[martin_a]

IANAL, but I think you can work around this by running Matomo locally and activate the options to anonymize/scramble IPs directly at the beginning.

If you don't use IP addresses or can't come back from a user profile to an IP address, you should be fine with tracking the user journey. But be careful with tracking actions like "placed an order" and linking to that order then. That link would create an option to identify a specific user and could therefore be a problem.

[Nextgrid]

Anonymizing IP addresses wouldn't do anything it you still collect other data that is unique enough, such as a browser user agent or session ID. The whole thing you're trying to do requires a persistent identifier (to track the user across their browsing session) and since analytics is not functionally-necessary, it will require consent.

The only analytics you can do without consent is effectively a stateless hit counter that increases on every operation. For a lot of features, it's more than enough and saves you from all these headaches.