DPDP Act compliance for Shopify stores

What valid consent looks like under the DPDP Act

Section 6 of the DPDP Act is unusually specific about consent. It must be free, specific, informed, unconditional and unambiguous, given by a clear affirmative action, and limited strictly to the personal data necessary for the stated purpose. Bundled consent — one checkbox covering analytics, advertising, marketing email and profiling — does not satisfy this test.

The Act also requires that withdrawal be as easy as giving consent. In practice that means if a visitor could accept tracking with one click on a banner, they must be able to withdraw it with roughly one click too, at any time, from any page. A buried link in a privacy policy is not equivalent.

• No pre-ticked boxes and no implied consent from continued browsing
• Separate opt-in per purpose: analytics, marketing, functional, advertising
• A notice, in plain language, available in English and the Eighth Schedule languages
• A standing, always-reachable way to withdraw consent
• A record of what was consented to, when, and against which notice version

Installing a DPDP-ready consent banner on Shopify

The mechanics on Shopify are deliberately boring: AssentRepo is a single script tag under 3KB that loads asynchronously, blocks non-essential scripts until consent is recorded, and posts every decision to an audit log. There is no build step and no plugin conflict surface.

• From Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Themes → ⋯ → Edit code
• Open layout/theme.liquid and paste the AssentRepo script tag just before </head>
• Save. The banner is live on every storefront page including checkout-adjacent pages
• In AssentRepo, mark Meta Pixel and Google Analytics as marketing/analytics so they are held until consent
• Enable the persistent 'Privacy choices' launcher so withdrawal is always one click away

The Shopify-specific traps

Shopify apps inject their own scripts through ScriptTag and theme app extensions, which means trackers can appear on your store that you never added by hand. Run the AssentRepo cookie scanner after every app install — it crawls the rendered page and reports third-party scripts and cookies, so you are not relying on memory.

Shopify's own Customer Privacy API handles a narrow slice of this for GDPR/CCPA regions and does not model DPDP consent categories or produce the audit trail Section 8 requires. Treat it as complementary, not sufficient.

Data Principal rights and the request queue

Chapter III of the Act gives every Data Principal the right to access a summary of their personal data and the processing performed, the right to correction and completion, the right to erasure, and the right to nominate someone to exercise those rights on their behalf. You must publish a way to make those requests and you must respond within a reasonable period.

For a small team, the failure mode is not refusing a request — it is losing one. Requests arrive by email, WhatsApp, a contact form and Instagram DM, and nobody owns the spreadsheet. A single intake endpoint with an auditable status trail removes that risk entirely, which is why the AssentRepo banner ships a built-in DSAR form alongside the cookie controls.

You have to be able to prove it

The obligation that catches most teams out is evidentiary. Under Section 8, the Data Fiduciary — you — is responsible for demonstrating compliance, including that valid consent was obtained. If the Board asks and your answer is "our banner was live", that is not evidence.

A defensible consent record contains, at minimum: a stable visitor identifier, the categories accepted and rejected, a UTC timestamp, the version of the notice shown, the policy text hash, and enough network context to establish the request was genuine without storing raw personal identifiers. AssentRepo writes exactly this record for every consent event and one-way hashes the IP address with a server-side salt, so the log is useful to an auditor and useless to an attacker.

Frequently asked questions