Privacy Policy

Shop Buddy is a business-to-business service. Our direct customer is the merchantwho installs the app. In the course of providing the service we also process limited data about the merchant's shoppers(the store's end customers). For shopper data, the merchant is the data controller and Shop Buddy acts as a data processor on their behalf.

Shop Buddy is operated by Softora. That entity is the controller of merchant account data, and the processor of shopper data.

• Store & catalog data — product titles, descriptions, prices, variants, inventory, images, collections, and store pages/policies synced from Shopify to power grounded answers.
• Conversation data — the full text of messages exchanged in the chat widget, stored as written and not redacted or masked. If a shopper types personal information into the chat, that text is stored as part of the transcript. Each conversation is keyed to an anonymous session identifier, not to a Shopify customer account.
• Contact & support details — a name, email, and message when a shopper asks to speak with a human, so the merchant can follow up.
• Shopper email from the storefront — see section 3.
• Order data — when enabled by the merchant, order status and, for attribution, whether a chat led to a purchase.
• Cart snapshots — when cart features are enabled, the current cart contents, total, currency, and cart identifier for a session, used for cart-aware answers and abandoned-cart recovery.
• Behavioural signals — when enabled, lightweight events such as page and product views and cart activity, used for personalization and cart recovery.
• Feedback — a thumbs rating and any free-text comment a shopper leaves on an answer.
• Unanswered questions — questions the assistant could not answer, kept so the merchant can fill the gap. These include the shopper's wording of the question.
• Merchant account data — the merchant's email and store domain used to authenticate and administer the app.

If — and only if — the merchant has enabled cart recovery, the widget reads the email address that Shopify already exposes on the storefront for a logged-inshopper, and stores it with that session's cart snapshot. It is used to send that shopper a cart-recovery email on the merchant's behalf.

No email is read or stored for shoppers who are not logged in, and none is read when cart recovery is switched off. We do not read a shopper's phone number or postal address from Shopify at any point.

We use the data above only to provide and improve the service: to answer shoppers' questions using the store's own catalog and knowledge, to surface relevant products, to route requests to a human when asked, to send cart-recovery emails the merchant has enabled, to show merchants analytics and logs, and to secure and operate the platform. We do not sell personal data, and we do not use shoppers' personal data to build cross-merchant profiles.

To generate an answer, we send the AI provider:

• up to the most recent 40 messages of the conversation, verbatim as written;
• context drawn from the store — product information, store details, and policy or knowledge content relevant to the question;
• only where the merchant has switched personalization on (it is off by default): the titles of items in the shopper's cart and of products they recently viewed.

We also send text to an embeddings provider so that catalog and knowledge content can be matched to a question by meaning.

The provider used is a per-deployment configuration choice: chat responses are generated by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google (Gemini), or Groq, and embeddings by OpenAI or Google (Gemini), depending on how the instance you are using is configured. Each provider handles the data it receives under its own terms and privacy policy; we make no representation here about any provider's retention or model-training practices. Merchants who need a specific provider arrangement should contact us.

We rely on a small set of providers to run the service:

• Shopify — the platform the app installs on; source of catalog, order, and store data.
• AI providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or Groq, depending on deployment configuration, to generate chat responses and text embeddings (see section 5).
• Supabase (PostgreSQL) — stores app data (catalog index, conversations, settings).
• Vercel — hosting and serverless compute.
• Resend — transactional email (support alerts, cart-recovery messages).

These providers process data only to deliver their part of the service.

Shop Buddy includes an internal administration panel that lets our own staff open a merchant's account and read stored conversations, including the full text of shopper messages, along with system logs and usage records. We use it to investigate faults, respond to support requests, and keep the platform running safely.

Access is restricted to a fixed allowlist of staff email addresses configured in the deployment environment; a signed-in account that is not on that allowlist cannot reach the panel. Merchants who would like to know whether their account has been accessed can ask us at support@softora.store.

We retain data for as long as the merchant keeps the app installed and as needed to provide the service. Catalog data is refreshed on sync and superseded rather than accumulated. When a merchant uninstalls the app, or on a valid deletion request, associated store and shopper data is deleted or anonymized.

Separately from uninstall and deletion requests, a scheduled job runs daily and removes shopper data once it passes the age limit for its type:

• Conversation transcripts and the feedback on them — 180 days.
• Cart snapshots (including any shopper email held for cart recovery) — 90 days.
• Behavioural events — 90 days.
• Unanswered questions — 180 days while awaiting the merchant's review, 90 days once approved or dismissed.
• Support requests — 365 days after the request is resolved. Open and in-progress requests are not aged out.
• System logs — 90 days.

Two things are deliberately kept for as long as the store exists: order-attribution records, which hold a Shopify order id and an anonymous session id, and the audit trail of administrative actions, which exists to record who did what — including that a deletion was carried out. Both are removed when the store's data is deleted, and attribution records are also removed on a shopper redaction request. Merchant content such as catalog and knowledge-base entries is kept until the merchant deletes it or uninstalls.

Merchants can request earlier deletion of their data at any time by contacting us.

Shop Buddy honors Shopify's mandatory privacy webhooks. When a shopper or store owner exercises their rights through Shopify, we act on:

• customers/data_request — we provide the shopper data we hold for that store.
• customers/redact — we delete the shopper's personal data.
• shop/redact — we delete the store's data after uninstall.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or export your personal data, to object to or restrict certain processing, and to complain to your local data protection authority. Because conversations are keyed to an anonymous session identifier rather than to a customer account, we may need extra detail — such as the store domain and the approximate date of the conversation — to locate a shopper's records.

Shoppers can contact the merchant, or us at support@softora.store, to make a request.

Our sub-processors are United States–based cloud services, and the AI providers we may call operate internationally. Data processed through Shop Buddy is therefore likely to be transferred to and processed in countries other than the one you are in, including the United States. Where a transfer of personal data out of the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom takes place, it relies on the transfer mechanisms offered by the provider concerned, such as Standard Contractual Clauses.

Data is encrypted in transit: the app, the widget, and every API call between them and our providers use HTTPS/TLS. Access to the administration panel is limited to an allowlist of staff accounts (section 7), storefront API access is authenticated per store and rate-limited, and secrets are held in the hosting provider's environment store rather than in the codebase. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, but we work to protect data using industry-standard practices.

The chat widget uses your browser's local/session storage to keep an anonymous session identifier and remember whether the chat is open. It does not use advertising cookies or track shoppers across other websites.

• No stored IP addresses. A caller's IP address is read from the request in order to rate-limit abuse, but it is never written to our database in readable form — only a one-way, salted hash of it is stored as a counter key.
• No third-party analytics or tracking SDKs. The widget and dashboard do not load analytics, session-replay, or advertising scripts.
• No shopper phone numbers or postal addresses are read from Shopify.
• No payment details. Paid plans are billed by Shopify; we never see or store card data.

Shop Buddy is a tool for businesses and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has provided personal data through a chat on a store using Shop Buddy, contact us and we will delete it.

We may update this policy as the product evolves. Material changes will be reflected here with a new "last updated" date.

Privacy questions and data requests: support@softora.store. General support: support@softora.store. Postal address and other routes are on our Contact page.