What Happens When AI, or a Shopify App Deletes Your Data?

0:07Shopify has an official help page called Backups and duplication. I actually read it this week and step 10 and I'm quoting says, copy and paste your blog posts and online store pages. Step 11, rebuild your menus by hand. So if you've been assuming that somebody at Shopify can roll back your store to yesterday, nobody can. And the terms you've agreed to the whole time you've been using Shopify have actually said so the whole time. Hey everyone, I'm Jay Myers and this is Shopify 1 % podcast. This is a solo show where I am focusing on giving you a 1 % win, something you can do to make a Shopify at least 1 % better today.

0:52So today's 1 % episode is actually a bit of a strange one because it won't make you a single dollar, but it will protect the dollars you've already made and the dollars that you might potentially be making in the next hour or day or weeks because by the end of this episode you'll have something that I call an undo map it's just going to be one page and it'll take maybe 15 minutes and it answers a question most merchants have never really asked out loud if the most important parts of my store disappeared today what would I put them back from and how long would it take so we're going to cover four big things.

1:32What Shopify actually protects, what their terms quietly hand you that you've accepted, the free safety nets that actually are already sitting inside your Shopify admin and how to do it and how to set it up because you should be taking advantage of them. And then how to close the gap between those free safety nets and the gap of what would be lost if something happened to you today. And I'm also going to read you one sentence from Shopify's terms of service. And it's about apps. I think every merchant should hear it at least once, which is a funny thing for me to say, because one time at Bold, we had 36 apps.

2:12So we'll get there. Hang on. This is going to be a good episode. OmniSend just shipped something that I've always wanted. You can now connect OmniSend to ChatGPT or Claude and just say, where can my email and SMS campaigns be making more money? And it actually figures it out. It reads your store data, all your campaign details, your store history, and it tells you, and the insights are legit good. And even better, you can then say, okay, let's fix that or build that campaign. And it actually does it right from your chat. It's wild. Now, if you're one of our listeners, you can get 30 % off for three months on OmniSend, just go to the show notes.

2:48There's a link there. Or you can just use the code J30, J-A-Y-3-0 when you sign up. Now, if you're using another email and SMS platform and you want to switch to OmniSend, which is a great idea, they will do the migration for you. Just give them five days and then you show up with everything set, ready to go. Now they've migrated thousands of stores from Klaviyo and on average, they're saving 35 % on their email and SMS bills. If you're listening to this show, you clearly care about your Shopify business. If your store isn't backed up and protected, it could all be for nothing. That's why I tell every store owner I know who cares about their business, you 100 % need Rewind installed.

3:24It's a non-negotiable for me. One bad CSV import, one app that edits your store the wrong way, which has happened to basically everyone I know. One bulk edit gone wrong, and now AI making changes for you. Listen, Shopify does not have an undo button. Rewind is the undo button. Go to shopify1percent.com slash rewind for 30 days free on us. Links in the show notes too.

3:54Okay, the way I like to think about Shopify is like a landlord, a really good landlord. Now, they keep the building standing. They fix the roof. They keep the lights on and there's security at the front door. And on Black Friday, when 10 ,000 people show up at your building, the elevators still work and everything works. But everything inside the unit, inside the building is yours. So if you leave a tap running and you flood your own kitchen and destroy your couch, you're the one buying it. It's in the lease. It's not the landlord's fault. Your products, your photos, your theme, your pages, your customer list, that's the stuff inside the unit.

4:37And I think the reason this catches a lot of people off guard is a lot of other software in our lives has trained us to expect a safety net. For example, if you delete a photo from your phone, it'll be in your recently deleted for, I think, 30 days. If you delete an email and Gmail, it's it's in your trash or it's in the archive section. But your Shopify admin doesn't have a trash can. You may have never thought about that before, but go look. There isn't one there. Now, there is a Rewind case study library that I've come back to multiple times. And Rewind is a sponsor of the show. I'm a huge fan of them.

