Privacy Policy
Effective August 15, 2026 · Firsthand is operated by Pixel and Shelf ("we")
The short version: Firsthand processes the minimum order data needed to link a survey answer to a purchase and compare it with your store's own analytics. It never collects a shopper's name, email address, phone number, or street address. Nothing is sold, shared with data brokers, aggregated across stores, or used to train AI models. Uninstalling the app erases your data.
Who this covers
This policy covers merchants who install the Firsthand app for Shopify, their customers ("shoppers") who answer a survey, and visitors to firsthandsurveys.com. For shopper data, the merchant is the data controller and Firsthand is a processor acting on the merchant's instructions.
What we process, and why
When a merchant installs Firsthand, we store the shop domain, the merchant's contact email, and the access token Shopify issues the app. When a shopper answers a survey, we store, per response:
- The answer itself, including any write-in text the shopper chooses to type.
- Order details: order ID and number, order total and currency, discount codes used, and purchased products (product ID and title only).
- The order's marketing journey as recorded by Shopify (referrer and UTM touchpoints), used to compare what shoppers say with what analytics credited.
- The customer's Shopify ID (an opaque identifier) plus two lifetime aggregates: order count and total amount spent. These distinguish first-time from returning buyers and power lifetime-value reporting. This is the only customer identifier we hold — we do not collect or store shopper names, email addresses, phone numbers, or street addresses, and the app has no ability to contact shoppers.
We use this data for exactly two purposes, as declared to Shopify: app functionality (serving the right question to the right shopper, linking answers to orders, writing answers back to orders as tags and metafields, and minting optional single-use thank-you discount codes) and analytics (the reports the merchant sees: attribution comparison, segment comparison, seasonality, and the weekly digest email sent to the merchant).
Shoppers
The survey appears on the order confirmation page after checkout. Answering is voluntary and skippable, and the survey widget sets no cookies, runs no trackers, and makes no third-party network calls. If a shopper answers, the merchant may see that answer alongside the order in their own admin and reports.
Where data lives and how it is protected
Data is stored in a PostgreSQL database hosted by Render (United States), encrypted at rest, with daily backups. All data in transit uses TLS. Each merchant's data is scoped to their shop and is never visible to any other store.
Sharing
We do not sell or share personal data, run third-party analytics on it, or use it to train AI models. Our only subprocessors are Shopify (the platform the app runs on) and Render (hosting). One optional feature sends data elsewhere at the merchant's own instruction: a merchant can connect their own AI assistant (for example Claude or ChatGPT) to their survey data over MCP, in which case their queries and the responsive data flow to the AI provider the merchant chose, under that provider's terms.
Retention and deletion
- Data is retained while the app is installed, so long-range reports keep working.
- When a merchant uninstalls, Shopify sends its
shop/redactwebhook and we erase that store's data completely. - When a shopper asks their merchant for erasure, Shopify's
customers/redactwebhook anonymizes that shopper's rows while leaving the merchant's aggregate counts intact. - Shopify's
customers/data_requestwebhook is honored with an export of what is held. - Merchants can export their data as CSV at any time, on every plan, including after canceling a subscription.
This website
firsthandsurveys.com is a static site. It sets no cookies and runs no analytics or tracking scripts.
Changes and contact
If this policy changes materially, the effective date above changes with it and the current version always lives at this address. Questions or requests: [email protected].