Privacy Policy

When you open a Merkora account, work in the admin as a Merchant or a member of staff, or visit our own website, we decide why and how your personal information is used. Privacy laws call this role a “controller” or a “business”. This policy describes what we do in that role, and your privacy requests come to us.

When you browse or buy from a Store, the Merchant who runs it decides what information to collect and what to do with it. We host the Store and process the information for the Merchant under our Data Processing Addendum. Privacy laws call our role a “processor” or a “service provider”.

For Shoppers this means three things:

• The Merchant's own privacy policy is the one that governs your information. This policy only describes what the platform does when it processes that information for the Merchant.
• Privacy requests about a Store, such as a request to see, correct or delete your information, should go to the Merchant first. If you send one to us, we pass it to the Merchant and help the Merchant respond.
• Each Store is separate. A Shopper account, a cart or a privacy choice made at one Store does not carry over to another Store.

• Account details — your email address, your sign-in credentials, and a record of the version of the Terms of Service you accepted and when you accepted it.
• Store and team details — the Stores you create (name, web address, currency and settings), the people you invite (their email address, role and permissions), and which Stores each person belongs to.
• Subscription details — your plan, its status and dates, and the brand, last four digits and expiry date of the payment card for your subscription. We do not keep full card numbers or security codes.
• Payment account details — if you set up payment processing for a Store: the business's legal name, type, country, website and category; the representative's name, title, email address and year of birth; and the payout bank's name, the last four digits of the routing and account numbers, and the payout schedule.
• Content you add — products, images, themes, pages, discounts, notes about customers, files you upload to import a catalog, and the settings and credentials for the third-party tools you connect.
• Messages you send us — the name, email address, company, topic and message you enter in our contact form.
• Technical information — your IP address and the details a browser sends with each request, such as browser type. We use them to deliver pages, to limit abusive traffic and to keep accounts secure.
• Cookies and similar storage — a sign-in cookie and a few preference settings. See our Cookie Policy.

• Contact form — the name, email address, company, topic and message you send us.
• Technical information — your IP address and the details a browser sends with each request, handled by our hosting provider to deliver the page. We also use a shortened form of the address to limit how many messages one network can send through the contact form.
• Preferences — your light or dark display choice, kept in your browser.

Our own website and admin do not load third-party analytics, advertising pixels, tag managers, session recording or chat tools. The fonts they use are served from our own domain. The one exception is the theme editor in the admin: it previews a Merchant's own theme, so it runs whatever code that Merchant has put in the theme.

We process the following for the Merchant who runs the Store. What is collected in practice depends on the features the Merchant has turned on.

• Orders and checkout — email address, name, phone number if given, shipping address, the items ordered, prices, taxes, shipping method, discount codes used, and order and payment status.
• Payment details — the payment method, amount and status, the card's brand, last four digits and expiry date, and a one-way keyed fingerprint of the card number, used for fraud checks. We do not keep full card numbers or security codes. Once card processing is enabled for a Store, card details are handled by a third-party payment processor.
• Customer profile — your contact details, your order history, your email marketing preference with the wording you agreed to and the time, whether you have unsubscribed, and any tags or notes the Merchant's team adds.
• Shopper account — if you create one: your email address, name, a salted hash of your password, saved addresses, the time of your last sign-in, and a record of each signed-in session, including the browser type it was opened from.
• Sign-in codes — when you ask for a code by email, a hashed copy of the code and the IP address that requested it, kept briefly to stop guessing.
• Saved carts — if you tick the email marketing box at checkout and the Merchant has cart reminders on, your email address and the contents of your cart, so the Store can send you a reminder.
• Reviews and forms — a review you write (your name, email address, rating and text; your name and review are shown publicly once the Merchant publishes it), and whatever you enter in a sign-up or contact form on the Store.
• How you arrived — campaign tags in the link you followed, the first page you landed on and the site that referred you. Advertising click identifiers from the link may be kept as well, as the Cookie Policy explains.
• Privacy choices — your cookie choice, whether your browser sent a Global Privacy Control signal, and any opt-out saved to your Shopper account.
• Advertising details for an order — only where marketing is allowed for you under the Store's privacy controls and the Merchant has connected Meta or TikTok: your IP address, browser type, the advertising cookie identifiers set by those companies, and the address of the checkout page, kept for a short time so the purchase can be reported to them.
• Fraud prevention — a record of refused checkout attempts (email address, a short card label and the rule that refused it), and the email addresses or card fingerprints the Merchant has chosen to block.
• Approximate location — the country and region our hosting provider derives from your IP address. It is used to show the right market, to decide whether the cookie banner must ask you first, and it is recorded with your cookie choice.
• Store statistics — daily totals of page views, product views, visits, add-to-cart actions and checkouts started. These are counts for the Store as a whole and are not linked to you.