5:16We invited them to be a sponsor. But the case study is about a company called Whisker Seeker Tackle. They make catfishing gear. I just thought that that's the best name, Whisker Seeker. We have catfish where I live and they've got these big, huge whiskers. Apparently, they're one of the actually the biggest catfishing companies in North America. But they're a small team, five people. and on Black Friday, they generally do a couple hundred thousand dollars in sales. It's a really, really big day to them on one day. Last year, three days before Black Friday, they were struggling with a CSV import.

5:47They were trying to import it. They kept getting an error and it wouldn't go improperly. So what do they do? They called their e-commerce platform support team and support said, Well, the best way to fix this is actually to delete all of your products and just re-import a clean import. So they did that. And guess what happened next? The import didn't work. And I don't know exactly why something happened, but it didn't work. Every single product, every SKU, every photo gone three days before Black Friday. And Shopify couldn't bring any of it back. There is no restore button. There is no, they weren't in the archive.

6:25Those products that got deleted are gone forever. And they didn't have a backup. So the owner, his name is Matt Davis, he said it was actually the worst day of his life. And some of it got pieced back together, but a lot of the photos, they were just gone. And some of the originals were years old and nobody could find them on their hard drives. So what did they do? The team spent the next 70 hours reshooting a lot of the product photos and rewriting the descriptions for more than like hundreds of SKUs. Thankfully, it had a happy ending. They finished just in time and they were actually still able to run their Black Friday sale and they hit their number.

7:05But what sticks with me the most from the story is there's no bad guy. Like there's no villain. Nobody got hacked. Nobody installed some malware or clicked on a pop-up they shouldn't have. Nobody did anything wrong. Somebody was just trying to fix a spreadsheet problem. So when you think about this, let's put your own numbers on it. Say your store does 2 million a year. So if you divide that by 365, that's roughly 54, 55, a hundred dollars a day. Let's call it now divide that by 24 hours, 5 ,500 divided by 24. Don't judge my mental math here. Call it roughly 200. I think it's probably closer to say 230 bucks an hour.

7:44So your store is making dollars an hour on an average day. Now, nobody's catalog gets wiped out on an average day. It happens when you're touching things and you touch things the most right before the biggest days of the year. So let's get into, I've got kind of four parts I want to cover here. Part one, I want to cover what the landlord covers, what Shopify being your landlord. And I want to be, I want to be very fair to Shopify here because they do hold up to their end. Shopify protects the platform, the servers. I mean, if you think about running an e-commerce platform on any other platform where you're actually maintaining the servers and everything else, you don't have to think about any of that.

8:26Shopify absolutely holds up their end of the bargain. The uptime, the security patches that you never have to think about, PCI compliance on payments. It's all written right in and they take care of it all. A checkout that holds up on Black Friday, millions of checkouts per second, and you don't even have to think about it. And they back up the platform. And if a data center has a bad day, Shopify has a plan for it. What they don't have a plan for is your, let's call it bad Tuesday afternoon, where you accidentally delete a bunch of products. There's no button in your admin and no button on the support side over there either that says, put this store back one day to the way it was yesterday.

9:07If you delete a product and Shopify's own developers, docs actually say this, it can't be recovered. So their advice is to archive it instead, which, okay, that's one great tip and one free 1 % win right here. Before we even go any further, don't delete, always archive. There is no reason to ever delete a product. You can always archive it. Tell everyone that on your team today, an archive product will come back with one click for easy win. but a deleted product it never comes back it comes back with a new photographer and a new new copy for the product and I honestly don't know why Shopify has actually never built a store-wide undo or a rollback they've never put anything out on it I've never seen like an official explanation by any types but my guess is it's actually really hard to do especially when you've got thousands of apps and staff and integrations all writing to the same store at a time Shopify probably just can't be liable.

10:04So rolling one thing back might break three other things at once, right? So that's just a guess. I don't know why. I moved my store onto Shopify in 2009 and I still don't know like the real answer for that, but that's an aside. So let's move on to part two, which is the lease. Okay. So Shopify is the landlord. Now the lease is Shopify's terms. I actually read Shopify's entire terms of service this week, all 16 sections. It was a wild, wild night at the old Myers house here. So the current version is actually pretty recent. It's dated August 1st, 2026. And the three things that are worth knowing are specifically around this.

