The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) raises a lot of questions for our customers.
On of the most frequently asked questions is: "I'm using Relaodify, am I allowed to send an email to all of my customers, or only to those ones, who explicitly agreed to receiving the newsletter?". This confusion stems from blog articles, which view the GDPR from a blog website perspective only and not from an e-commerce one.
To keep it simple, the sending of commercial emails to a contact person is only allowed, if:
they have either explicitly said "yes" to it or;
if they have previously/currently entered into a payment relationship with your shop.
In the latter case, you are only allowed to send commercial emails which refer to the service procured by your customer. Furthermore, on receiving the contact details, you have to provide the customer with the opportunity to unsubscribe from the email communications.
This means that you, as an online shop owner, don't have to worry about making mistakes or breaking any rules. Packages like Reloadify focus on your customer profiles. These are customers, with whom you already have or had a payment relationship, because they made a purchase in your online shop. You are therefore allowed to inform them of similar products and/or new services without an active opt-in.
🔎 More information on the regulations can be found under the following link deze link (Artikel 11.7 Punt 3) or via this search in Google: deze zoekopdracht.
The abandoned cart email with the General Data Protection Regulation
The Spam and Telecommunications Act says the following about it:
Any person who has obtained electronic contact data for electronic messages in connection with the sale of their product or service may use such data to transmit communications for commercial, idealistic or charitable purposes regarding their own similar products or services, provided that when the contact data were obtained, the customer was clearly and expressly offered the opportunity to oppose the use of such electronic contact data, free of charge and in a convenient manner, and, if the customer did not avail himself of this opportunity, he was offered the possibility of opposing the further use of his electronic contact data under the same conditions with each communication transmitted. Article 12, second paragraph, of the Spam and Telecommunications Act applies mutatis mutandis.
As noted above, as a web store, you have slightly different rights because you are selling a product. It is then up to the website visitor to object if he or she does not wish to receive communication. The law is not clear on how to do this as long as it is clearly visible, free of charge and can be done in an easy way.
One method that customers of ours use is to mention during check-out that the web shop uses shopping cart abandonment emails. If the user does not want this then they can indicate this through the email. Also including the text in the privacy statement of the webshop is a good option.