These companies process personal information for us so that the Services work:

• Supabase — database, sign-in and file storage, hosted in the United States; it also sends Merchants' account emails; receives the information stored in the Services.
• Vercel — web hosting, content delivery and domain routing; receives each request to the Services, including the IP address, and derives approximate location from it.
• Resend — email delivery for Store emails to Shoppers (orders, shipping, sign-in codes and marketing emails) and for our contact form; receives the recipient's email address and the content of the message.

We also use an infrastructure monitoring service. It receives system health figures only, such as queue lengths, error counts and server load, and no personal information.

A Merchant can connect advertising and analytics tools to a Store: Meta, Google Analytics, Google Ads, TikTok, Pinterest and Klaviyo. When a Merchant does, those companies receive information about Shoppers' activity on that Store, such as pages viewed, items added to the cart and purchases. They receive it only for that Store, and subject to the Shopper's choices described in Privacy controls on Stores.

For a purchase, a Merchant who has set up server-side reporting to Meta or TikTok also sends, where marketing is allowed for that Shopper: the order number, value and currency, the items bought, hashed versions of the Shopper's email address, phone number, name, city, state, postal code and country, a hashed customer identifier, the Shopper's IP address, browser type and advertising cookie identifiers, and the address of the checkout page. A Merchant who has set up server-side reporting to Google Analytics sends the order number, value and items, with the Google Analytics identifier from the Shopper's browser if there is one, where analytics is allowed for that Shopper.

When payment processing is enabled for a Store, card payments are handled by a third-party payment processor, Convesio Pay, under its own agreement with the Merchant. The Services send it the order details needed to take the payment. We may also share information about a Merchant and its Store with the processor so that it can set up the Merchant's account, prevent fraud and meet its legal duties.

These companies act for the Merchant, not for us, and use the information under their own terms and privacy policies. Merchants can also add their own code to a Store's theme. We do not control what that code collects, and the Merchant is responsible for it.

• The Merchant and its staff — Shoppers' information is available to the Merchant who runs the Store and to the staff the Merchant has given access.
• The public — a review you write is shown on the Store with your name once the Merchant publishes it.
• Connected Merkora services — if you use your Merkora account to sign in to another service we offer, such as Merkora Domains, we share your email address and name with that service after you approve the request on our consent screen.
• Legal and safety reasons — we disclose information when we believe in good faith that the law requires it, or that it is needed to protect the rights, property or safety of Merkora, our users or the public, or to investigate fraud or a breach of our terms.
• Business transfers — if we are involved in a merger, acquisition, financing or sale of assets, personal information may be transferred as part of it, subject to this policy.
• With your direction — when you ask us to, or agree to it.

We do not sell the personal information of Merchants, their staff or Visitors, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We have not done so in the past 12 months. Our own website and admin carry no advertising pixels or third-party analytics, and we do not send this information to advertising platforms or data brokers.

We do not sell Shoppers' personal information, and we do not share it for our own advertising. We process it as the Merchant's service provider.

A Merchant who connects advertising tools to a Store sends Shopper information to those companies. Under some state laws that is a “sale” or “sharing” by the Merchant. Whether a particular Store does this depends on the Merchant, and the Merchant's privacy policy must say so. The controls the platform gives Shoppers over it are described in Privacy controls on Stores.

Account sign-in credentials count as sensitive personal information under some laws. We use them only to sign you in and keep your account secure, and not to infer anything about you.

By default the banner asks every visitor, wherever they are, before the connected advertising and analytics tools load. Those tools stay off until you accept them, and stay off if you choose “Reject non-essential”.

A Merchant can switch a Store to a mode in which the banner asks first only for visitors in the European Union, the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. In that mode the connected tools are on by default for visitors elsewhere, who can still turn them off at any time. If we cannot tell where a visitor is, the banner asks first.