10:41The first one is your stuff is your stuff. Shopify has a word for it. They call it materials and the definition is broad. So that means your products, descriptions, prices, photos, videos, those code reviews, and then basically any other business content or data that you put in your store. That is your materials. Shopify writes, if you've ever read their terms, they have these little plain English summaries on the right hand side beside each section, which I really appreciate and makes it very easy to understand this. And those summaries say in so many words that what you upload stays yours and stays your responsibility.

11:23So who owns your Shopify data? you do well that's good right actually well owning is maybe the wrong word to get stuck on when people get stuck on it because they think when they upload photos to facebook facebook owns their data well you still own it when you upload it to shopify it's yours you've always owned it nobody's arguing that but the question is who's on the hook for it when it's gone and that's also you you're on the hook for it not shopify it's your responsibility and it says so right in the terms that you signed so this leads to the second thing in the terms that you need to know if your data gets lost Shopify is not liable and that's I ended my notes here that's a section seven in there that's the limitation of liability so the list of things that they're not liable for includes loss of profits and loss of data so this means if your store is down for 24 hours or it takes you that long and you and you lose fifty thousand dollars in sales Shopify is not liable for it.

12:21So not only are they not liable for any loss of data, they are also not liable for any loss of profits during that time. The service is provided as is. They don't promise it'll be uninterrupted and they don't promise it'll be error free. Now, before anybody gets mad hearing that every shop, every, every software company on earth is basically the same. And they have that same paragraph and we have one here at bold. And if you go to any apps terms, you'll see it too. They flat out generally encourage you to make your own backups. They all do it. QuickBooks, MailChimp, HubSpot, all the same. Nobody's hiding anything.

12:55Just people don't read the terms. And then there's a related line in here about your team that you should think about is you as the store owner are responsible for everything your staff accounts do as well too. So it's not just you. If you give a staff account to someone, you are responsible for them. So another kind of quick win here while we're on it is every now and then, you know, do it today, but review this maybe once a month, go to your settings under users, open up each staff account and look at what they're actually allowed to do with products. Most people on your team don't need permission to delete products.

13:35Most don't need permission to run imports. So just turn off what they don't use. It takes two minutes and it can remove a massive disaster. Okay, the third thing in the terms that I wanted to highlight is related to apps. And this is section 9.9, if you're following along in the terms. When you install an app, you are giving it permission to get at your data. And there's different levels of permission an app can have. But when you install an app, there's a screen that comes up right away. It's called the scope and you click accept and then you move on to the app. Most people just click accept and move on.

14:11The app needs that permission to function. That's what that permission screen is. But most people don't read it. And you have to accept it for the app to work. Now, the terms say, and this is a quote, Shopify is not responsible for any disclosure, modification, or deletion of your data that comes from apps access. Modification or deletion. Now, I co-founded Bold and at one point we had 36 apps in the app store and a lot of them wrote to your products. Our product options app, quantity breaks, customer pricing, membership, subscriptions, upsells. They need right access. So I'm saying this as someone who has been on the other side of that fence of the permission screen.

14:56Most app developers are very careful. We at Bold are extremely careful, but every app company that has been around long enough has shipped a bug, every single one. And when an app with right access has a bad day and has a wrong type of bug, the terms are very clear about whose problem that is. It's not Shopify's and it's not the apps because you accept their terms too. So there's one more line in there that actually made me laugh. 9.6. If you install a new theme and it overwrites your old one, that's on YouTube. So, uh, so do this, uh, there's another quick thing to do while you're listening, go to settings, apps, sales channels, count how many apps you have installed.

15:42I've seen stores with well over 40 apps. That's fine. Not to say they don't need it, but just make note of them. Every one of those with right access to products is another set of hands on your shop shopify catalog now add your staffed all those user accounts add your agency your freelancer you know your nephew who knows shopify who has a login and lately ai agents it's a big one they have access and people are giving ai full control of their store i actually read a stat uh recently that 80 percent of people have said that AI agents have made mistakes managing their Shopify store. They do a lot of good, but they're like humans and they operate at a speed.

