Who we are
Affisi is a Shopify app published by Alessio Bussolari (Negozione), Via del Prete 121, 47841 Cattolica (RN), Italy, VAT no. 02037590383. We process personal data in two different roles, explained below: as controller for our own relationship with the merchants who install the app and for affiliate portal accounts, and as processor on behalf of each merchant for the data of its affiliate program and of its customers.
For any question about this policy you can write to [email protected].
What Affisi does
Affisi lets a Shopify merchant run an affiliate program and a refer-a-friend program. People join from the store's signup page, get a personal link and, if the merchant turns it on, a discount code, and earn a commission on the sales they bring. The merchant approves them, follows the results and pays the commissions by hand or as Shopify store credit.
Store data we access
When a merchant installs Affisi, Shopify grants us access to the following, strictly to make the app work:
- Store details: name, domain, currency and language. The store's contact email is read from Shopify only when we need to write to the merchant, and is not stored.
- Products: to let the merchant set commission rules for specific products and to compute commissions on the items sold.
- Orders and refunds: number, date, currency, amounts, items, discount codes, checkout token and the Affisi reference saved on the cart, to credit each paid order to the right affiliate and to lower or cancel the commission after a refund.
- Customers: only the Shopify customer ID. We do not store the names, email addresses, phone numbers or postal addresses of the store's customers. If an order contains an email address, we turn it into a one-way keyed code, used only to spot self-referrals and addresses the merchant has blocked, and we discard the email itself.
- Discounts: to create and remove the affiliates' discount codes, when the merchant uses them.
- Store credit: to pay commissions and referral rewards as Shopify store credit, when the merchant chooses this method. To find the affiliate's customer account, we look it up in the store by the affiliate's email address.
- Web pixel and customer events: to install the Affisi pixel, which tells us which affiliate link led to a completed checkout (see Cookies below).
Personal data we process
Besides the store data above, Affisi stores:
- Affiliates and referrers: name, email address, password (kept only as a secure hash), language, website, the answers given to the merchant's signup questions, links, discount codes, commissions and payouts.
- Affiliate portal sessions: the browser's user agent and the time of sign-in.
- Clicks on affiliate links: the store page the visitor landed on and the time. We do not store IP addresses. The browser's user agent is read only to skip known bots and is never stored.
- Store customers: the Shopify customer ID, on attributed orders, on the link between a customer and the affiliate who first brought them (when the merchant uses lifetime attribution), and on the account of a customer who joins the refer-a-friend program.
- Checkout tokens sent by the Affisi pixel: kept for 2 days, then deleted.
- Messages the merchant sends to its affiliates through Affisi.
- Technical data: application logs and error reports, needed to keep the service running and secure.
Why we process it
As controller. We use the store details and the merchant's contact details to provide the app and its support: the legal basis is the performance of our contract with the merchant (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). These details are needed to install and use Affisi: without them the app cannot work. When we deal with a member of the merchant's staff, we use their contact details on the basis of our legitimate interest in managing the relationship with the merchant (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). We are also controller of the affiliate portal account — name, email address, password, language and sessions — which one person can use to join the programs of several stores: we use it to let that person sign in and manage the account, on the basis of the performance of our contract with them (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). We use application logs and error reports, including the technical details they may contain about the people using the app, to keep Affisi secure and working: the legal basis is our legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
As processor (Art. 28 GDPR). The data of each affiliate program — memberships, signup answers, clicks, attributed orders, commissions and payouts — and the data of the merchant's customers are controlled by the merchant, who decides why they are used and on which legal basis. We process them only on the merchant's instructions, given through the app's settings, to credit sales, compute and pay commissions, send the program's emails and provide support. We do not use them for any purpose of our own. Hetzner and Amazon Web Services, listed below, act as our sub-processors for this data.
We never sell personal data, and we never use it for advertising or profiling.
Where the data is stored
The data is stored in Germany, inside the European Union: the application, its database and the files merchants upload, such as marketing materials for affiliates, are on Hetzner servers in Germany. The app's emails are sent through Amazon Web Services from the Frankfurt region, Germany. All traffic between your browser, Shopify and our servers is encrypted with TLS.
Shopify keeps store and customer data on its own platform, under the merchant's agreement with Shopify and Shopify's own privacy policy.
