This policy covers the personal information we process when merchants use Frontstore, and when shoppers buy from stores hosted on it. 1code X (Pty) Ltd, a South African company, is the responsible party for merchant account data. For a store's customer data, the merchant is the responsible party and we process it as their operator, to run their store.
From merchants: your name, email, phone, business details, and — for identity verification before you can trade — KYC documents such as an ID, CIPC certificate, bank letter and proof of address. From shoppers: the details needed to fulfil an order — name, email, delivery address and order contents. From everyone: basic technical logs needed to keep the service secure and working.
Frontstore never sees or stores full card numbers. Payments are processed by our payment partner (currently Paystack), whose systems are PCI-DSS certified; card data goes to them directly.
To run the platform: creating and operating stores, processing and delivering orders, identity verification, payouts, support, fraud prevention, and the accounting records merchants see in their Books. We don't sell personal information, and we don't use shopper data for advertising.
We share only what a service needs to do its job: our payment partner (to process payments and, where required, to meet their own regulatory checks), our infrastructure providers (secure cloud hosting and storage), and email delivery for transactional messages. Where the law or a regulator requires disclosure, we comply.
Data is stored on hardened cloud infrastructure, encrypted in transit. KYC documents live in private storage that is never publicly reachable and is visible only to the merchant themselves and our compliance staff. We keep information only as long as we need it — financial records are retained for the periods South African law requires.
Some businesses use 1code AI, our AI assistant and voice receptionist, to answer or place calls on their behalf. This part of the service processes information a shop-only policy doesn't cover:
Call content. When Frontstore answers or places a call on a business's behalf, we process the audio of that call, a written transcript of it, and any details the caller provides during it — such as their name, contact details, the reason for the call, and any booking made.
Call metadata. The caller's number (including calling line identity), the number dialled, the time, the duration and the outcome of the call.
Files shared during a call. Documents and images a caller sends while on a call — an ID page, a referral letter, a quote, a proof of payment — including any text or information we extract from them in order to answer the caller.
A business that uses Frontstore to answer its calls is the responsible party for its own callers' personal information. Frontstore acts as an operator, processing that information on the business's instruction and only to provide the service. If you are a caller and your information was collected on behalf of a business, we may direct your request to that business, or coordinate with them, as the responsible party.
To answer a call, we pass audio and text to specialist technology partners who each perform one part of the service: converting speech to text, generating the reply, converting that reply back into speech, carrying the telephone call itself, and delivering SMS or one-time links. Each of them processes the information only on our instruction, under a written agreement, solely to deliver the service — and none of them is permitted to use it for their own purposes, to sell it, or to train their own models on it.
If you are a business using Frontstore and you need the current list of these processors for your own compliance records, email support@frontstore.co.za and we will provide it.
If a business connects its Google Calendar, we ask only for permission to see the list of calendars in that account (so the business can choose which diary the agent uses), to see when it is busy, and to create, update and cancel events on the calendar it selects. We use that access for one purpose: so the agent can offer times that are genuinely free, write a confirmed booking into the calendar, invite the person who booked, and cancel or move it when asked.
We do not read the content of unrelated calendar entries beyond the busy/free times needed to avoid double-booking. We do not sell Google user data, we do not use it to train any model, and we do not use it for advertising.
What the AI actually receives. To offer you times that are genuinely free, our receptionist is given a list of busy time intervals only — for example “already taken: 10:00, 10:30”. Event titles, descriptions, locations, attendees, organisers, meeting links, calendar names and your account email are never sent to any AI model. That is a property of how we read your calendar, not a promise about how we handle it: we deliberately use Google’s free/busy endpoint, which returns only start and end times, rather than the read-events permission — so the content of your calendar is never available to us in the first place. When the agent speaks a booking time aloud, that sentence is sent to our text-to-speech provider so it can be voiced.
The AI providers that receive this data are listed in the technology-partners section above. Each is configured so that your data is not used to train their models.
A business can disconnect its calendar at any time from its dashboard, or revoke our access from its Google account. On disconnection we delete the stored access and refresh tokens immediately, and the calendar events we created remain the business's own to keep or delete.
Limited Use. The use of raw or derived user data received from Google Workspace APIs will adhere to the Google User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Call recordings and transcripts are kept for 90 days, then deleted or de-identified, unless the business's own settings, a legal obligation or a dispute requires longer. Details a caller provides, and files they send, are kept for the life of the business's account or as the business instructs. Account, billing and metering records are kept for the account's lifetime and 5 years after it ends, for tax and audit purposes.
Where a call is recorded or transcribed, the agent says so at the start of the call. Businesses using Frontstoreare responsible for any additional notice or consent their own industry or their own customers require.
Under POPIA you may ask to see the personal information we hold about you, have it corrected, or have it deleted (subject to records we must keep by law). To exercise any of these, email support@frontstore.co.za. You can also complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa): inforegulator.org.za, enquiries@inforegulator.org.za or POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za, 010 023 5200 (toll-free 0800 017 160).
We'll post any changes to this policy here. Questions or requests: support@frontstore.co.za.