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How to create a Privacy Policy page for BigCommerce?

Last updated: March 01, 2024
This article has been written and researched by our expert Avada through a precise methodology. Learn more about our methodology

Sam

Author

Daniel

Researcher

Whenever we buy a product or simply register for an account on any website, we all have to tick on their checkbox as an agreement with the Privacy Policy, Terms of service, or Cookie Law. So what is it that we are talking about? And why is it “Privacy Policy” so important?

Today, this article will clear your mind towards BigCommerce Privacy Policy definition, its necessity, and How to create a Privacy Policy page for your BigCommerce store. Just so you know, compliance with national and international legislation is crucial in creating an eCommerce website. Keep reading to find out more!

What is a BigCommerce privacy policy?

To make it simple, a BigCommerce Privacy Policy is a written and explained contract to your website’s visitors giving them an overview of what information you are gathering, why you are collecting it, and how you are going to use it. Because when talking about a person’s private data, it is vital and legal to give them a sense of reassurance.

Most governments, nations, and jurisdictions worldwide mandate that every website online needs to present its Privacy Policy to maintain visitor confidentiality. For this reason, your BigCommerce store also needs a privacy policy in order to gather personal details, including email address, name or shipping locations, and phone number.

Reasons why you need a BigCommerce privacy policy?

If you are still wondering about the importance of BigCommerce privacy policy, below is the list of reasons explaining why your online business can not run without it:

  • Law requirements: this is an essential factor you need to take into consideration. According to EU GDPR legislation law establishing in May 2018, not only do you have to create your own BigCommerce privacy policy as any website can collect its users’ information despite the implementation, but also people have legal rights to know the purposes for using their personal data. Fines may be very severe if a company fails to follow government regulations.
  • Third-parties requirements: since most third-parties place cookies on their user’ devices. Therefore, based on the law requirements, it is a must to make your Privacy Policy page available to your customers. Several common platforms you can catch up with the same requirements are Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and so on.
  • Users privacy agreement: Everyone pays close attention to their privacy when using the Internet, particularly when it concerns their own details. It is advisable to get them an idea of their privacy use until they disclose their personal information such as email addresses, names, phone numbers, etc. Apparently, it seems that customers tend to trust and more confident in handling their sensitive details to brands that present a comprehensive Privacy Policy page.
    • For example, you can check out eBay’s privacy policy for their applications using iOS as they made a very clear note about whether they are going to use any information or not, and table designs made it even easier for users to grasp information:

eBay Privacy Policy

  • Every store has one: Regardless of how many personal details you get from your customers, it is always essential to have one. Even if it is the case you are collecting nothing from them, you must inform them that, too! You can place your Privacy Policy page at the bottom of the website or create an “I agree” checkbox every time your customer signs up for a new account or at check-out steps.

How to create a BigCommerce privacy policy page for your online store?

Within a perfect designed BigCommerce Privacy Policy being prepared, it is time to add and create a brand new page on the website of yours. We will divide today’s tutorial into small steps so that you can slowly do the same thing correctly:

Step 1: Go to Create a Web Page

The first website you need to go to is your BigCommerce control panel, choose “Storefront”:

BigCommerce Storefront

Click on “Web Pages” and select “Create a Web Page”:

Add a new web page

Step 2: Adjust “This Page Will”

This is where you choose the purpose of adding a brand new page to your website. BigCommerce will ask you to click on one out of these four options:

  • Contain content created using the WYSIWYG editor below
  • Link to another website or document
  • Allow people to send questions/comments via a contact form
  • Contain raw HTML entered in the text area below

The first choice would be preferred in this section. Click on it, and then we will move to the next step.

Choose the first one

Step 3: Editing Web Page details

With the Page Name, please set it as “Privacy Policy”. If you have an URL link specifically created for this page, then you can customize it as what we did:

Example

Here comes the most important part of the BigCommerce Privacy Policy page: the content. You can see a box including space for you to write it, tools to edit the font, color, and format of your page. All you have to do is paste in or retype your Privacy Policy into this box and change it in any way you wish to:

Privacy Policy content

Don’t forget to “Save” your work when everything’s done!

