Section Forest Privacy Policy

Section Forest (“the App”) is a Shopify app that adds ready-made theme sections, AI-built pages, a side cart, volume discounts and bundles, and product page blocks to Shopify stores. It is operated by Progryss Media Private Limited (“Progryss”, “we”, “us”, “our”). The App runs at sectionforest.progryss.com.

This policy explains what the App collects, why, who it is shared with, and how long it is kept. By installing or using the App you agree to this policy.

What we collect

From merchants

• Store identity: your myshopify.com domain, store name and store contact email, read from the Shopify Admin API when you install and whenever the App checks your plan. We keep them in a store record with your plan, whether the App is installed, and the dates you installed, last used and uninstalled it.
• Shopify access tokens and sessions, so the App can act on your store on your behalf.
• Your sections: which library sections your store owns (free, bought, or included in your plan), which you saved for later, and which you added to which theme (the theme’s id and name and the file name).
• Settings you enter: your side cart settings, your volume discount and bundle offers, your product block settings, and your brand settings for AI pages (colours, fonts, button corners, tone and notes).
• Your AI work: for each “Customize with AI” run, the section, theme and page you picked, the product or collection you chose (its id and title), your notes, the result’s summary and warnings, and the credits used. For each AI page: what you asked for (description, notes, look, colours), the page as built, the theme template it went into, a copy of your original home page template when you use an AI page as your home page (so you can restore it), and the page’s id and address once you publish it.
• Plan, billing and credits: your plan, read from Shopify’s Billing API; the plan subscriptions the App created for your store (the subscription’s id and plan name); your one-time purchases (what was bought, its price, Shopify’s charge id and status, and, for a custom pack bought for another store, that store’s myshopify.com domain); and your AI credit balance.
• Free trial record: Plus starts with a free trial, one per store. To keep it to one, the App records the trial’s subscription, the day it started, how many trial days it has, how many your store has used, and whether it is over.
• Support: the messages you send us through “Chat with us” and our replies; feature requests you send (title, details and an optional picture) and the requests you vote for. Other merchants see a request’s title, tag, status and number of votes, never who sent it, its details or its picture.
• Browser preferences, kept only in your own browser (localStorage): which notifications you have seen, the setup guides you hid, how many rows per page you like, your last Page Builder style, and the sections picked for a custom pack before you buy it.

Store data the App works with

To do what you ask, the App reads from your store, through the Shopify Admin API: products (titles, handles, descriptions, types, prices, images, variants and options), collections, your themes and their files (including your theme’s colours and fonts), your Files library, your navigation menus and discounts. If you allow it for the side cart’s best-seller suggestions, it reads the products and quantities in your last 50 orders to rank your best sellers; it reads no customer names, email addresses, phone numbers or addresses from them.

The App asks only for the permissions a feature needs, when you first use it. The one it always needs is write_themes. The others are asked for when needed: read_products, write_products, write_files, read_discounts, write_discounts, read_orders, write_online_store_pages and write_online_store_navigation. It does not request Shopify’s customer permissions.

What the App writes into your store, only when you ask it to: section files and templates in the theme you pick; a copy of your live theme named “Section Forest · Try” for Try on theme; a product’s theme template; images in your Shopify Files; pages and a link in your main menu (when you publish an AI page); the App’s own settings for the side cart, discounts and product blocks (app metafields); automatic discounts for your volume discounts and for side cart rewards; and the charges you approve.

From shoppers and customers

The App holds no shopper or customer personal data: no names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, IP addresses or order records.

The side cart, the bundle widget and the product blocks run on your storefront. They talk only to your own store’s Shopify storefront APIs (the cart, product and recommendation endpoints Shopify provides), for example to add an item, change a quantity, apply a discount code or save an order note. The discount code and order note a shopper types go to your Shopify cart, not to us. The side cart keeps two values in the shopper’s browser for that browser session only (sessionStorage): when its “cart reserved” timer ends, and the last reward tier reached.

How we use it

• To run the features you use: the section library, Try on theme, Customize with AI, AI pages, the side cart, volume discounts and bundles, product blocks, and support.
• To apply your plan and purchases: which sections you own, the features your plan includes, and your AI credits.
• To give each store one free trial: the free trial record decides how many trial days a new Plus subscription starts with, so that reinstalling the App carries on the same trial instead of starting a new one.
• To answer your messages and feature requests.
• To operate, secure and debug the App, and to show your store in our own admin panel for support: store name, domain, contact email, plan, trial, install status and dates, sections owned, purchases and credits.

