days but haven't repurchased, a clean segment for a win-back flow that a receipt-scanning approach could never assemble reliably.
You don't have to define these segments yourself if you don't want to. We automatically recommend segments based on the data that you have in Subtotal. One click creates the segment in your Klaviyo account.
Any segment in your Klaviyo account built on Subtotal events shows up here too, with the date it was created and a live profile count, so you can see what the data is driving without digging through two tools.
Coming full circle
Now, with Purchased at Retailer as a trigger, the entire post-purchase sequence runs for purchases made at third-party retailers. The thanks for the order, the offer on the product that pairs well, the review request, the reminder to restock.
Your retail customers stop being invisible the moment they link an account. Everything you already built for the customers who buy from your website starts working for them too, and you finally get to engage with retail customers.
Start today
- Find Subtotal in the Klaviyo app marketplace
- Sign up for Subtotal
- Install the Klaviyo app from your Subtotal dashboard
- Follow the steps in our integration docs
- Book a demo to see the integration in action first
FAQs
Which events can I use?
Seven today: Purchased at Retailer, Connected an Account, Disconnected an Account, Unauthenticated Connection, Reauthenticated Connection, Profile Created, and Profile Updated. Each arrives as its own Klaviyo metric, and the full payloads are in the event types documentation.
How do events match my existing Klaviyo profiles?
By email. Events attach to the profile that already exists in your account, so there's no import step, no new list, and no duplicate customer records to reconcile.
Will historical purchases trigger my flows?
They can, and there are times when you may want them to. When a shopper links an account, we send the purchases already in it, and those events can trigger flows like any other. If you only want to message recent activity, check the purchase date in any flow triggered by Purchased at Retailer so older purchases fill in your segments without sending an email.
Can I control which events get delivered?
Yes. Every event has its own toggle in the Subtotal dashboard. Turn one off and delivery stops immediately. Turn it back on and the next event flows through.
Can I see individual items that are purchased?
Yes. Every purchase event carries the UPCs of your products in the order, so segments and flows can key off a specific item rather than the whole basket. Filter on upcs in a segment condition or a flow trigger and you're targeting the exact SKU a shopper bought.
