How we improved the GDPR/CCPA app in 2021?

Another year, another recap! 2022 is just around the corner, and here we are - wrapping up what we have been through these challenging 12 months. We are grateful to all of our users and truly appreciate the support and positive feedback on our work. We hope that the GDPR/CCPA + Cookie Management app will continue to evolve and promise to do our best to provide you the quality service you deserve.
Now, let's get straight to the point and see what we have done this year:

Quick Setup

This is the first step you need to go through after installing the GDPR/CCPA app. There you are able to choose the region you want to show the Cookie Bar for. You can enable the Cookie Consent Bar for:

• EU/EEA visitors (GDPR) + Brazil (LGPD)

• for California visitors only (CCPA)

• for both GDPR and CCPA regions

Next, you can select the outlook of the Cookie Bar and Preferences Popup. You are able to choose between three different design samples.

Golden

Navy

Jade

Note: Keep in mind that these are just sample designs, and you can further modify the colours after finishing the Quick Setup.

Lastly, you have to choose which cookies to be blocked on initial visit. There are four options available:

• To Keep all store cookies
• To Block the marketing cookies 
• To Block functionality cookies
• To Block analytics cookies 

Translations

Earlier this year we introduced our new Translation Tab, which includes the following options: 

• Set the Language of the GDPR/CCPA Request pages and emails 
• Change the Language for data collection text. 

We have also added video tutorials showing how you can manually translate different parts of the app.

Other than that we have two brand new buttons: 'Refresh Metafields' and 'Add metafields to theme.liquid'. First, what are the metafields? Metafields are extra pieces of data that apps can attach to products, customers, orders, and other objects in Shopify. They are useful for storing information like part numbers, customer titles, blog post summaries, or as it is in this case, help with the translation of specific fields introduced by 3rd party apps. Here is what the new buttons do: 

• Refresh Metafields - press the button to set up the metafields. That way they will be visible in the settings of the translation app that you are using.

How the Refresh Metafields button looks like

• Add metafields to theme.liquid file - this button will add the necessary code, for our app to work correctly with those metafields. 

How the Add metafields to the theme.liquid button looks like

We receive a lot of questions on how to translate the GDPR/CCPA app on a daily basis. For that reason, we started creating tutorials showing the translation process with some of the most popular translation apps we already work with. We gathered these videos in our GDPR/CCPA app Translation Series playlist.

How the Translation playlist looks like

New features in the Policy Acceptances Tab 

The newly updated Policy Acceptances tab shows if the client has interacted with the Accept button or the Close button. In addition to that, it stores the type of cookies that the customer has decided to accept using. We have also modified the "Created at" section by adding the exact time and time zone to it.

Help Center Improvements

In April, we launched our improved Help Center tab. There you can find a lot of useful resources plus a self-diagnostic option that helps you check your situation before opening a chat with our support team. The tab has a brand new outlook, and you are able to choose between two options: Live Chat and FAQ.

How the new Help Center looks like

• If you select the Live Chat option, you will see the most common issues that the users are experiencing. 
• If you select the FAQ option, you will find all the questions we receive daily. For your convenience, we have highlighted the most popular ones with a yellow tag and divided them into three sections: General, Cookie Consent Bar, and Translation. 

Integrations

This year was full of cross-marketing collaborations and new partnerships. We joined forces with Analyzify - an all-in-one Shopify data-analytics app that takes care of your data collection. This integration guarantees fully GDPR compliant Google Tag Manager for your Shopify store. You can find out more about our partnership here.

Regarding integrations, we have a new Integrations tab on the admin side of the app. In this tab, you will see all the apps compatible with our GDPR/CCPA app.

How the new Integrations tab looks like

By clicking on some of the featured apps, you will find an overview, a list of features, plus a video tutorial (available for the translation apps).

A Step-by-Step Setup Guide

To facilitate your work with the GDPR/CCPA app, we created a Setup Guide. This guide helps you make your Shopify store compliant. It includes steps such as Enable for Specific Regions, Setup the Privacy Policy page, Configure the Cookie Management section that will assist you with the additional configuration of the app.

In order to ease your job even more we created a playlist with video tutorials for each point.

New GDPR/CCPA app plan

This year we upgraded the GDPR/CCPA app plans by launching our brand new Enterprise plan.

We recommend the Enterprise plan for big marketplaces and Shopify Plus stores. It contains all the features of the Pro plan plus some new exclusive additions like:

• Free translation app set up - this means that, upon request, you will get a one-time free translation app set up of your choosing.
• AWS CDN (Amazon Web Services Content Delivery Network) - this feature brings enhanced content security, a higher performance rate as opposed to the other plans, and better location detection.
• Priority Support - this type of support is available only for Enterprise plan users. Their requests will be reviewed first at the beginning of the day. The rest will be replied from oldest to newest.

Polishing up our YouTube channel

We all know that people prefer to watch videos rather than read articles. That is why we started improving our YouTube channel. One of our brand new playlists is the GDPR/CCPA app "How to" Guide. It is based on the most frequently asked questions sent to our support team. The playlist consists of tips and tricks on how to easily modify the app by your preferences. We recommend checking it regularly as we are constantly adding more content.

How the How-to Guide playlist looks like

Setup Guide playlist is another useful resource. We have gathered all the initial steps you need to follow in order to stay on top of the latest regulations.

How the Setup Guide looks like

CCPA Compliance Updates

This year, we made a major update of the CCPA Compliance page due to the new CCPA Do Not Sell My Personal Information Rule. If your business is operating in California, or you have customers based in this state, your Shopify store must be compliant with this rule. In case you are currently using the app, you will have to update your CCPA Compliance page in a few clicks. The page has to include the Do Not Sell My Personal Information section which allows the customers to opt-out of selling their personal information to third parties. Regarding the new installations the updated page is pre-generated with the installation of the app. 

How the updated CCPA Compliance page looks like

After you renew your CCPA page, you should compose the Do Not Sell My Personal Information link and add it to the footer of your store, that way your customers can easily access it. In order to see the whole process of renewing your CCPA Compliance page, check our dedicated blog post here.

Conclusion

To wrap it up, we can say that 2021 was a year full of improvements and updates.

We will raise the curtain a little by sharing that great new features are coming up, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, download the GDPR/CCPA + Cookie Management app if you haven't already.

Last but not least, a big THANK YOU to all our users for the thrust and appreciation this year. 

Happy Holidays!