Reference
Data and privacy
What Pay Sync stores about your shop and payments, where it lives, how long it is kept and what it never holds.
#What does Pay Sync store?
Pay Sync keeps the records it needs to send payments to your terminals, match them to orders and check them every night. For your shop that means:
| Record | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Shop and settings | Your shop domain, currency, store locations, payment type name, Simulator or Live mode, and your plan and billing dates. |
| Terminals and tills | The label you gave each terminal, its terminal and merchant IDs, site and till numbers, and for each till its device ID, name, location and when it was last seen. |
| Payment records | Amount, currency, time, outcome, the references the terminal returns, the card scheme, a masked card number, the Shopify order it matched and the POS staff member number. |
| Raw requests and replies | What Pay Sync sent to your terminal provider and what came back, so a disputed payment can be investigated. |
| POS and order events | Totals, payment methods, line items and IDs of completed sales, returns and exchanges. |
| Nightly reports | What your terminal provider's report says for each till and day. |
| Exceptions and activity | Exceptions, any note you type when you resolve one, and a log of what was done and by whom. |
The staff member is stored as a number that Shopify assigns, not as a name.
#What is never stored?
Good: Pay Sync never stores a full card number, expiry date, CVV or PIN. Card details are typed on the terminal and stay there.
What the terminal returns, and what Pay Sync keeps, is a masked card number, the card scheme, the authorisation code and reference numbers. Card numbers in nightly reports are masked before they are saved.
Pay Sync also does not ask for or store customer names, email addresses, phone numbers or addresses. Shopify events can carry these fields, so Pay Sync removes them before an event is saved.
Careful: Free text that staff type into Shopify, such as an order note, is not read by Pay Sync. If an event carries it, it is saved with the rest of that event. Keep customer details out of notes.
#What does Pay Sync write to Shopify?
The terminal's answer is written onto the order as metafields in the app's own namespace. You can read them in your admin and use them in your own exports. The On the order page lists every field.
Pay Sync also adds hidden properties to the POS cart after an approved sale, so the sale can be linked to its payment. It does not change an order's totals or payment status. It asks Shopify for three permissions: read locations, read orders and write orders.
#Where is the data kept?
The app runs on servers in Frankfurt, Germany, and its database is also in Frankfurt. Your records are therefore stored outside South Africa. Apart from Shopify and the hosting and database providers, only your own terminal provider, which you choose, handles them.
The connection details you save for your terminal provider are encrypted. The pages and the API use HTTPS only.
#How long is it kept?
While Pay Sync is installed, your records are kept so your history stays complete. Nothing is deleted on a schedule.
When you uninstall:
- Shopify tells Pay Sync at once. Pay Sync deletes its access token for your shop and marks the shop as uninstalled.
- Your records stay for now, so your history is intact if you reinstall.
- About 48 hours later, Shopify sends an erasure request. Pay Sync then deletes everything held for your shop, including settings, credentials, terminals, payment records, raw requests and replies, events, reports, exceptions and the activity log.
You do not need to ask for this. If you reinstall before the 48 hours are up, nothing is deleted.
Note: Copies of deleted records in the database provider's rolling recovery history are overwritten as that history ages out.
#What about my customers' data requests?
Shopify may pass on a customer's request to see or erase their data. Pay Sync acknowledges these. It stores no customer details, so there is nothing to export or erase.
Under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), you are the responsible party for these records and Pay Sync is your operator. We do not sell your data or use it for advertising.
#How do I ask for a copy, a correction or deletion?
Email info@askmario.co.za, or contact support. You may also complain to the Information Regulator in South Africa. The full wording is in the Privacy Policy.