Privacy policy█

What this covers

TellShip Rates ("TellShip", "we", "us") is a Shopify app that shows shipping prices in a store's checkout, worked out from Australia Post's published retail rates. The app serves Australian merchants and is operated from India, and this policy is written on that basis.

TellShip is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Australia Post, and no information is exchanged with Australia Post. This policy explains what information the app handles for the merchants who install it and for their customers, and what it deliberately does not keep.

This policy covers the app only. Tellship's general site and client privacy policy covers tellship.com and consulting engagements.

The short version

We price shipping. To do that we read your store's settings and products, and at each checkout Shopify sends us the cart and the delivery address so we can quote it. We never store your customers' names, street addresses, emails or phone numbers. The quote record we keep — the rate log — contains the parcel, the prices, and the reason for any refusal. The rate log keeps the destination postcode and country of each quote, and nothing else about the person.

Who is responsible for what

Two different relationships run through this app, and the GDPR treats them differently.

• Your store's own information — we are the controller. Your shop details, your configuration and your support correspondence are ours to answer for, and this policy governs them.
• Your customers' information — you are the controller and we are your processor. At checkout we act on Shopify's instruction on your behalf. We use that data only to return the quote and for nothing else. Of your customers' data we keep only the destination postcode and country of each quote, to explain the rate. We do not decide what happens to it. Your own store privacy policy is what governs your customers.

The contract between us, including our data processing terms, is in the TellShip Rates terms of service.

Information we collect from your store

When you install TellShip we access, and store where needed to run the app, the following through Shopify's APIs:

• Your store's name, myshopify.com domain, and the email address Shopify holds for the store — used to operate the app and to contact you about it.
• Your locations, shipping settings and Shopify plan — used to attach the carrier service, ship from the right place, and show which features your plan supports.
• Your product catalogue, including the dimension fields the app maintains (custom.tellship_* metafields) — used to pack carts into your boxes.
• The configuration you create in the app: boxes, packing rules, service settings, rounding and free-shipping rules.

Information we handle about your customers

At checkout, Shopify sends us the cart contents and the delivery address. We keep the destination postcode and country on the quote's rate log row, so the quote can be explained later. The street address, name, email, phone and checkout identifiers are used in memory for that one quote and are not stored. Specifically:

• We do not store customer names, delivery addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, or checkout identifiers.
• The rate log row written for each quote contains the parcel that was priced (items, dimensions, weight), the services and prices returned, the reason if no price could be given, and an internal request id we generate ourselves.
• We do not place cookies or any tracking on your storefront, and we collect nothing from your customers' browsers. The app runs only inside the Shopify admin.

Information you give us directly

If you contact support we keep the correspondence, your name and the contact details you use, for as long as needed to help you and to keep a record of the issue.

How we use information

Only to provide, support and improve the app: quoting shipping at your checkout, diagnosing why a price came out the way it did, and responding when you ask for help. We do not sell information, share it for advertising, or use your customers' data for any purpose beyond returning the quote Shopify asked for.

Quotes are worked out by our own rates service from Australia Post's published retail rates. The parcel details — dimensions and weight, never the customer's identity — are sent to that service of ours to be priced. Nothing is sent to Australia Post, and nothing goes to any recipient beyond those listed below.

Why we are allowed to process it

Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, our lawful bases are:

• Performance of a contract — running the app you installed, which is the whole of the quoting, configuration and billing path.
• Legitimate interests — keeping the service secure, diagnosing why a quote came out as it did, and holding the post-uninstall archive described below so a billing dispute can be answered. We have weighed these against your interests and they concern store data, not buyer data.
• Legal obligation — responding to Shopify's mandatory compliance webhooks and to lawful requests.

We do not rely on consent, and we do not process any special category data.

Who else sees it

We do not sell data and we use no analytics, advertising or tracking service of any kind — the app carries no third-party SDK. The only parties involved in running it are:

• Shopify — the platform the app runs inside, and the source of everything we receive. Shopify's own handling is governed by its privacy policy and by your agreement with them.
• Our hosting provider, Railway, which runs the application and its database in us-east-1, Northern Virginia, United States.
• Our rates service, which prices a parcel and receives dimensions and weight only.
• Our support desk, which holds the correspondence you send us.
• Our support assistant, which runs inside our support desk, can read your rate log when you ask it a question in the support chat. Each of those reads is logged.
• OpenAI, the AI provider behind the support assistant, which receives the rate log rows the assistant reads, including the destination postcode and country. It processes them in the United States, does not train on them, and keeps them for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring before deleting them.

