Last updated: 11 October 2026
This policy explains what the HolaReply app for Shopify (“the app”) reads, stores and shares when a merchant installs it on their Shopify store, and when the store’s customers use the chat.
Who we are
HolaReply is made by SEO Agency Inc. Contact: hola@holareply.com.
For the personal data of a store’s customers, the merchant decides why and how it is used (the controller) and we process it for the merchant (the processor). For the merchant’s own account details, we are the controller.
What the app does
The app adds an AI chat to the merchant’s storefront. The chat answers shoppers from the store’s own published content, hands topics the merchant locks (such as custom quotes) to the merchant’s team with an enquiry form, and lets a shopper check their own order with its order number and email.
What the app can read in your store
When you install the app, you allow it to read:
| Shopify permission | What we read | Why |
|---|---|---|
read_products | Published products: title, description, variants, price, availability, images | To answer questions and show product cards |
read_content | Published pages and blog articles | To answer questions |
read_legal_policies | Your shop policies (refund, shipping, privacy, terms) | To answer questions |
read_discounts | Running automatic discounts (title, summary, dates) | To mention current offers correctly |
read_orders | One order at a time, only when a shopper asks: order number, the email on the order, date, payment and fulfilment status, tracking company, number and link | To show that shopper the status of their own order |
We do not read customer accounts, addresses, payment details or your other orders. We only use published content; drafts and hidden products are not indexed. Shopify’s read_orders permission covers orders from the last 60 days.
What we store
| What | Personal data? | How long |
|---|---|---|
| An index of your published content (text pieces and their search vectors) | No | While the app is installed; removed when you unpublish or delete the item |
| Your settings (assistant name, greeting, colour, locked topics, AI choice) | No | While the app is installed |
| Your own AI key, if you add one | No (a secret) | Encrypted; until you remove it or uninstall. Never shown again, never logged |
| Your store’s Shopify access token | No (a secret) | Encrypted; until you uninstall |
| Chat conversations: the shopper’s questions, the answers, the language, and contact details if the shopper left them | Yes | Until you delete them, or 30, 90 or 365 days after the last message if you choose a period in Settings, then deleted automatically; always deleted 48 hours after you uninstall |
| Enquiries a shopper sends through the chat’s form: name, email, phone, message, and the question they asked before it | Yes | While the app is installed; shown on the app’s Enquiries page (with a CSV download) and emailed to your store’s address unless you turn that off |
| A log of who viewed your customers’ data in the app (your staff’s Shopify user id, the time, the address) | Yes (your staff’s) | One year; you see the last 90 days in the app |
| Order lookups | Order data is shown to the shopper and not stored | Not kept |
| Usage counts for your plan (number of AI conversations per period) | No | While the app is installed |
We do not use tracking or advertising cookies. The chat keeps a conversation token in the shopper’s browser session storage, which is cleared when the tab is closed. We do not store shoppers’ IP addresses with conversations; to stop abuse, we keep a one-way hash of the IP address in a short-lived counter (a window of at most an hour) that the daily clean-up deletes.
What goes to the AI provider
To answer a question, we send the AI provider:
- excerpts of your store’s published content;
- the shopper’s question and the last few messages of the conversation, after removing every email address and phone number;
- the instructions for the answer (your locked topics, the language).
Never sent to the AI: names, emails, phone numbers or companies from the enquiry form or from the conversation’s contact details, and any order data from order tracking. If a shopper types their own name inside a question, it cannot be told apart from ordinary words and is sent as part of the question.
Which provider:
- HolaReply AI (the default): Google’s Gemini API, called with our paid key.
- Your own key, if you choose it: Google Gemini, OpenAI or Anthropic, called directly with your key. With OpenAI we ask that requests are not stored (
store: false). Your use of your own key is also covered by that provider’s terms. Note: Google may use prompts sent with free-tier Gemini keys to improve its products; use a paid key if that matters to you.
We do not use your store’s data or your customers’ conversations to train any AI model, and we do not sell or share personal data for advertising.