GDPR mandates that the terms of the Privacy Policy must be prominently shown before an account can be created. Luckily, BigCommerce is working to provide it as a feature so you can use these simple solutions to build a consent requirement checkbox.

When signing up for an account

First thing first, at your BigCommerce Dashboard, go to Advanced Settings:

BigCommerce advanced settings

Then choose the Account Signup Form and click on “Create a New Field”:

Create a new field

These are the options BigCommerce delivered for online merchants, select the “Checkboxes”:

Checkboxes

A pop-up site will appear on your screen asking you to fill in the form; please do the following:

Fill in the form

After saving the adjustments, move on to Storefront > Script Manager and then copy and paste the below script into your URL:

<script>
if(document.location.search === "?action=create_account") {
    consent_checkbox = document.querySelector("input[value='I agree to the Privacy Policy']").attributes['name'].value;
    document.querySelectorAll("label[for='"+consent_checkbox+"']")[0].innerHTML = "I agree to the <a href='/privacy'>Privacy Policy</a>";
};
</script>

Correctness is extremely important here, so read the instructions precisely; otherwise, you might not get what you were expecting.

When checking out orders

Another way to acknowledge your customers of your BigCommerce Privacy Policy is to insert the checkboxes before the checking out process:

An example

The first step is to go to Advanced Settings > Checkout and tick on the box like in the image:

Require acceptance

Last but not least, “Save” your work, and you are good to go!

What do you need to include in your BigCommerce privacy policy page?

To design an inclusive BigCommerce Privacy Policy version for your online business, it is a must to understand what needs to be included in this paper so that both your consumers and partners can understand how it works.

How you gather information

The aim of BigCommerce privacy policy is to obtain a clear understanding of what sensitive knowledge you are acquiring, and this first step is going to satisfy the goal. The paper can start off by introducing exclusive data that you are seeking to collect from your customers, for instance:

  • Names
  • Email addresses
  • Home addresses
  • Date of birth
  • Phone numbers
  • Payment method details
  • Username
  • Password

You can take a quick look at how Flydubai - a BigCommerce merchant, presents to their future customers:

Flydubai privacy policy

Additionally, technical details collecting techniques should also be informed in the BigCommerce Privacy Policy page, including:

  • Cookies
  • Types of browser
  • Device ID
  • IP address

Another example of asking your users to agree with using their technical information:

Collecting technical information

In a sense, personal information has come to include any data that can be linked to an entity. For this fact, all forms of data which you receive from your customers or visitors must be as clear as practicable and disclosed.

If you want to protect your site users’ privacy, you can also let them know about your cookies, pixels, and web beacon’s availability. These marketing research methods can uncover sensitive personal details at any time.

There are companies that divide their BigCommerce Privacy Policy page into many sections, one of them is called the Cookies Policy that helps users to learn more about how they are going to use cookies to collect data.

These are a few most well-known strategies in writing about how you are going to gather information in your BigCommerce Privacy Policy. Do the research and pick out the best one that works for your online store!

How you use information

Moving on, if you are done with explaining what and ways you collect your customers’ information, then it’s time to describe the purpose of gathering these data. Here are some examples of how eCommerce retailers process these amounts of data:

  • Name, phone numbers, payment methods details: handle transactions
  • Home/Shipping addresses: ship products
  • Email addresses: send orders notifications and marketing emails
  • Cookie information: for security reasons, enhance the website’s performance or design targeted advertising.

However, be careful with your wording in this paragraph. From personal knowledge, collecting sensitive details is a bad idea if you do not use them for a particular reason. And it becomes even worse when you failed to deliver a clear explanation to your customers. If they see only a spark of uncertainty while reading your BigCommerce Privacy Policy page, there is a higher chance that they would not purchase any of your products in the future.