Each is used only to run the app, is bound to handle the data on our instructions, and may not use it for its own purposes.

Retention and deletion

Retention. Each quote is logged with the destination postcode and country, the cart weight, the parcel we declared and the rates returned, and kept for 90 days so a quote can be explained, then deleted. No name, street address, email address or phone number is kept. When you uninstall the app, or Shopify sends a store erasure request, your store's settings and quote history are moved to an archive held for 12 months so a billing dispute or legal question can be answered, then permanently deleted. Access tokens are discarded at uninstall and never archived.

• When you uninstall the app, your store's live data is removed: the carrier connection immediately, and everything else when Shopify sends its redaction request about 48 hours later.
• Before removal we take an archive copy of your store's configuration and quote history — none of it customer personal data beyond the postcode and country already on each quote — and keep it for up to 12 months, solely so billing disputes and legal questions can be answered. It is then deleted.
• Dimension fields written to your own products remain yours and stay on your store.
• We respond to Shopify's data-subject webhooks. Quote records hold a postcode and country but nothing linking them to a person, so they cannot be found for a single customer; they are deleted after 90 days whatever happens. A shop redaction request removes the store's live data as above.

Where information is processed

Information crosses three countries, and we would rather say so plainly than bury it:

• Your store is in Australia.
• The app and its database run in us-east-1, Northern Virginia, United States, and the support assistant's AI provider, OpenAI, processes in the United States.
• It is operated and supported from Bangalore, India, so the people who build and support it access it from there.

Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, the United States and India are third countries without a UK or EU adequacy decision covering this transfer. We rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses — and the UK Addendum where the UK GDPR applies — together with the technical measures described below. A copy of the clauses is available on request at the address at the foot of this page.

Wherever you or your customers are, the same practices apply: minimal collection, no storage of buyer personal data beyond the destination postcode and country, and no secondary use.

How we protect it

The strongest protection here is structural rather than technical: Buyer personal data beyond the destination postcode and country is never written down, so there is no store of it to lose. What remains is store configuration and quote records.

• Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and backups are encrypted. All traffic to and from the app goes over TLS.
• Access to the production database is limited to the people who operate the app, and is used for support and diagnosis rather than routinely.
• Every request Shopify makes to the app is verified against Shopify's own signature before it is acted on, including the compliance webhooks, which are rejected outright on a bad signature.
• The app holds a session for the signed-in Shopify admin user so it knows which store is asking. It sets nothing on your storefront and nothing on your customers' browsers.

If we confirm a security incident affecting your data, we tell you within 72 hours of confirming it, and the supervisory authority within 72 hours where the law requires.

Your rights (GDPR)

Merchant data is created and redacted via Shopify's mandatory compliance webhooks. If a shop uninstalls TellShip Rates, or a data-redaction request is received, that shop's data is deleted — the carrier connection immediately, and the store's configuration and rate log on Shopify's redaction request, subject only to the 12-month dispute archive described above.

Quote records hold a postcode and country but nothing linking them to a person, so they cannot be found for a single customer, and a customer data request or redaction request has nothing it can return or remove. They are deleted after 90 days whatever happens.

Where the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies to you, you have the right to access the information we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to receive it in a portable form, to restrict or object to its processing, and to withdraw any consent — though we do not rely on consent for anything described here. Write to us at the address below and we will answer within 30 days, free of charge.

If a request reaches us about one of your customers, we will pass it to you rather than act on it, because for that data you are the controller and we are not.

You can also complain to your own data protection supervisory authority — in the EU, the authority for your country; in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office. We would rather you came to us first, but the right does not depend on that.

Children

The app is a tool for merchants and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16, and because nothing stored identifies a shopper, a shopper's age never reaches us.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update it at this URL and note the date at the top. A change that affects what we collect will be announced to installed stores before it takes effect.

Contact

supportratesau@tellship.com
Tellship
BHive, Bangalore, KA 560066, India

Help centre: support.tellship.com