Privacy

Nima Collective is a place to find clothes from independent boutiques. Each boutique sells to you directly and takes your payment on their own Shopify checkout — we are never in the middle of that. It means there is a great deal we simply never see.

What we do not collect

• No payment details. Card numbers are entered on the boutique’s own Shopify checkout. They never pass through us and we could not store one if we wanted to.
• No name, address or phone number for anyone shopping here. You are not asked to make an account and there is nothing to sign up to.
• No email address in a form we can read. See below — we keep a one-way scrambled version of it, and only for boutiques you have actually bought from.
• No shopper profiles. We do not build a picture of who you are or follow you across other sites.

What we do collect

If you are shopping

• Your bag. A random token in a cookie so the bag is still there when you come back. It identifies a bag, not a person.
• A reference for each checkout. When you go through to a boutique we attach a random reference (like mkt_4f3a…) so we know the sale came from here and can bill the boutique our commission. It contains nothing about you.
• Which pieces get looked at. Counted against that anonymous session so the site can order things sensibly. Not tied to a person.

If you are a boutique

• What you told us when you applied — brand name, store domain, a contact name and email.
• Your catalogue, read from Shopify: products, images, prices, stock, and the policies you publish.
• Orders that came from us, so commission can be worked out. We read the totals and our own reference. We do not use your customers’ details for anything of our own, and we never contact them.

If you bought from a boutique you found here

When a boutique tells us one of their sales came from us — which is how they pay our commission — we keep a note that you shopped with them, so that if you buy from that same boutique again within 30 days they still credit us for the introduction. It is the ordinary way a referral works.

• Your email is never stored as an email. It is put through a one-way scramble (a SHA-256 hash). It lets us recognise the same buyer again and does nothing else — it cannot be turned back into your address, and we could not email you if we wanted to. We never do.
• It is tied to one boutique. Shopping with one brand tells us nothing about another. This is never used to follow you around the marketplace.
• It expires after 30 days and is not extended by buying again.
• We do not fingerprint you. There is no device fingerprinting and no profile built from your browsing. This note comes from the boutique’s own record of a purchase you already made, not from watching you.

Cookies

Your bag, and an anonymous session used to count how many people looked at a piece. If you are a boutique or one of our staff, a sign-in session as well. None of these follow you to other websites.

One more, and only if you reach us by clicking an advertisement: we store the advertisement’s click identifier so that the platform which showed it to you can be told the visit led to a sale. It holds no name, no email address and nothing about what you looked at, and it lasts ninety days. If you never arrive from an advertisement, it is never set.

Advertising

We advertise boutiques’ pieces on other platforms, and those platforms need to know when an advertisement worked. Because your purchase completes on the boutique’s own checkout rather than here, we cannot see it happen in your browser. Instead, once the boutique tells us an order was placed, we send the advertising platform a record of that sale.

What that record contains: the pieces bought, what was paid, and the click identifier described above so the sale can be matched to the advertisement. Where an email address is used to match, it is hashed before it leaves us — the platform receives a one-way fingerprint, never the address itself. We do not send your name, your postal address, or anything about what you browsed and did not buy.

This is measurement, not profiling: it tells a platform that an advertisement led to a sale. We do not build advertising profiles, and we never sell your data.

Who else sees it

The boutique you buy from, because they are the seller. Shopify, because that is where the boutique’s shop and checkout live. Amazon Web Services, where this site runs. Advertising platforms, for the measurement described above and nothing more. Nobody else, and we do not sell data to anyone.

How long we keep it

Bags and view counts are short-lived. A boutique’s catalogue is deleted when they leave. Records of commission we charged are kept longer because tax law requires it — those are amounts and dates against a shop, with nothing personal in them.

Your rights

You can ask the boutique you bought from for a copy of your data or for it to be erased. Shopify passes those requests to us automatically and we act on them: we confirm what we hold — which for a shopper is nothing that identifies you — and remove any reference we have. You can also write to us directly at privacy@thecollective.example.

If a boutique leaves, everything of theirs is erased within 48 hours of Shopify telling us, apart from the commission records above.