Sub-processors
| Service | What for | What they receive | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google (Gemini API) | Answers and the search index (HolaReply AI, or your Gemini key) | Store content; questions with emails and phones removed | Outside the EEA |
| OpenAI | Only if you choose OpenAI with your own key | The same | Outside the EEA |
| Anthropic | Only if you choose Claude with your own key | The same | Outside the EEA |
| Resend | Emails: to you (new enquiries, the weekly summary, your account), to your team (Desk sign-in codes, chats given to them) and your team’s replies to shoppers | Email addresses and the emails’ content (an enquiry email contains the enquiry) | Outside the EEA |
| Hostinger International Ltd | The server the app runs on (a virtual private server) | Everything we store | Outside the EEA |
| Cloudflare, Inc. | Network and security in front of app.holareply.com; storage of the encrypted off-site backup copy (R2) | Requests in transit; encrypted backups (14 days) | Global network; backups outside the EEA |
| Shopify | The platform and billing | What Shopify already holds | — |
Only if you turn them on (Pro and Business, in the Desk: Integrations), enquiries also go where you send them. These are your own services, not our sub-processors; you choose them and their terms apply:
| Your choice | What it receives |
|---|---|
| Your Telegram bot and chat | Each new enquiry (name, email, phone, company, the question) and what that shopper writes next; your replies from Telegram go back to the shopper |
| Your webhook address (Zapier, Make, n8n, a CRM) | Each enquiry as JSON, signed with your secret |
Security
- HTTPS for all traffic: the storefront chat, the app, Shopify’s webhooks.
- Conversations, the contact details shoppers give and enquiries are encrypted in our database; access tokens, AI keys and other secrets are encrypted too. The keys are kept apart from the database.
- Each store’s data is kept apart from every other store’s; the app checks Shopify’s session token on every admin request and Shopify’s signature on every webhook.
- Only our technical staff can reach the server, with SSH keys. Every time someone views your customers’ data, in the app or on our side, it is logged; you can see that log in the app.
- Backups are made daily, encrypted, and kept for 14 days, so deleted data can remain in an encrypted backup for up to 14 days. A copy of each backup, still encrypted, is kept for the same 14 days with Cloudflare.
- We have a written security incident policy: if your store’s data is affected by a breach, we tell you within 72 hours.
Your rights (merchants)
You can see your store’s conversations and enquiries in the app (and download the enquiries as CSV), see who viewed them, change your settings, and remove your own AI key at any time. Our terms and Data Processing Addendum (holareply.com/shopify-terms/ and holareply.com/dpa/) set out how we process your customers’ data for you. You can ask us at hola@holareply.com for a copy of the data we hold for your store, or to delete it. Uninstalling the app deletes everything we hold for your store 48 hours later (so a quick reinstall loses nothing), or straight away when Shopify sends us its deletion request. The one thing we keep is your store’s myshopify.com address and the date its free trial began, so that each store has one free trial; it holds no personal data about you or your customers.
Your customers’ rights
Shoppers can ask the store for a copy of their data or for it to be deleted. Shopify passes those requests to us:
- Data request (
customers/data_request): we prepare the conversations and enquiries linked to that customer’s email or phone, and show them to you in the app (Conversations › Customer data requests) so you can send them to the customer. - Deletion (
customers/redact): we delete that customer’s conversations and enquiries in your store. - Store deletion (
shop/redact): we delete all of your store’s data.
A shopper can also write to us at hola@holareply.com; we will pass the request to the store, since the store decides about its customers’ data.
Children
The app is meant for shoppers of the merchant’s store and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect children’s data.
International transfers
The app’s server and most of our sub-processors are outside the EEA. Where personal data from the EU, the UK or Switzerland is transferred, we rely on the Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK addendum) in our sub-processors’ data processing terms.
Changes
If we change this policy, we update the date above and, for important changes, tell merchants in the app or by email.
Contact
SEO Agency Inc — hola@holareply.com — https://holareply.com