16:27One estimate it was there. They can, they can modify and update stores as fast as 16 people. So when a mistake happens, it happens 16 times faster too. So that's a lot of hands on a site with no trash can and no rollback option. At the beginning of the show, I told you why everyone serious about their Shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with Rewind. There is no excuse not to. There literally is no undo button for Shopify. Shopify's own terms actually say that your data is 100 % your responsibility, your products, your theme, your customizations, your settings, everything.

17:10They don't back up any of it. And no, a CSV export does not cover it. With CSV exports, there's no images, no meta fields, no themes, settings, etc. Nothing. I was talking to the people at Rewind about a brand where one team member actually ran a bulk update and accidentally overwrote 11 ,000 products. Orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action. Luckily though, with Rewind, it was a simple one-click rollback. It could be anything. A bad CSV import, a random app you just installed that messes everything up, or all of these AI tools that everyone's using to manage their store now.

17:46I have heard so many horror stories. Rewind just gives you peace of mind no matter what. If you don't have Rewind installed, you absolutely should have it. Go now and get it. Shopify 1 % dot com slash Rewind. You'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes. At the top of the show I mentioned, OmniSend can now talk to ChatGPT and Claude. And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds. So if you missed it, quick catch up. OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with, plus for this show as well. And you can now connect your AI, Claude, ChatGPT straight to your OmniSend account.

18:27Your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money? And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything. My favorite part, though, is AI segments. I used to build these by hand, clicking through filters forever. Now I just type something like customers who bought twice but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. and anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails, from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything.

19:07I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me. I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months or you can just use code J30 when you sign up, J-A-Y-3-0. If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to OmniSend like thousands of others, they will do everything for you. You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo.

19:39Okay, so part three of this, I got four kind of parts, is I want to talk about the safety nets that Shopify does actually include in your admin. Because I don't want anybody walking away from this thinking that the only way to solve this is to go buy something. so there are four really good safety nets that Shopify provides and for each one of them I'm going to tell you what it does but also where it stops so okay number one is duplicate your theme so go to online store themes there's three dots beside your live theme click duplicate now do this before every change every single one and then make sure you name name the copy like a grown-up Use the date, year, month, day.

20:22So it's be consistent and what you touch. So for example, 2026, September 17th and changed header. I have seen so many stores where the name of the theme is copy of copy of copy of Dawn. And it tells you absolutely nothing about what changed in that theme and when it was done and what was, what was modified. So when your freelancer breaks the header, for example, on your mobile version and it's four o 'clock on a Friday before the weekend, you can just publish the backup copy and then you're back online in 10 seconds. Now here's where it stops though. A, you can only keep up to 20 themes in there.

21:01Not a huge limitation, but when you start to get different themes, like maybe you're working on a new launch and you've got different themes for that, it does fill up pretty quick. And a theme, this is more important, is just the design. There's no products in there, No pages, like the page structure is in there, but none of the actual content from the pages, none of the actual content from the menus. So that's, there's a lot that is not included when you back up a theme. Okay, step two of the things that you should do is actually download the theme file. It's in the same menu, you go in theme settings, but just click download and Shopify will email it to you.

21:38So now you've actually got a copy that lives outside of Shopify. Now where it stops, and Shopify is very clear about this on their help page, the download doesn't include any of the actual assets, products, collections, menus, pages, blog posts, images, anything in the files section, none of it. None of that is in your theme download. It's just the housing, the framework of your design. Three, another thing that Shopify does do is the code editor does have a little rewind button of its own. so if someone edits a liquid file and if they break something you can open edit code and click on that file and under the file name there is a version drop down that you can select you can just pick an older timestamp and it rolls it back and a lot of merchants actually have no idea that that's in there but it is there and it's helpful if you're editing all code in a theme now but where it stops is this is the liquid files and it's one file at a time i like to say it's like a scalpel.

