Privacy Policy
Last updated 4 November 2026
Relay is software for independent boutiques. It reads a store's vendor orders, stock and sales so the owner can buy, receive and sell with less paperwork. This page says what Relay collects, where it comes from, what we do with it, who helps us, and how to get it back or have it deleted.
- Who we are
- Your data and your store's data
- What we collect, and where from
- How we use it
- AI processing
- Who we share it with
- How long we keep it
- Security
- Your choices and rights
- US state privacy notice
- Google user data
- Shopify data
- Sign in with Apple
- Children
- Where data is kept
- Changes to this policy
- Contact
1. Who we are
“Relay”, “we” and “us” mean CairnRock Solutions, LLC, a New York limited liability company. Its registered address for service of process is 99 Washington Avenue, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12260, United States. Relay is sold only to businesses: boutique owners and the people who work with them. Questions about privacy go to privacy@relay.boutique.
2. Your data and your store's data
We handle two kinds of information, in two different roles.
- Information about you, as someone who uses Relay or visits our site: your account, your store's subscription and billing, your messages to us, and how you use Relay. For this, Relay decides how it is used and is responsible for it (the “controller”).
- Your store's records: orders, stock, sales, pictures, and the personal details in them, such as your shoppers' customer profiles and your vendors' sales reps. Relay holds and processes these for your store and on its instructions, as its service provider (or “processor”). The store decides what happens to them, and our Data Processing Addendum governs how we handle them.
If you are a shopper at a boutique that uses Relay, the boutique is responsible for your information. Please contact the boutique; we help it answer you.
3. What we collect, and where from
Your account
From you, when you sign up or are invited: your name, email address and password, your store's name, web address and currency, your role, and the people you invite. Your password goes straight to our sign-in provider, which keeps only a scrambled (hashed) form; Relay never sees it. If you sign in with Apple or Google, they give us your name and email address (see section 13).
From the systems your store connects
Relay reads a system only after someone in your store connects it and approves Relay's access on that system's own screen. What it reads:
| System | What Relay reads |
|---|---|
| POS and web store (Heartland Retail, Shopify, Square, Lightspeed) | Your catalogue (styles, items, prices, costs, vendors), stock by location, purchase orders and deliveries, and sales and orders going back about two years, line by line. |
| Customer profiles (Heartland Retail) | For each of your shoppers in the POS: name, email, phone, birthday (day and month), whether they accept marketing email, loyalty points, when they joined, their spending and number of purchases each year, and which sales were theirs. Only the store's owners and managers can see them in Relay. |
| Accounting (QuickBooks Online, Xero) | Bills, money spent, supplier credits and your chart of accounts, going back up to about three years. Read only: Relay never writes to your books. |
| Mailbox (Gmail, Outlook and Microsoft 365) | Only the emails that match the filter you choose (listed vendors, one folder, label or category, or the whole inbox of an address used only for orders), with their attachments, and the mailbox's address. Read only: Relay never sends, moves or deletes email. |
Vendor orders, photos and words
- Orders you upload (PDF, spreadsheet or photo), take a picture of in the iPhone app, email or forward to your Relay orders address, or that Relay reads from your mailbox. These usually include the vendor's and the sales rep's names and contact details.
- Product pictures you add or that Relay finds on the web and you keep; photos of a model you add to the Studio, which you may only add with that person's permission; and descriptions you write or ask Relay to draft.
Payments
When you subscribe, you pay through Stripe. You enter your card details on Stripe's form, so card numbers go to Stripe and never reach Relay. Stripe tells us whether a payment worked, and we keep the store's billing contact, plan, add-ons and payment history.
Messages to us
What you write to support@relay.boutique or privacy@relay.boutique, and what we write back.
How Relay is used
- Activity in your store: a record of significant actions and who took them, such as approving an order, sending it to the POS, connecting a system or changing a setting, and when Relay staff view the store to help you.
- Server logs: our servers log each request's time, the address it came from (IP address), the page or function asked for and whether it worked. We use them to keep Relay running and secure.
- In your browser and on your phone: Relay keeps your sign-in and a few preferences (such as the store and location you last chose) in your browser's local storage or the app. We do not use advertising or analytics trackers, and we do not set tracking cookies. Our pages load fonts from Google Fonts, so Google receives your device's IP address when a page loads.
What Relay does not collect
Card numbers; your shoppers' payment details; email that does not match the filter you set; your location; your phone's contacts.