How long we keep it
We keep the data for as long as the app stays installed on the store, except checkout tokens, which are deleted after 2 days.
When a merchant uninstalls Affisi, Shopify sends us a shop deletion request 48 hours later, and we delete all data belonging to that store: its program, memberships, clicks, attributed orders, commissions, payouts and uploaded files. Affiliate portal accounts are not tied to a single store, so they stay until their owner deletes them.
Affiliates can delete their account at any time from the affiliate portal. We then delete the account, its memberships in every program, its links, clicks and attributed orders. Each merchant keeps its commission and payout records, which no longer point to the account and only show the affiliate code.
If a customer asks the merchant to delete their data, Shopify forwards the request to us: we remove that customer's Shopify ID from the attributed orders and delete their link to an affiliate. We also remove it from their refer-a-friend membership and from completed store credit payouts. A store credit payout still in progress keeps it, because it is needed to check that payment. If a customer asks for a copy of their data, we email the merchant the orders attributed to that customer, and the merchant passes them on.
Who we share it with
The merchant whose program an affiliate joins sees that affiliate's details, signup answers and results. Apart from that, we only share data with the providers we need to run the service:
- Shopify — the platform hosting the store and processing payments. For stores in Europe the contracting company is Shopify International Limited, Ireland. When Shopify transfers data outside the EU to its group companies, including its parent Shopify Inc. in Canada (a country covered by an adequacy decision of the European Commission), it relies on its Binding Corporate Rules; transfers to other recipients rely on the Standard Contractual Clauses of the European Commission, as set out in the Shopify Data Processing Addendum. When the merchant turns on the Affisi triggers in Shopify Flow, we send Shopify the affiliate details its workflows use, such as name, email address and code.
- Hetzner Online GmbH — our hosting provider in Germany.
- Amazon Web Services — sending of the app's emails (Amazon SES) from the Frankfurt region, Germany: account confirmations, password resets, program updates, the merchant's messages to affiliates and customer data copies for merchants. The data stays in the EU; if Amazon Web Services, Inc. accesses it from the United States, that transfer relies on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, under which the company is certified, and on the Standard Contractual Clauses of the European Commission included in its data processing terms. You can request a copy of these safeguards at [email protected].
- CloseYourIt — our own error monitoring service, run by us on Hetzner servers in Germany. Email addresses, passwords and other sensitive details are removed before an error report is sent, IP addresses are not sent, and the reports are not passed on to third parties.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you can ask to access, correct or delete your data, to restrict its processing, to object to it and to receive it in a portable format.
If you are a customer of a store, or an affiliate in a store's program, the store is the controller of that data: contact it first, and we will help it answer. You can also write to us at [email protected] and we will pass your request on to the store. You can delete your affiliate portal account yourself from the portal. For that account and for the other data we process as controller, write to us directly at the same address.
You can also lodge a complaint with the Italian data protection authority, the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (www.garanteprivacy.it), or with the authority of the EU country where you live or work.
Cookies
Affisi uses three cookies of its own and stores nothing in your browser's local storage. The first two are strictly necessary, so they do not need your consent. The third is set on the store's website only if you allow marketing in the store's cookie banner, through Shopify's Customer Privacy API; if you do not allow it, or withdraw it later, Affisi removes it. The Shopify admin that hosts the app sets its own cookies under Shopify's cookie policy. The cookies and browser storage of this website (negozi.one) are listed on its cookie page.
- _affisi_rails_session — the encrypted session cookie of the Affisi app. In the Shopify admin it only holds the security token that protects forms from forged requests: you are signed in through Shopify session tokens, not through cookies. On the program's signup pages and in the affiliate portal it also remembers the language you picked. Duration: until you close the browser.
- affiliate_session_id — set when you sign in to the affiliate portal. It holds a signed identifier of your session and nothing else. It is deleted when you sign out; otherwise it lasts up to 20 years.
- affisi_ref — set on the store's website when you arrive through an affiliate link, only if you allow marketing. It holds a random identifier of that click, so the sale can be credited to the affiliate. The same identifier is saved on your cart as _affisi_ref and, when you complete checkout, the Affisi pixel sends it to us together with the checkout token. Duration: 60 days from the click.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page and, when the change is significant, we will inform merchants by email.
Contact
Alessio Bussolari (Negozione) — [email protected]