Shopify and MailChimp have changed their status from ‘it's complicated’ to officially broken up. This news has left a lot of Shopify store owners feeling lost, betrayed, and overwhelmed about having to start over on all of their email campaigns.
On Friday, MailChimp released a statement that they have asked Shopify to remove the MailChimp integration from the Shopify marketplace, stating that the move was due to “updated [Shopify] terms that would negatively impact our business and put our users at risk.”
The same day, a Community Manager on a Shopify forum explained that “Shopify has had growing concerns about Mailchimp’s app because of the poor merchant experience and their refusal to respect our Partner Program Agreement.” The new Shopify terms will require app partners to share all important data back to the merchant using Shopify’s API.
In the statement from Shopify, they highlight their priority on merchants having accurate, complete insight into their businesses and customers, and they state that this isn’t possible when MailChimp locks in their data. “Mailchimp refuses to synchronize customer information captured on merchants’ online stores and email opt-out preferences. As a result, our merchants, other apps, and partner ecosystem can’t reliably serve their customers or comply with privacy legislation.”
On the other side of the fence, MailChimp states that the two companies have been trying to work together for months on terms that would be fair and equitable for both of our businesses.
“Throughout these negotiations, we refused to agree to terms that jeopardize our users’ privacy and require us to hand over customer data acquired outside of Shopify. From our perspective, that's not our data to share,” MailChimp said in their statement released Friday.
Shopify believes that the data captured on behalf of merchants belong to those merchants and the decision to have MailChimp removed from the Shopify App store was because they were not willing to agree to these terms. “We will never put our merchants’ trust on the line like that.”
MailChimp has asked Shopify to leave the integration on for existing connected users through until May 12, when the data sharing provisions of Shopify’s new terms take effect.
If this news has your small business reeling like many others, check out this comparative list of alternative services.
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Good luck business babes xo