4. How we use it
- To run Relay for your store: read vendor orders, track arrivals, keep your stock count, file each style with its picture, show what is selling, and estimate what to buy.
- To write to your systems, only when you say so: for example sending an approved order or a style to your POS or web store.
- To learn for your store: Relay improves its results for your store from your store's own records, and adds de-identified sell-through counts (no prices, no personal data, no store names) to totals across stores, as section 9 of the Terms describes and with your agreement there.
- To bill you, tell you about your account, your subscription and changes to Relay or these policies, and answer your questions.
- To keep Relay safe: secure accounts, find and stop misuse, fix problems, and meet our legal duties.
Relay does not sell personal information, does not share it for advertising, does not use your store's records for advertising, and does not use them to train AI models.
5. AI processing
Relay uses AI models from other companies for some of its work. Each receives only what the task needs, at the moment it is asked for:
| Provider | What it does | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic (Claude) | Reads vendor orders; suggests categories; drafts product descriptions; finds an order from a description; answers setup and report questions | Order documents and emails (including the names and contact details on them), style details and pictures, the details of open orders, your store's public website at setup, and the questions you ask |
| Fireworks AI | Reads photos and scans of orders; writes POS tag names; checks product pictures found on the web; plans report questions | Order photos and scanned pages (including names and contact details printed on them), style names and details, product pictures, and the questions you ask |
| OpenAI | Makes product pictures in the Studio | Product pictures, and a photo of a model when your store uses one |
- Your shoppers' customer profiles are never sent to an AI provider. Report questions send only the question and the names of your categories, vendors and the like, never your sales figures, prices or customer records.
- Relay uses these providers under their business terms, under which they do not use what Relay sends to train their models, and Relay has not signed up to any programme that would let them. Relay itself does not train AI models on your data.
- AI results can be wrong. Relay shows them to you to check, and nothing reaches your POS, your web store or anyone else until someone in your store approves it.
6. Who we share it with
- Service providers who host Relay, store files, send email, take payments, and run the AI models and picture services above. Each is bound by contract to use the data only to provide its service to us. The full list, with what each receives and where it is, is on our subprocessors page: Railway, Supabase, Cloudflare, Anthropic, Fireworks AI, OpenAI, Photoroom, remove.bg, Brave Search, Postmark, Resend and Stripe.
- The systems you connect, when you tell Relay to send them something, under your agreement with them.
- People in your store, according to the role an owner gives them.
- When the law requires it, or to protect the rights and safety of Relay, our customers or others. We tell the store first unless the law forbids it.
- If Relay's business is sold or merged, to the new owner, who must keep this policy's promises for the data it receives.
We do not share personal information with anyone else.
7. How long we keep it
| Information | How long |
|---|---|
| Your store's records, including customer profiles, orders, emails, documents and pictures | While the store is open. When a store closes, everyone loses access at once and its records are deleted 30 days later. |
| The record of actions in your store | With the store's records, and deleted with them. |
| Your account | Until you delete it; your sign-in is deleted at once. Your name stays in the history of a store you worked in (who approved what) until that store's records are deleted. |
| Keys for connected systems | Until you disconnect a mailbox or Shopify, and for every system when the store closes. |
| Emails Relay turned away (from a sender no store has confirmed) | A short note of each (sender, address, subject and attachment names, not the message) with the store it was meant for, deleted with that store's records; when no store matches, only as long as needed to investigate misuse. |
| Billing records | As long as tax and accounting law requires, usually seven years. |
| Messages to us | As long as they help us support you and keep a record of what we agreed. |
| Server logs | A short period set by our hosting provider, then they expire automatically. |
| Backups | Copies of deleted data remain in backups until those backups expire on our database provider's schedule. They are kept secure until then. |
We may keep information longer only where the law requires it, and then only for that purpose.
8. Security
All connections to Relay use HTTPS. The keys Relay holds for your connected systems are encrypted with a key kept outside the database. Each store's records are kept apart from every other store's, and roles decide who in your store sees what. Only Relay staff with administrator access can reach a store's records, to support it or fix a problem; when they open a store in Relay it is read only, and Relay records that they did. More on our security page. No system is perfectly secure; if we confirm a breach that affects your store's data, we tell you as the DPA describes.
9. Your choices and rights
- See and download: what Relay holds for your store is on its pages, and your inventory, purchase orders, pictures and many reports can be downloaded from the pages that show them. For a complete copy, write to privacy@relay.boutique.
