Reference
Customer data requests
When a customer asks for their data or asks to be forgotten, Shopify forwards the request to every app on your store. Alva Courses records each one, answers a data request with a file, and carries out a real deletion for an erasure.
Where the requests appear
The banner's Open privacy requests action opens Customer privacy requests, a table of everything Shopify has forwarded for this store. Each row shows the request type, the customer's email, when it arrived, its status and how many attempts it has taken. Statuses are Received, In progress, Completed and Failed.
The three kinds
- Data request — a copy of what you hold, answered with a downloadable file.
- Customer erasure — Alva Courses deletes that person's data for your store and marks the request Completed.
- Store data erasure — sent after the app is uninstalled; it removes your store's Alva Courses data outright.
What a data request produces
A JSON file covering everything Alva Courses holds about that person for your store: enrolments, quiz attempts and submitted answers, reflection entries, lesson comments, the course and order emails sent to them, and any contact properties you added. Each section reports how many rows it returned and whether it was capped. Producing the file marks the request Completed.
What an erasure removes
A customer erasure removes that person's enrolments, progress, quiz attempts and answers, reflection entries, comments, purchase and refund records, email history, contact properties, and any coursework archive kept for them — and suppresses them from the monthly digest. Their customer record goes once nothing else refers to it.
Deleting a member is not an erasure
The two differ on purpose. When you remove a student, Alva Courses keeps the coursework you graded, so a qualification you awarded still has evidence behind it. An erasure request destroys that archive too: retention is a convenience, erasure is an obligation. See keep coursework after removing a member.
If a request fails
A request that could not be completed is marked Failed, and its row offers Retry to queue it again. Any other status is not retryable, so the button stays disabled. If one keeps failing, email courses@alvaapps.com with the date it arrived — well inside your 30 days.
See also
See add or remove a member, contact properties, or export members to CSV.
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Last updated 2026-09-07