Post-purchase surveys and customer privacy: what to keep, and where
Your customers’ names and contact details are already in Shopify. A post-purchase survey can work without copying them: each answer links to its order, and you look up the customer on the order when you need to.
This guide describes common practice. It isn’t legal advice. Check the details for your markets with someone qualified.
What a post-purchase survey needs to store
- the answers;
- the order each answer belongs to, so that each order answers once and you can see revenue per answer;
- the date and time.
It doesn’t need the customer’s name, email address, phone number, postal address or the products they bought. Each of those, copied into another tool, is something else you have to protect, and something else to find when a customer asks you to delete their data.
Keep customer data in Shopify
When every answer links to a Shopify order, you can always see who answered: open the order. And when a customer asks to see or delete their data, Shopify is where you already handle it.
This is how Post Purchase Surveys works. It stores the Shopify order ID, the answers, the order total and the time. It never asks Shopify for access to your customer records.
Don’t call the survey anonymous
A line like “this survey is anonymous” is tempting. If the answers link to orders, it isn’t true: you can open the order and see who placed it. Under the GDPR, data that can be traced back to a person is personal data, even when the name isn’t stored next to it. Other laws, such as California’s CCPA, take a similar view.
Say what is true instead: answers are linked to the order and are used to improve the store. Buyers accept that easily. They are less forgiving when a promise of anonymity turns out to be false.
Text boxes need extra care
Text boxes collect what you didn’t ask for: names, email addresses, phone numbers, and sometimes health details that explain why someone bought a product. To keep that to a minimum:
- Ask narrow questions. “Anything we could do better?” invites feedback. “Tell us about yourself” invites life stories.
- Put a note under each text box, such as “Please don’t include your name, email or phone.”.
- Remove what slips through before it is stored. Post Purchase Surveys replaces email addresses and phone numbers, and names that follow phrases like “I’m” or “my name is”. A name without such a phrase can stay, which is why the note matters.
- If you sell health or personal care products, don’t ask why the customer bought. The answer may be health data, which has stricter rules.
Decide how long to keep individual answers
To see a trend over a year, you need daily totals, not each individual answer. Keep individual answers for a short time, then keep only the totals. In Post Purchase Surveys you choose 7, 30, 60 or 90 days. After that, the individual answers and the text of written answers are deleted. Your charts keep the daily counts and revenue.
A CSV export of individual answers contains each answer with its order ID. Store it like any other customer file, and delete it when you have finished with it.
Add the survey to your privacy policy
In Shopify, edit your privacy policy under Settings → Policies. Add a paragraph like the one below, and replace the parts in brackets:
After you place an order, we may show you a short, optional survey on the order confirmation page. Your answers are stored with your order number by our survey provider, Post Purchase Surveys, and help us understand how customers find us and how we can improve. Please don’t include personal details in written answers. We keep individual answers for [30] days and after that only as totals. To ask about or delete your answers, contact us at [your email address].
Handle access and deletion requests
Customers usually contact you, not Shopify. Both kinds of request start in your Shopify admin, on the customer’s page:
| Request | What happens |
|---|---|
| “Send me my data” | Use Request customer data. Shopify sends the request to your apps. Post Purchase Surveys holds no name or contact details, only answers linked to order IDs, which you can see on the customer’s orders. |
| “Delete my data” | Use Erase personal data. Shopify tells your apps which orders are affected, and Post Purchase Surveys deletes the answers for those orders. Shopify sends this to apps after a delay, which can be longer if the customer ordered recently, so the deletion isn’t immediate. |
When you uninstall the app, Shopify asks it to delete your store’s data about 48 hours later, and it deletes all of it. The privacy and data docs list exactly what is stored and for how long.
Post Purchase Surveys links each answer to its order, removes contact details from written answers, and deletes individual answers after the period you choose. Install it from the Shopify App Store.