EZ Exporter: Function to Get MD5 Hashes of Your Shopify Data Is Now Available

We've recently added the md5_hash() function to EZ Exporter. You can use this function in a Calculated Field to get the MD5 hash of your Shopify data.

What's an MD5 hash?

The MD5 hashing algorithm is a one-way hash function (i.e. once a data is hashed, it can't be reversed, in theory) which can be used to verify data integrity or to help mask information such as email addresses.

For example, if you have 2 files, you can easily check whether they're identical by getting their MD5 hash. Even if one of the files just has an extra space in the data, it will return a completely different MD5 hash.

Just to give you a quick example:

This text below:

I like ice cream and beer.

Will have an MD5 hash of:

e9ad6a65105cb8f35a858b9ea73cba4

While this text:

You like ice cream and beer and coffee and tea.

Will produce this MD5 hash:

fa5eb633dfc7d80585ca74d0cb32e54a

As you can see, it doesn't matter how big the input is, the output is always the same length. This makes it very useful when checking if 2 big files/data are identical as you can just get their MD5 hashes instead of manually looking at the content of each file.

How can I use this MD5 hash when managing my Shopify store and e-commerce business?

Here's a few use cases we can think of.

1. Sending out a list of email addresses to a third party

There may be cases where you need to send a copy of your customer's email addresses to a third-party, such as an agency that manages your ads for you, for instance. If the ad platform allows uploading of email addresses in MD5-hashed format, then there's really no reason to give them the actual email addresses which helps protect the privacy of your customers.

Facebook's Custom Audience actually used to allow CSV uploads of hashed data not so long ago, but they've removed that option (I just checked today). Though other platforms may still have this option.

In the case of Facebook, the idea here is Facebook already has the real email addresses and they can run their own MD5 hash against those email addresses. So when a user uploads the list of email hashes, Facebook can then just compare them with their own hashes to match up the users.

2. See your customers' avatars if they use Gravatar

Gravatar is a popular tool that allows users to upload their avatar in one place and have that avatar show up in many places, such as when they comment on blogs and forums. Many apps use Gravatar as well to display their users' avatar within their app instead of adding another option for users to upload their avatar.

The avatar URLs are public and uses the MD5 hash of an email address to find a matching user.

For example, my email address is jonathan@highviewapps.com. The MD5 hash of my email address is b09ec9029a76374dfae5d501aa726a0e.

Anyone who has the MD5 hash of my email address can then see my avatar by going to this URL:

https://gravatar.com/avatar/b09ec9029a76374dfae5d501aa726a0e

With EZ Exporter, we can even automate this by using this formula in a Calculated Field and have the avatars displayed automatically in Google Sheets.

'=IMAGE("https://gravatar.com/avatar/' + md5_hash({{ email }}) + '")'

Here's what it would look like:

3. Quickly check if you have identical product data

Say you have many products in your store that are very similar and for consistency, you want all of them to have identical product descriptions.

You can try exporting the data and check them one by one. If the product descriptions are fairly short, this may not be a big deal. However, if there's a lot of content there this could be very tedious.

With the md5_hash() function, you can simply do something like this in a Calculated Field:

md5_hash({{ body_html }})

Now, you can just look at the MD5 hashes, which are much smaller, to determine if the descriptions are identical. You can even sort this column in your spreadsheet application to make it easier.

There are probably a bunch of other use cases out there that we haven't thought of. If you have a use case that we haven't mentioned, please feel free to comment as we'd love to hear about it! :)

Tags: new features, shopify, csv export, ez exporter, reporting