There are two ways to end a Shopify connection: you disconnect the shop in your MemberArea, or you uninstall the app MemberArea Connect in your Shopify admin. They do different things, and an uninstall is followed by a deletion of the shop data two days later. This article walks through each case and through the privacy requests Shopify passes on from your customers.
Disconnect the shop in your MemberArea
- Open Settings, then Integrations.
- Click the row of your shop. The Shopify dialog opens.
- Press Disconnect.
- The question Disconnect Shopify? appears with "Purchases in your shop stop unlocking access. Members keep what they already have."
- Press Disconnect to confirm, or Cancel to keep the connection.
The dialog closes and the shop is gone from the list. The Shopify page at
/admin/settings/integrations/shopify shows No shop connected yet again.
If the disconnect does not go through, the dialog shows the reason at the top, or "The integration could not be disconnected. Please try again." when there is none. Try once more.
What a disconnect changes:
- Your MemberArea stops listening to the shop. Shopify no longer sends it orders, refunds, product changes or customer changes.
- The app MemberArea Connect stays installed in your shop. Opening it in your Shopify admin shows its start screen again, which asks for a "Connection code". Uninstall it there if you no longer need it.
- Members keep every course, group or forum they already have. Orders, members and contacts stay in your MemberArea.
- Your mappings are kept but unlock nothing. If you connect the same shop to this workspace again, as described in Connecting your Shopify shop, exactly the mappings that were linked before the disconnect are back.
From the moment you disconnect, a purchase in your shop unlocks nothing. A refund or a cancellation in Shopify no longer takes access back either. If a buyer should lose their access after that, remove it by hand on the member.
Uninstall the app in Shopify
When the app is uninstalled in your Shopify admin, your MemberArea notices it at once:
- The card on the Shopify page reads Disconnected.
- Every mapping on the Mappings tab reads No longer linked. Your MemberArea remembers which mappings these were.
- The Webhook log shows an
app/uninstalledrow with the note "The app was uninstalled in your-shop.myshopify.com. The connection now needs to be reconnected."
New orders unlock nothing from then on, and members keep what they already have. The Webhook log stays readable, so you can still look back at what arrived before.
Within 48 hours you can undo this. Press Reconnect shop on the Shopify page and approve the connection in Shopify, or reinstall the app from the Shopify App Store and open it in your Shopify admin, which reconnects the shop without a code. Either way, exactly the mappings that were linked before the uninstall come back. The details are in Connecting your Shopify shop.
48 hours after an uninstall
Two days after the app was uninstalled, Shopify asks every app to delete the data it holds about that shop. Your MemberArea then removes:
- the links between Shopify customers and your members and contacts,
- every mapping of that shop,
- the stored deliveries of that shop,
- the connection itself.
Orders, transactions, members and contacts stay with your workspace, and so does every access a buyer already received. The hidden products that carried your mappings stay in your catalog together with the orders that point at them.
The same happens if you disconnected the shop in your MemberArea first and uninstall the app later. The mappings and customer links that the disconnect kept are removed 48 hours after the uninstall.
After those 48 hours the mappings cannot be brought back. Connecting the shop again then works as if for the first time, and you set up every mapping anew.
If you pay for MemberArea through Shopify
This only concerns the plan your workspace pays for, not purchases in your shop.
While your workspace is billed by Shopify, the shop cannot be disconnected in your MemberArea. Pressing Disconnect then shows "Switch billing to MemberArea before disconnecting Shopify." Switch your billing first, then disconnect.
Uninstalling the app in Shopify ends the Shopify billing. The app/uninstalled
note in the Webhook log then adds "Shopify billing ended for this
workspace. Nothing was deleted." Your plan keeps running until the end of the
period Shopify already charged for. Deleting your whole platform, on the
other hand, does not stop the Shopify billing: only the uninstall does.
How to switch your billing, and what happens to your plan after an uninstall, is in Paying for MemberArea through Shopify.
When a customer asks for their data
A customer of your shop can ask Shopify for the data stored about them.
Shopify passes the request on, and it shows up as a customers/data_request
row in the Webhook log.
Every owner of your workspace then gets an email and a notification titled "A Shopify customer asked for their data". Both name the shop, the customer and the date your answer is due. The email also lists the orders the customer asked about and says "Shopify expects your answer within 30 days. MemberArea does not send the data for you." Its button "Open the Shopify settings" leads to your Shopify page.
The answer is up to you. Collect what your MemberArea holds about the person, for example under Audience, then Members or Contacts, and their orders under Payments, then Sales, then Orders, and send it to them before the date in the email.
When a customer asks to be deleted
When a customer asks Shopify to delete their data, a customers/redact row
appears in the Webhook log. Your MemberArea removes the link to that
Shopify customer and the stored deliveries about them, including the refunds
of their orders and their earlier data requests. The customers/redact row
itself stays as a record of the request, with nothing left in it but the
Shopify customer number. The note reads like
"Removed 1 link and 4 stored deliveries for Shopify customer 7012345678. The
member itself belongs to the workspace and stays."
The member, the contact, their orders and their transactions stay. They belong to your workspace, and the person may also have bought from you outside Shopify. If you want the person gone from your MemberArea too, delete the member or the contact yourself.
Your MemberArea handles both kinds of request even after you have disconnected the shop in your MemberArea. Owners still get the email and the notification for a data request, and a deletion request still removes the link and the stored deliveries. The request then does not show up in the Webhook log, because the shop no longer belongs to your workspace.
Customers who reach your MemberArea through Shopify are described in Importing your Shopify customers.