You can learn from Flydubai how they demonstrate this idea:

Flydubai privacy policy

The involvement of BigCommerce

BigCommerce has clearly stated its opinions towards this matter in the BigCommerce Privacy Policy requirement paper:

BigCommerce requirements

This is extremely significant because if you are building your online store on the BigCommerce platform, then you will have to pass your customers’ credit card information to them. Therefore, to conform to the privacy rules that we have mentioned before, it is a must to explain this to your clients.

Your business must warn your consumers that their personally identifiable information, such as details about credit card payments, was sent on behalf of your organization to BigCommerce.

ToyWiz has successfully mentioned the appearance of BigCommerce on their Privacy Policy page:

ToyWiz privacy policy

Third-parties you are working with

If you have read the BigCommerce Privacy Policy requirements paper, it includes that if you want to sell something on this eCommerce solutions provider, then you must reveal who you are sharing your customer’s information with.

When you decide to become an e-tailer, it is expected that you will be exchanging your customers’ personal details with several other third parties, for instance:

  • Payment methods providers (PayPal, ApplePay, Stripe,..)
  • Website hosting solutions
  • Marketing intermediaries
  • Mail services platforms.

Above is the list of sections you need to insert in your BigCommerce Privacy Policy page, please read it carefully to make sure that you are not missing out on a thing. When it is completed, reread multiple times would be really helpful for you to ensure the comprehension of your page.

Top free apps for BigCommerce privacy policy generating

If you are meeting difficulties while writing and creating your own BigCommerce Privacy Policy, these applications will solve your problems with no fee charged! What a deal!

We have picked out the best 5 apps for generating BigCommerce privacy policy based on their productivity, previous clients, and features:

Termsfeed

Termsfeed

TermsFeed helps you make flexible deals that are quickly enforceable electronically – it includes everything ranging from Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Cookies Policy, or even Return and Refund Policy. When talking about building websites, smartphone, desktop, and e-commerce applications, or Saas services, the lack of these paper are unacceptable.

These arrangements can be tailored to fit your business requirements and when it comes to this, Termsfeed has rendered the deal as it is a highly customizable and legally binding contract.

PrivacyPolicies.com

PrivacyPolicies.com

We believe this website is highly regarded and ranks strong for privacy policy generators. They only charge you in case you use them for your company instead of individual purposes. And within the free price, you will get a distinct version of BigCommerce Privacy Policy that no one else can share the same one. Your individual requirements are input into the simple framework, which is required because every website and company is different.

Free Privacy Policy

Free Privacy Policy

Just by the name, it’s clear that Free Privacy Policy understands how to run an online privacy policy generator. You can easily create a BigCommerce privacy policy that will meet the requirements in 15 minutes of time by following their simple measures. In order to preserve the safety and confidentiality of web users, this organization has a few enforcement testing resources. In addition to federal and state legislation, it is often essential to abide by federal e-mail spam regulations and state initiatives, including the CAN-SPAM Act, as well as Federal Trade Commission Fair Information and various others.

Lubenda

lubenda

Even though you do not have to pay lubenda anything but it benefits a lot more than that. Other things it discusses include how and why you will need to create rules for things like Google AdSense and AdWords, as well as mailing lists and cookies, along with MailChimp, Facebook, newsletters, and cookies in 10 different languages, including English. One could conclude that the platform has achieved some measure of popularity, as it has produced over 500,000 policies.

Getterms

Getterms

Once you have built your website, Getterms generates rather clear terms of operation and privacy policy. At no cost, you can set up your own privacy policy using their form.

Final thoughts

In conclusion, designing a BigCommerce privacy policy might seem difficult at first, however, when you are working on this platform, it will give you access to almost every related tool to help fasten the process.

We hope that this article will help you to grasp important requirements, information towards the matter and know how to create a BigCommerce Privacy Policy page for your store.


Sam Nguyen is the CEO and founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore. He is an expert on the Shopify e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Sam loves talking about e-commerce and he aims to help over a million online businesses grow and thrive.

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