This policy explains what the AliExpress Product Importer Shopify app ("the app") collects, what it deliberately does not collect, and how long anything is kept.
The app stores no customer personal data at any point. It does not read or hold your customers' names, shipping addresses, phone numbers or email addresses. This is a design decision, not a promise about handling: the app does not request the protected customer fields from Shopify, so it never receives them.
The app is installed by Shopify merchants. For the data described here, the merchant is the data controller and the app's publisher is a processor acting on the merchant's instructions.
Shoppers who buy from a merchant's store do not interact with the app and their personal data is not sent to it.
The store's myshopify domain, currency, selected plan, and the access token that authorises the app to call the Shopify API on the store's behalf.
Titles, images, prices and category data for AliExpress products the merchant searches for or imports, and the Shopify products the app creates, so it can keep them in step with the supplier. This includes a price history for imported products.
Only for orders that contain a product imported through the app: the order number, order totals, line items, and which AliExpress product each line came from. Orders containing none of the app's products are not stored at all.
This is metadata only. No part of the customer's identity or address is included. When a merchant fulfils an order, they copy the shipping address from the order in Shopify — the app never holds it.
If the merchant uses search-by-image, the uploaded image is processed to find matching products and deleted within 24 hours.
| Service | What it receives |
|---|---|
| AliExpress affiliate API | Search terms and AliExpress product IDs. No customer or merchant data. |
| Image search API (via RapidAPI) | The image the merchant supplies for a visual search. No customer data. |
| Shopify | The platform the app runs on and reads product and order data from. |
No customer personal data is sent to any third party, because the app does not hold any.
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Uploaded search images | 24 hours |
| Price history snapshots | 180 days |
| Completed background jobs | 7 days |
| Cached AliExpress responses | 5–30 minutes |
| Store, product and order metadata | Until the store is deleted (see below) |
There is no personal-data retention period, because no personal data is stored.
Uninstalling the app immediately deletes its access tokens and stops all background work for the store. The merchant's own data — import lists, imported product records, price history — is kept briefly so that reinstalling within 48 hours restores the store to where it was left.
After that, Shopify's shop/redact request causes the store's
record and everything linked to it to be deleted permanently.
The app implements all three of Shopify's mandatory privacy webhooks:
customers/data_request, customers/redact and
shop/redact. The two customer-facing requests have nothing to act
on, since no customer data is held.
API credentials and access tokens are held server-side only and are never exposed to the browser. Traffic to the app is served over HTTPS. Access to the production database is restricted to the application itself.
The app sets a session cookie required for it to function inside the Shopify admin. It sets no advertising or analytics cookies and does not track merchants across sites.
The app generates AliExpress product links for imported products. When a merchant fulfils an order through one of those links, the app's publisher may earn a commission from AliExpress. This is at no additional cost to the merchant or to the merchant's customers.
Merchants may request access to, correction of, or deletion of the data the app holds about their store, by contacting us at the address below. Deletion can also be triggered at any time by uninstalling the app.
Depending on where a merchant is located, they may have rights under the GDPR, UK GDPR, or CCPA/CPRA. Because the app holds no consumer personal data, a consumer request under those laws is answered by the merchant's own store records, not by this app.
If this policy changes materially, the updated date at the top of this page will change and the new version will be published here before it takes effect.
Questions about this policy or about data handling: support@imagesearchaliexpress.com