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Comment by aboutruby | Hacker News Reader

Shopify:

> Shopify has had growing concerns about Mailchimp’s app because of the poor merchant experience and their refusal to respect our Partner Program Agreement. Our terms require app partners to share all important data back to the merchant using Shopify’s API to help them run their businesses.

Mailchimp:

> Throughout these negotiations, we refused to agree to terms that jeopardize our users’ privacy and require us to hand over customer data acquired outside of Shopify. From our perspective, that's not our data to share.

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I had been working on an integration between our product and Shopify via an app for just about a week when their updated ToU came out. It is a pain in the butt. I side with MailChimp here, that customer data isn't ours to share with Shopify, especially since it concerns a whole different segment of our merchants' customers (brick and mortar vs ecommerce).

What's not mentioned here is that they also updated the terms to prohibit selling anything on behalf of a merchant without using their checkout api, if your software is integrated with Shopify. But we make a special-purpose POS, that's our value-add. It appears that they just want their cut - of customer data and of fees.

Edit: a link to the ToU discussion on the Shopify forums. https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-APIs-SDKs/We-ve-upda...

Exactly what data is this dispute about? The article says "customer information captured on merchants’ online stores" but what exactly does that mean?

The definitions are frustratingly vague. "Any customer data excluding sensitive personal data", which doesn't exclude stuff that isn't relevant to them, or things that don't fit in the API.

Also, it states that apps "not use an alternative to Shopify Checkout for web checkout or payment processing, or register any transactions through the Shopify API, without Shopify’s express written authorization".

That's from 2.3.17-18 of the api terms of use: https://www.shopify.com/legal/api-terms

As an app developer the updated T&C really threw me off. How are they going to enforce apps sending back data to Shopify? What happens if a merchant has 5 apps, and each one of them sends back a different phone number or name for the customer?

Also, how does one determine if data collected on behalf of an entity needs to be send back to Shopify? Say there's a contact form app. Anyone can fill out that form (investors, analysts, vendors, partners, as well as actual customers). Is the app then required to send that data back to Shopify? How does one make the differentiation, aside from only syncing back to Shopify if the customer exists on Shopify (this isn't clarified in the terms)

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