Why am I asked to accept some permissions on installation?

The Shopify Platform has a permission system for Shopify apps. That way, the Shopify Platform controls which information from your store apps can access or modify.

Unfortunately, the permission system is coarse-grained and apps have to ask for a full chunk of information in order to get something particular. For example, if an app just wants to know the number of orders in your store, it has to ask for the read_orders permission, what also allows to read the detail of the orders or the order customer data.

The following are the permissions required by Also Bought, as displayed by Shopify in the app installation page:

Let us explain in detail the meaning of each permission listed.

View Shopify account data

We need to know your Shopify plan, your contact email address and your store currency. This is a read-only permission, our app cannot modify any shop data.

View products

As the product information (product name, price, picture...) is displayed in the app widget, we must read the product information from Shopify. This is a read-only permission, our app cannot modify product data at all.

View orders

We read all your previous orders to generate automatic recommendations. Please note that we only read the product ids from your orders (a product id is a number like 4850392033485). We do not read any customer data or any other order information. This is a read-only permission, so our app cannot modify your orders.

Manage your Online store

This permission allows us to insert a reference to our app script in your store (this is necessary for the app widget to appear in your store). Our app is comprised by a single Javascript file that is referenced in your store HTML.