Connect Shopify with the Growth Dept ACR app

Install the app and link the shop

1. Open the install link Growth Dept sends you while you are signed in to your Shopify admin, and approve the access the app asks for. Shopify installs Growth Dept ACR and opens it inside your admin.
2. Press Connect to ACR. A new tab opens on acr.growthdept.ai, from a link that works once and expires after 30 minutes.
3. Sign in. Without an account, Continue with Google creates one, using a Gmail or Google Workspace address.
4. Choose the ACR store that should receive this shop's checkouts and orders, or A new store in one of your organizations, or A new organization and store. Only admins and owners of an organization can link a shop to its stores. A store created here takes its time zone from Shopify.
5. Leave Start receiving checkouts and orders now unticked unless your campaigns are ready, then press Connect the store.
6. Go back to Shopify and press Check again. The app now shows Connected to your ACR store.

Each ACR store holds one Shopify store. To move the shop to a different ACR store, open the app in Shopify and choose Connect this store to another one; the first store stops receiving its checkouts.

If Shopify stops accepting ACR's access, the connection shows Error. Opening Growth Dept ACR from the Shopify admin gets a fresh token and reconnects it.

What the app can read

The app asks Shopify for three read permissions and nothing that writes. It cannot change your store, and it creates no orders or discount codes.

Shopify then sends ACR these notifications: checkouts/create, checkouts/update, orders/create and app/uninstalled, plus Shopify's three privacy requests. ACR checks every notification's signature and skips any it has already handled. Apart from the notifications, ACR reads only the shop's name, domain, currency, time zone and plan.

What ACR keeps

• From each checkout: the shopper's email, phone, name, country, state or province and language, their marketing consent, the items with variant, quantity, price and SKU, the total, subtotal, shipping cost, currency and discount codes, the link back to the cart, the sales channel, and the landing page and referring site with any UTM tags.
• From each order: the order number, total, currency, discount codes, sales channel, UTM tags, payment status, test flag and dates.

Street addresses and the full Shopify payload are not stored. Shopify records nothing about consent to calls, so that stays unknown; see Consent.

While reading is off, ACR acknowledges each notification and stores nothing about the shopper. Checkouts from before you start reading are never fetched later.

Start reading checkouts

Checkouts reach your campaigns only after an admin or owner of the store switches reading on. The box on the connect page does it at connection time; otherwise:

1. In ACR, open Integrations from the menu at the foot of the sidebar.
2. On the Shopify app row, press Start reading checkouts. The button stays greyed out until the row shows Connected.
3. Read the confirmation and press Start reading.

The confirmation spells out what changes. ACR reads the store's abandoned checkouts and saves the shoppers as leads. From then on, any published campaign with its trigger on can call, text and email those shoppers, inside the consent and calling-hour rules. A campaign that is still a draft, or has its trigger off, contacts nobody.

Every start and stop goes into the audit log. Stop reading checkouts takes effect at once, without a confirmation. It does not end runs already under way, and while reading is off their shoppers' orders do not reach ACR either, so a purchase will not stop those runs.

Privacy requests from Shopify

When a customer asks Shopify for their data, ACR collects what the store holds about them into a sealed file and posts a notification. An admin downloads it from Privacy requests on the Integrations page and sends it to the customer. Each file is kept for 30 days, and every download is recorded.

When Shopify asks for a customer to be erased, ACR removes the contact details, names, conversation content and cart links of the leads that match their email or phone, and ends their open runs.

Uninstalling

When the app is uninstalled, the Shopify app row shows Disconnected, ACR deletes its token, reading goes off, and every scheduled step and open run in the ACR store ends.

Shopify asks apps to erase a shop's data 48 hours after an uninstall. ACR then deletes every shopper record the store holds: leads, checkouts, orders, runs, conversations, hand-offs, conversions and the suppression list. Your campaigns and settings stay.

Installing the app again does not reconnect the shop by itself. Open the app, press Connect to ACR and pick the store again. Reading starts off unless you tick the box.