How Sheets handles Shopify data

Last updated: 8 October 2026

This page sets out exactly which Shopify data Sheets reads, what it does with it, where it keeps it and for how long. It completes the privacy policy and the Data Processing Agreement.

In short

  • Sheets has read-only access to your store. It never creates, changes or deletes anything in Shopify.
  • Of your customers' personal details, Sheets reads only the city and the country of an address. It never asks Shopify for a customer's name, e-mail address, phone number, street address, postcode or region.
  • Store data is read live when a spreadsheet needs it and kept in server memory for at most one minute. It is not written to disk, except values your staff deliberately put in a spreadsheet, an export or a scheduled report.
  • Nothing is sold, shared with third parties, used for advertising or profiling, or used to train AI models.

Why Sheets has protected customer data access

Shopify groups customers' names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and addresses as protected customer data (level 2). Shopify gives its analytics API (ShopifyQL), which provides the store's sessions, visitors and conversion rate, only to apps that have level 2 access to all four of these fields. Sheets requests that access so your traffic reports work. It does not use the access to read names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers or street addresses: its queries to Shopify do not contain those fields, so Shopify never sends them. The only parts of an address it reads are the city and the country, for reports by location (sales by country, orders by city).

This is enforced in the code: every query Sheets sends to Shopify is checked by automated tests that fail if a query asks for any other personal field.

What Sheets reads from your store

  • Orders and order lines: order number, dates, status, amounts (subtotal, discounts, shipping, taxes, refunds, total), sales channel, tags, products, variants and quantities, the customer's ID, and the city and country of the shipping address.
  • How an order was reached: for each order, the source of the customer's first and last visit (for example "google" or "direct"), the referring website's domain, the path of the landing page (without its query string), UTM campaign tags, and the days from first visit to order. No IP addresses, browser details or visitor identifiers are read.
  • Customers: customer ID, number of orders, amount spent, account status, tags, dates, and the city and country of the default address.
  • Store traffic (Analytics): totals per day, per traffic source, per landing page, per device type and per visitor country: sessions, visitors, sessions that added to cart, reached checkout or completed checkout, conversion rate, pageviews, bounce rate and session duration. These are totals; Sheets does not read individual sessions or visitors.
  • Catalogue and stock: products, variants, collections, inventory levels and your locations.
  • Staff: the name, e-mail address and Shopify user ID of the staff members who open Sheets, to sign them in and apply sharing.

Where it goes and how long it stays

  • Read live: Sheets asks Shopify for data when a spreadsheet, chart, export or scheduled report needs it, and keeps the answer in server memory for at most one minute so a page can load its charts together.
  • Stored: your spreadsheets, their settings, sharing and version history, schedules and alerts, on our servers in the European Union, on encrypted disks. A spreadsheet contains store data only where your staff put it there (a value typed or pasted into a cell). Formulas, charts and pivot tables store how to compute a figure, not the store data behind it.
  • Sent: exports go to the staff member who asks for them; scheduled reports go to the recipients your staff choose, through the mailbox your staff connect.
  • Access token: the token Shopify issues at installation is stored encrypted (AES-256-GCM, key kept outside the data volume) and used only to read your store.

Who can see it

Inside your store, the staff members you give access to Sheets, within the sharing you set on each spreadsheet. At Drop Top, nobody looks at a store's data unless you ask us to in a support request or the law requires it. Our sub-processors are listed in the Data Processing Agreement.

Shopify's privacy requests

  • Customer data request: Sheets keeps no customer records of its own, so it answers with what your spreadsheets contain about that customer, if your staff put anything there.
  • Customer redaction: anything Sheets holds about that customer is deleted.
  • Uninstall and store redaction: uninstalling deletes the access token at once; all of the store's Sheets data is deleted within 48 hours of Shopify's store redaction request. We keep no backups of store data.

Questions

Write to [email protected]. We answer data protection questions and requests within 10 days.