About 2 years or so ago I had a store on Shopify that I closed. The business was liquidated formally and as part of that process I handed over all paper and digital assets to the liquidators and the company wound-up. The domains were left to expire and email terminated. All was fine
Last week it was brought to my attention that the old store was back on-line with all our old images and content. The domain was purchased back in Nov '22 by someone. A closer look seemed to show (unconfirmed by a very unhelpful Shopify) that it is a clone of my old store (there are some odd links on it). How is was actually cloned and when I’ve no idea. That in itself is worrying but given that the site is close, the company wound-up and the ‘cart function’ seemed not to be working I am not overly concerned.
I am unsure that the actual threat is here except that I do not need to be accused of trading again given that I went through the expensive and formal process of winding up the company.
Should I have expected that when I closed the store that Shopify should be also blocking access to the assets they are hosting? It seems pretty basic part of ‘closing a web-site’ to prevent public access to pages and image resources.
I can no longer access the old store even though I have the login details as I can no longer access the email account and getting that changed requires information that I no longer have legal access too (bank statements etc).
Thank you for reaching out about this and sharing those details. I definitely understand your concern and desire to get any of your owned assets completely taken down.
In regards to Shopify’s policy on data management in these cases, much of the store data is not purged upon immediate closure of the store. This allows a merchant to close their store for a season and recover it again at a later time. Generally, data is stored on our servers for about 2 years before the account will be flagged for a full purge. You can read a bit more about that here: Shopify Privacy Policy.
If the URL for the assets were scraped before the store was closed then having them backlinked on an external site could have stopped them from being purged from our servers.
I recommend:
Submitting a copyright/trademark infringement report through our Legal page here: Shopify Legal
I full understand the purging process and understand the rational behind it. I didn’t ask about purging - moreover ‘blocking’ access to assets associated to a closed store. I see no reason for those assets to remain public for a closed store and I would have imagined that access would have been prevented. You are essentially exposing assets when I asked for them to become private / blocked.
If those assets were ‘blocked’ this site would not ‘look’ at all like the original. None of the product images or other identifiable assets would be visible and it would become essentially inoperable.
I’ve already reported it as a Phishing Page to Google.
WHOIS reports an anonymous new owner (surprise)
.. and I cannot complete a copyright/trademark infringement report to shopify because I NO LONGER HAS ACCESS (legal and practically) to the ‘original’ materials - thanks to the formal liquidation.
I understand that you may not have access to the direct resources regarding the intellectual/copyright/trademark rights to the images, but if the store that owned these resources was originally on Shopify or if our team is able to confirm that the backlinks are connected to this closed Shopify store, then we may be able to still take action.
If you have not yet, please review the infringement reports as the information required to show ownership can be a detailed report of the business. Please provide the original Shopify store URL, account owner details, etc, and then links to the Shopify CDN URLs for the images. From there our Trust and Safety team will receive the request and can work with you further on removing this content.