The banner controls the tools a Merchant connects through the platform, and any script the Merchant has marked to wait for consent. It cannot control other code a Merchant adds to a theme.

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, Stores treat it as a request to opt out of the sale and sharing of your personal information. Marketing cookies and advertising tools stay off for that browser, both in the browser and for purchase events sent from our servers, unless you yourself turn Marketing on in the Store's privacy choices while the signal is on. The Store shows “Opt-out request honored” when it has applied the signal.

Every Store with the consent layer shows a link or button marked with California's opt-out icon, normally labeled “Your Privacy Choices”. It opens your choices at any time. The first option there is a single button, “Do not sell or share my personal information”, which turns Marketing off and leaves your other choices as they were. Marketing covers Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, Pinterest and Klaviyo. Google Analytics, where a Merchant has connected it, is in the Analytics category and follows your Analytics choice.

If you opt out while signed in to your Shopper account at that Store, the opt-out is saved to the account. It then applies on every device where you sign in, and to purchase events sent from our servers for orders placed with that account's email address. It stays in place until you turn Marketing back on yourself, while signed in, in a privacy choices panel that showed you the opt-out.

Purchase events that a Store sends from our servers follow the same choices as the browser. Events to Meta and TikTok are sent only when Marketing is on for you under the rules above and you have not opted out. Events to Google Analytics are sent only when you allowed Analytics, or when the Store's banner was not required to ask you and you made no choice.

• Account and Store information — kept while your account and Store are open. When an owner deletes a Store, its database records are deleted at once and its uploaded files are removed. Your sign-in account stays until you ask us to close it.
• Catalog import files and row reports — deleted 90 days after the import finishes; an upload that was never started is deleted after 7 days.
• Contact form messages — delivered to our team by email and kept for as long as we need to deal with your request.
• Request-limit records — the shortened network addresses we use to limit repeated requests are deleted after 1 day.

The Merchant decides how long to keep its Shoppers' information. The platform applies these periods:

• Orders, customer profiles, Shopper accounts, saved addresses, reviews and form entries — kept for the life of the Store, until the Store is deleted or the Merchant instructs us to delete them.
• Sign-in codes — deleted within about two hours of being issued.
• Signed-in sessions — deleted once they are signed out or expire, which is 30 days after they were last used.
• Saved carts for reminders — deleted 60 days after they were last updated.
• Cart reminder records — the email address is removed after 60 days and the record is deleted after 400 days.
• Email delivery records — the recipient, type and status of each email sent, deleted after 180 days.
• Unsubscribe list — kept for the life of the Store, so that an address that unsubscribed is not emailed again.
• Advertising details for an order — IP address, browser type and advertising cookie identifiers, deleted after 30 days.
• Refused checkout attempts — deleted after 90 days. Emails and cards a Merchant has blocked stay on the Merchant's list until the Merchant removes them.
• Promotional checkout sessions — deleted after 7 days; the step-by-step counts behind a Merchant's funnel reports are deleted after 400 days.
• Queued events — the internal queue that triggers emails and purchase events is cleared after 30 days.
• Cookie choice records — kept for 36 months. The cookie that holds your choice in your browser lasts 180 days.

Deleted information can remain in backup copies for a limited time, until those copies are overwritten in the ordinary course.

Email info@altiusapps.com and tell us which right you want to use. To protect your information we will check that the request comes from you, normally by replying to the email address on your account. We may ask for more information if we cannot verify the request that way.

We respond within the time the law requires, usually 45 days. If we need longer, where the law allows it, we will tell you why.

You can ask someone else to make a request for you. We will ask the agent for proof that you authorized them, and we may ask you to confirm the request with us directly.

If we refuse a request, you can appeal by replying to our decision or by emailing info@altiusapps.com with “Privacy appeal” in the subject line. We will answer in writing within the time the law requires. If you are not satisfied with the outcome, you can contact the attorney general or privacy regulator of your state.

Send your request to the Merchant whose Store you used. The Merchant decides how your information is used and is responsible for answering. If you write to us instead, tell us which Store it concerns and we will pass your request to that Merchant and help it respond.

To opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information by a Store that uses advertising or analytics tools, use the “Your Privacy Choices” link on that Store or turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser. A Store that uses none of these tools has no cookie banner and no such link. To stop marketing emails from a Store, use the unsubscribe link in any of them, or change the setting in your Shopper account.