Privacy Policy

This policy explains what CartHouse (“CartHouse”, “we”) collects and why. It covers two groups of people: merchants who install the CartHouse app on their Shopify store, and shoppers who use a mobile app that CartHouse built for a merchant. The short version: we keep as little as possible, and a shopper’s name, email, address, orders and payment details stay between them and the merchant’s Shopify store. We never receive them.

Merchants

What we store about your store:

• Its Shopify domain, name, shop number, currency and primary web address; which permissions you granted the app; when it was installed; whether we approved your brand for CartHouse (and, if we declined it, why); the status of your CartHouse plan; and which setup notes we last left in your Shopify admin, including the products they name.
• The design you publish and its earlier versions: template, colors, wordmark, logo file, feature choices and any text you write. This includes your store’s public contact email and policy links, because the app shows them to your customers.
• A Storefront access token for your store: the public kind Shopify makes for storefronts and apps. It lets the app show the catalog you published to the CartHouse sales channel and start carts and checkouts; it cannot change your products, orders or settings.
• The notifications you send to your customers from your Shopify admin (the title, the text and how many phones received them).
• A record of each change made to your published app, kept for 90 days.
• Your email address and store address, if you wrote to us.

What we never ask Shopify for: your customers or any customer data, your payouts or your staff accounts. Orders placed through your app can be read by CartHouse’s sales channel, as Shopify allows for every sales channel, but CartHouse never stores them.

What the app’s permissions allow:

• Reading your products and collections.
• Reading and managing publications, to publish your catalog to the CartHouse sales channel.
• Reading your online store’s navigation: your main menu sets the order of collections in the app.
• Reading your themes, without changing them: your colors, logo and cover photo, to match the app to your brand.
• Leaving setup notes in your Shopify admin: what is left to do, and which products the app can’t show yet.
• For the shopper app, Shopify’s storefront permissions: showing the products you published and their tags, and starting carts and checkouts.

Why: to build and update your apps, to show you the state of your app in your admin, and to contact you about the service.

How long: until you uninstall. Shopify tells us when you do, and 48 hours later sends us a deletion request; when it arrives we erase everything listed above for your store. Shopify’s other data-request and deletion notices are honored the same way.

Shoppers using a CartHouse-built app

• Browsing and buying: the app talks directly to the merchant’s Shopify store for the catalog, the cart and checkout. Shopify’s privacy policy and the merchant’s own policies apply to that data. CartHouse does not receive it.
• Accounts: the app does not sign you in. Any account you have with the merchant stays with their Shopify store.
• Notifications: only if you turn them on. The app then registers your phone’s notification address (a push token) with us, together with the topics you chose, whether the phone is an iPhone or an Android phone, and the app version. We use it for one thing: delivering the merchant’s notifications to that phone, through Apple’s and Google’s notification services. It is not linked to your name, email or account. Turning every topic off in the app removes it.
• Diagnostics: when something goes wrong (for example, a checkout screen fails to open) the app sends us a small anonymous signal: the app version, iPhone or Android, the screen and the reason. This signal contains no name, email, cart contents or identifier for your phone, and is deleted after 30 days.
• Crash reports: off unless we switch them on, one merchant’s app at a time. When they are on and the app crashes or hits an error, it sends a technical report to Sentry, our crash-reporting provider, with details such as the app version, the phone model and its system version, and where in the app the problem happened. A report carries no name, email, account or user id, cart contents or other customer data, and Sentry is set not to store IP addresses. It may carry a random identifier created when the app is installed, which only links reports from the same installation. Reports are stored in [L: US/EU region] and deleted after [L: retention]. Separately, CartHouse’s own servers report their errors to Sentry: those reports are about our service, not about shoppers.
• Tracking: none. No advertising identifiers, no analytics profiles, no data sold or shared for marketing.

Who processes this for us

We run on a small number of providers. Except for Sentry, whose region is listed below, they store data in the United States. Like any hosting provider, they keep standard request logs (such as an IP address and a time) for a short period, for security and operations.

• Railway: our database (including the logo files you upload), this website, the service the apps talk to, and the CartHouse app inside your Shopify admin.
• Cloudflare: the network in front of our servers.
• Apple and Google: delivering the notifications a store sends to customers who turned them on.
• Sentry: crash reports from the shopper apps, one merchant’s app at a time and off unless we switch them on, and error reports from CartHouse’s own servers; neither carries customer data; stored in [L: US/EU region] and deleted after [L: retention].

Deleting your data

Merchants: uninstall the app, or write to us. Shoppers: your account lives with the merchant’s Shopify store; ask the merchant or use Shopify’s account tools. In the app, turning notifications off removes your phone’s notification address from our records. Crash reports are deleted after [L: retention].

Security

All traffic is encrypted in transit and our database is encrypted at rest. Our servers hold no shopper names, emails, addresses or payment data. Access to merchant data is limited to the people who run CartHouse, and every change to a published app is recorded.

Changes

We will post changes to this page and update the effective date. Material changes are announced to merchants in their Shopify admin or by email.

Contact

Privacy questions or requests: [email protected].