Shop customers and privacy: what is stored, importing customers and erasure

Not live for everyone yet. The Shop is rolling out to a closed pilot first, so some accounts don't see it yet.

To pack and post an order you need a name and an address. To print a name on a keychain you need the name the buyer typed. Beyond that, every extra piece of a buyer's personal data held in SimplyPrint is something you have to answer for. The Shop is built so you decide exactly which buyer details come in from each store, and can erase a customer completely when they ask.

This article covers the Customers tab (/panel/shop/customers), which buyer details each store shares, importing customers from a store, editing an imported customer, erasing a customer, and what happens to customer data when a store is disconnected.

The Shop is part of the Print Farm and Enterprise plans. Seeing customers needs See customers. Creating and editing them needs Manage customers. Erasing needs Erase customers, which is given to account administrators by default.

The customer directory
The customer page
Which buyer details come in
What each store shares
Importing customers from a store
Editing an imported customer
Erasing a customer
Disconnecting a store and erasure requests from a store
Related articles

The customer directory

The Customers tab lists everyone who has ordered from you, plus anyone you added by hand. Each row shows the person (with their initials, name and company), the stores they came from, and how many orders they have. A customer who bought in three stores shows the marks of all three and "3 stores". A customer you added by hand shows as Added here.

Choose New customer to add one, for example for a phone order. Search by name or email.

The Fernwood customer directory: people from Shopify, Etsy and added here, with the Stores and Orders columns

The customer page

Open a customer to see them on one page:

The header: their name, when they were added and from which store, where they are (country and city from the shipping address) and how many orders they have. One store gets an Open in Shopify button; several are listed in the side column, each with its own link.
Their orders, with mapping and production status. Release mapped orders straight from here.
Contact: email, phone and company.
Addresses: shipping and billing.
Store or Stores: where they came from, with a link to them in the store.
Custom fields and Internal notes for your team.

Edit customer changes their details here. If the store owns the record, the button reads Edit in and the store's name instead (see "Editing an imported customer" below). Erase customer is covered below.

Changing a customer's address doesn't change the address on orders they already placed; each order keeps the address it was placed with.

A Fernwood customer page: header with Open in Shopify, their orders, and the Contact, Addresses and Stores cards

Which buyer details come in

Every buyer detail is its own data-sharing switch on each store, and all of them start off. In guided setup the question is "How much customer detail do you need here?":

Answer	What comes in
None at all	No names, emails or addresses. You'll have to look orders up in your store to pack and post them
Just a reference number	The store's customer ID, so orders from the same person are grouped
Enough to pack and post	Name, email and shipping address from each order
A full customer directory	Also phone, company and billing address, and the store's whole customer list, including people who haven't ordered

Behind those answers are the individual switches: customer and recipient names, emails, phone numbers, recipient company names, shipping addresses, billing addresses, checkout notes, paid add-ons, and customer-supplied item details (personalization). Customer profiles are only created when customer intake is on: Do not create customer profiles, Customers from imported orders, or All accessible customers.

Turning a switch off stops new data arriving; it doesn't delete data already imported. To remove a person's data, erase them.

The Privacy Policy and the sub-processor list describe how SimplyPrint handles this data on your behalf.

What each store shares

What a store can send depends on the store as well as on your switches:

Shopify can send names, emails, phone numbers and addresses on orders, and its customer list. Customer details need customer access allowed in the SimplyPrint app in Shopify. See Shopify and the Shop.
WooCommerce doesn't send a buyer's name, email or address with orders yet, whatever you allow. The order page says so and points you to the order in WooCommerce. The store's registered customer accounts can be imported. See WooCommerce and the Shop.
Etsy sends the recipient's name with each order, if you allow it. It doesn't share a customer list or shipping addresses with SimplyPrint. See Etsy and the Shop.

When an order arrives with no customer or address, the order page says why: either the store doesn't send them yet, or the store's switches are off.

Importing customers from a store

To bring a store's existing customers in, choose Import customers on the Customers tab. It needs the Manage store connections permission, a store that can share its customer list, the store's customer population set to All accessible customers, and at least one contact field confirmed.

Choose one or more stores. Results are grouped by store, 25 at a time, and search covers every chosen store.
Select customers, a whole page, or everyone matching your search.
If you picked from several stores, a review shows likely matches. An exact email match is only a suggestion, unticked; names never count as the same person. Confirmed matches become one customer with a link to each store.
Import. The result counts created, existing and linked customers, and lists any that failed, so a retry never makes duplicates.

Importing never merges customers you already have by name or email on its own, and it doesn't turn on ongoing customer sync.

Editing an imported customer

A customer imported from a store exists in two places. The store's Editing an imported customer setting decides what editing them here means:

Edit here; the store keeps its own copy (default): changes stay in SimplyPrint.
The store owns them; do not edit here: the customer is read-only here, and Edit in (with the store's name) takes you to the store. The change comes back by itself.

When the store changes a customer's name, email or phone, the Shop doesn't overwrite your record. The order shows Review customer contact changes, and you pick which fields to take, knowing the customer record is shared by all their orders.

Erasing a customer

When a customer asks you to delete their data, open them and choose Erase customer. The dialog spells out exactly what happens:

What is erased

Their name, email address, contact details and picture, and the notes and custom fields on their customer page.
On every order they placed: the shipping and billing addresses, order and item notes, personalization (such as a name to engrave), comments, tracking numbers and your own custom fields.
The link between them and your store's own customer record, so importing again can't recreate them.

What stays

Their orders, with what was bought, quantities, amounts and dates. These are your commercial records. The orders keep pointing at the customer, marked Erased, so your history still adds up.

Orders still in progress. An order that hasn't shipped or been cancelled keeps its shipping address, notes, personalization and comments so it can still be made and delivered. They're erased once it ships or is cancelled, and after 30 days at the latest.

You have to give a reason ("Erasure request from the customer", for example). It's kept on your account's audit log (which Enterprise accounts can open) with the person's details replaced by "[erased]", so you can show what was done and why. An erasure can't be undone.

This erases the copy SimplyPrint holds. If the request covers your store too, erase them in the store as well.

The Erase customer dialog with What is erased, What stays, Orders still in progress and the required reason

Disconnecting a store and erasure requests from a store

Disconnecting a store doesn't delete customer data. Orders and customers stay as your production history, and reconnecting picks them up again. On Etsy, you can choose Disconnect and delete this store's data, which also removes its listings and mappings and erases customer details on its orders, while what was printed stays in your history.
When a store asks SimplyPrint to erase a buyer (Shopify sends this when a buyer asks it), the same erasure runs straight away for that buyer's data from that store, with no 30-day wait. Your audit log records how many orders and customers, never whom.
When a Shopify store uninstalls the app, Shopify asks SimplyPrint to erase the store's data about 48 hours later, unless the app is reinstalled first. Production history stays.

Updated on: 05/11/2026

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