22:37It's great for one bad edit, but it won't put your whole store back together. The fourth thing that is free and available to you are CSV exports. So there is six things that you can export in Shopify. You can export products, customers, orders. Those are the big three. Gift cards, discount codes, and financial data. But there's some limitations around those other three, which I'm going to mention in a second. So definitely use this though. If you go to products on the top right you'll see an export button it's the same spot in customers on the top right and on orders to export everything and you should be doing that and just a quick update because this one actually changed just recently shopify never used to export metafields and that was always the case they they now do and then their help center they talk about this that product metafields are now included in the export as long as you've set up a definition for each one.

23:34So that a lot of people think you can't export metafields. You can now. So the product CSV is it's better than it used to be, but it does have its limitations. And here's where it stops. Your images come out as links. If you've ever exported, you'll see that it doesn't actually export the image. It's a URL link column after column of URLs. and a link to a photo is not the real photo. And if you asked your team today, hey, where are all the original product photos for all of our products? Hopefully you have them stored, but usually the answer is, oh, they're on the photographer's laptop or we don't know, they were on Shopify.

24:14So make sure your product photos are in a shared folder saved, done. Make sure that's taken care of. And then there's everything that just isn't in the CSV. so you know the help page that we talked about earlier there is no content you can't export any custom pages that even shopify's own steps they this is what they say for rebuilding these files they say reinstall your apps manually reconfigure all your settings taxes shipping checkout payments copy and paste your blog posts and pages that's what they tell you to do to copy and paste them rebuild your menus and then my favorite detail on the whole home page was you can export your discount codes but on the exact same page it says discounts can't be transferred back in neither can gift cards that you've already issued so I mentioned earlier that like these three exports are not as good as you think you can export discount codes there's a lot of things you might use those discount codes for too for example like merging them in emails there's a lot of different ways that you reasons you'd want to export them, but you can't import the backend.

25:22You can do certain things to the API, but I mean, that's just like a big headache. And then orders, orders can't be imported. You can export them, but you can't import them through the admin at all. You can do stuff through the API. Um, there is limitations and it's again, a huge pain, but, um, you can export orders, but you can't import them. So the free kind of routine, this is what it would look like is you know once a month and before any big change duplicate your theme download the theme file export products customers and orders drop it all in a folder with the date on it done that's about as much as you can do now if you're a smaller store and and money's tight do that it's pretty good and you'll be ahead of honestly most stores i talk to but just make sure you understand what you've got what's covered you've got a snapshot from the last time you remembered to do it.

26:14Hopefully it's recent. But putting it together will be manual labor. Which leads me to part four, which is the gap, I call it. So the gap between thinking about everything we've just covered, you know, some things have no native ways to go back at all. Pages, blogs, menus, collections, deleted products. Thinking about the things that you can export and how they're only about as fresh as your last export and then how restoring it is slow and it's by hand and then what you can't do so i call that the undo gap now every store has one but they just don't know what it is if i asked you right now like what's your undo gap you probably wouldn't know like what if your store goes down right now like today during this episode something happens what can you restore what can't you do you have a crystal clear understanding of what that is you probably don't but every store has a gap i mean and there are maybe some that aren't, which I'll get into right away here, how you can have zero gap, but most stores do.

27:13And I'll kind of walk you through how it usually goes because actually this is, it's not one specific store. I can, I've heard this hundreds of times, but this is a pattern I often see. And if you've been around Shopify long enough, you'll have seen some version of this. It'll be a Tuesday afternoon. There's a sale starting on Thursday. So what do you do? Someone on the team exports a product CSV to update the prices. I've done this a thousand times. Maybe you've got 1400 rows because one product can have 50 rows for each variant. Each one has a different price. And then there's a lot of empty rows because when a variant expands down, it doesn't have all the details for the description.

27:51It's a, it's a pretty big, messy export. Um, so what happens is they sort to get all the products in a certain order, maybe by skew or by alphabetical, and maybe they forget to sort it properly and they put a price in or something doesn't get lined up. Everything shifts down by one by one row and somehow prices get messed up and they import it. I see this all the time. And Shopify does exactly what it was told to do. They import it each price by each row. But now nine hundred and a nine hundred dollar jacket is twelve bucks and a twelve dollar pair of socks is one hundred and forty. You can guess which one's going to sell out first.