- Correct: change your details in Your account, and your store's records in Relay. Records that come from your POS are corrected in the POS; Relay picks up the change.
- Delete your account: in Your account, on the web or in the iPhone app, choose Delete account. A store where you are the only owner closes, and its records are deleted 30 days later. A store with another owner carries on without you. See Support.
- Disconnect a system from Connections at any time. Relay stops using it at once. You can also remove Relay's access in that system's own settings.
- Keep your store out of the totals across stores by writing to privacy@relay.boutique.
- Anything else, such as asking what we hold about you or for something to be deleted: write to privacy@relay.boutique. We may need to confirm it is you, answer within 30 days, and never treat you differently for asking.
Where your local law gives you further rights (for example in the EU, the UK or a US state), such as to object to or restrict processing, or to complain to a data protection authority, write to us and we will help.
10. US state privacy notice
This section adds what California's privacy law and similar US state laws ask us to say.
- What we collect about you and why (our notice at collection): identifiers and contact details (name, email, phone, IP address); commercial information (your store's plan, add-ons and payments); internet activity (server logs and the record of actions in Relay); professional information (your store and role); and photos you choose to add. We collect them from you, from your store, from the systems your store connects and from Apple or Google if you sign in with them, for the purposes in section 4, and keep them as section 7 says. Your password is the only sensitive personal information we handle, and only our sign-in provider holds it.
- No selling or sharing. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and have not in the past 12 months. We do not use sensitive personal information to infer anything about anyone.
- Your rights: to know what we collect, use and disclose; to get a copy; to correct it; and to have it deleted. Use the steps in section 9. Someone you authorise can ask for you, with your written permission. We will not treat you differently for using these rights.
- Your store's records: for personal information in your store's records, such as shoppers' customer profiles, Relay is the store's service provider. It uses that information only to provide Relay to the store, as the DPA sets out, and passes any request it receives to the store.
11. Google user data
If you connect a Gmail account, Relay asks only for read access (gmail.readonly) and reads only the messages that match the filter you choose: listed vendors (the last seven days), one Gmail label (the last year), or the whole inbox of an address used only for orders (the last 90 days). If you sign in with Google, Relay receives only your name and email address.
Relay's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
- Gmail data is used only to read vendor orders into Relay for your store. From each matching email Relay keeps the text and attachments as the source of the order it reads, and the message's identifier so it is never read twice.
- To read an order, the email is sent to the AI providers in section 5 (Anthropic, and Fireworks AI for photos and scans), which process it only to return the result and do not train on it.
- Gmail data is never used for advertising, never sold, and never used to develop, improve or train generalised AI or machine-learning models.
- No person at Relay reads Gmail data, except with your permission for support or security, or where the law requires it.
- You can disconnect Gmail at any time from Connections: Relay deletes its access tokens and revokes its access at Google. Orders already read stay in your store's records until you delete them or the store closes.
12. Shopify data
If you connect a Shopify store, Relay reads and writes only what the permissions you approve in Shopify allow, and uses that data only to provide Relay to your store. Relay does not import your shoppers' profiles from Shopify. It does not use Shopify data to train AI models; it learns from it for your store, and adds de-identified counts to totals across stores, only with your agreement in section 9 of the Terms. When you uninstall Relay from Shopify, Relay stops reading the store and deletes its Shopify keys, and it answers Shopify's privacy requests about shoppers and stores as Shopify requires.
13. Sign in with Apple
If you sign in with Apple, Apple gives Relay your name and an email address. If you choose Hide My Email, that address is a private relay address that forwards to you, and Relay only ever uses it to email you about your account. When you delete your Relay account, Relay asks Apple to end Relay's access to your Apple sign-in.
14. Children
Relay is for businesses and their staff, and everyone who uses it must be 18 or older. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you think a child has given us information, write to us and we will delete it.
15. Where data is kept
Relay is a US company. Your store's records are hosted in the European Union: the database and files in Ireland, the application in the Netherlands. Some of our providers are in the United States and elsewhere, as the subprocessors page shows, and process data there under their contracts with us.
16. Changes to this policy
When this policy changes, we update the date at the top. For changes that matter, we email store owners or tell them in Relay before the change takes effect.
17. Contact
CairnRock Solutions, LLC
Service of process: 99 Washington Avenue, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12260, United States
Privacy: privacy@relay.boutique
Everything else: support@relay.boutique