We do not sell your data, use it for advertising, or use it to build products for anyone other than you.

AI processing (OpenAI)

“Customize with AI”, AI pages (including the product blocks they add), and the AI assistants in the side cart and volume discounts use OpenAI’s API: text generation for copy and settings, and image generation only when you ask for new images. What is sent is limited to what each task needs:

• your store’s name, description, address and currency;
• a few of your products, or the product or collection you picked: titles, handles, types, prices, the start of their descriptions and the addresses of their images;
• your theme’s colours and font names, and your brand settings;
• the section or page being built, and what you typed: notes, page descriptions and requests;
• for “Create discount from screenshot” only, the screenshot you upload. We do not keep it; only the discount draft made from it is saved. (The side cart’s “match a screenshot” reads the colours in your browser and sends only the colours.)

No customer or order personal data is sent, because the App holds none. Under OpenAI’s API terms, data sent through the API is not used to train OpenAI’s models by default. Images the AI makes are saved to your store’s Shopify Files. AI copy can be wrong: the App flags figures and promises it could not find in your notes or store data as warnings, and you review everything before it goes live.

Sharing & sub-processors

We share data only with the services needed to run the App:

• Shopify: the source of your store data and the place the App writes your sections, pages, images, discounts and settings. Shopify also handles all billing, free trials included: a trial is part of the subscription you approve in Shopify, and Shopify bills nothing until it ends.
• OpenAI: text and image generation, as described above.
• Our hosting provider (DigitalOcean): the cloud server where the App runs and where its database is kept.
• Google Fonts: serves the App’s font to your browser when you open the App. No store or shopper data is sent to it beyond the ordinary request your browser makes.
• YouTube: only if you play a help video inside the App.

We may also disclose data where we are legally required to.

Retention & deletion

While the App is installed, the data above is kept so the App can work.

When you uninstall:

• Your Shopify access tokens and sessions are deleted immediately, in the uninstall webhook.
• Your store record is marked as uninstalled and your plan goes back to Free. A free trial running at the time stops (Shopify cancels the subscription), and the days it used are added to your free trial record.
• The side cart, bundle widget and product blocks stop showing on your storefront, because the App’s theme extension is removed with the App.
• What the App wrote into your store stays there until you remove it, because it is part of your store: section files in your themes, the “Section Forest · Try” theme copy, pages, menu links and images in your Shopify Files. Side cart reward discounts the App created can remain under Discounts in your Shopify admin, where you can delete them.
• Everything we hold about your store in our database is permanently deleted when Shopify asks us to remove your store’s data (the shop/redact request, sent 48 hours after uninstall), and in any case within 30 days of that request: your store record, sections, settings, AI setups and pages, credits, free trial record, subscriptions and purchases, support messages, and your feature requests with their votes.
• Data deleted from our database may remain in our nightly database backups until they are replaced (backups are kept for 14 days).

Shopify compliance webhooks (GDPR)

The App responds to all three of Shopify’s mandatory privacy webhooks:

• customers/data_request: because the App stores no customer personal data, there is no customer data to export. We acknowledge every request and confirm this to the merchant within 30 days.
• customers/redact: likewise acknowledged; the App holds no customer records to delete.
• shop/redact: permanently deletes the store’s data in our database, as listed under Retention & deletion.

Security & data transfers

All traffic to and from the App is over HTTPS. Every page of the App in your Shopify admin checks Shopify’s session before it loads, and Shopify’s webhooks are checked against Shopify’s signature. Access to production systems is limited to staff who need it, and our internal admin panel is behind its own sign-in.

Our servers and the sub-processors listed above may be located outside your country, so your data may be transferred and processed internationally. We rely on the contractual protections offered by those providers for such transfers.

Your rights

Depending on where you are, you may have the right to access, correct, export or delete the data we hold about you, to object to or restrict processing, and to withdraw consent.

• Access and correction: what the App holds is visible and editable inside the App itself: your sections, settings, AI pages, purchases and support messages.
• Export: write to us and we will send you a copy of the data we hold about your store.
• Deletion: uninstalling the App deletes your data as described above. If you want it deleted sooner, write to us at the address below and we will action it.

We do not discriminate against anyone for exercising these rights.

Changes to this policy

If we change what the App collects or how it is used, we will update this page and the date at the top.

Contact