AI Data & Privacy in Sales by Country

This page sets out precisely what leaves your store when the AI features are switched on. In short: aggregate country totals only — never customer data.

The AI features are off by default. Until you enable them and save an API key, the plugin makes no external requests of any kind.

What is sent

When a summary, recommendation or answer is generated, the plugin builds a small digest of the report you are looking at and sends it to the one provider you selected. The digest contains:

Country codes and country names.
Order counts per country.
Gross and net sales totals per country.
Average order values.
Percentage change against the previous period.
The currency code being reported in, and the date range on screen.
For the Ask feature only — the question you typed.

The whole digest is typically under two kilobytes — about the size of a short email.

What is never sent

Data	Sent?
Customer names	Never
Email addresses or phone numbers	Never
Billing or shipping addresses	Never
Order IDs or order numbers	Never
Payment or card details	Never
IP addresses	Never
Product names or SKUs	Never

One honest caveat about aggregation. Country totals are not personal data in the ordinary case — a row reading "Germany, 412 orders" tells a provider nothing about any individual. But an aggregate over a single order is that order: if a country produced exactly one order in the period, its row effectively discloses that order’s value. No name, address or contact detail is ever attached, so the customer is not identified — but if you sell into very low-volume countries and treat order values as confidential, this is worth knowing before you enable the feature.

Who is allowed to send it

Sending store data to a third party — and spending money against your API key — is restricted to users with the manage_woocommerce capability, in practice Administrators and Shop managers. That covers enabling AI, saving a key, generating summaries and recommendations, and asking questions.

A user with only view_woocommerce_reports can read the report and see anomaly alerts, but cannot trigger any external request. There is no setting that grants AI access to a lower role.

What is written to your own site

Where	What	Kept for
The `srbc_ai_insights` database table	Generated summaries and recommendation text, with the provider, model and token counts used	Served from cache for 24 hours; rows are automatically deleted after 90 days
The `srbc_country_anomalies` database table	Detected anomalies and whether they have been dismissed	Until dismissed or superseded
WordPress options	Your settings and your encrypted API key	Until you change or remove them
PHP error log / WooCommerce logs	Nothing. The AI code writes no log entries, so neither your questions, your data, nor your API key can appear in `debug.log` or under WooCommerce → Status → Logs	—

Generated summaries are AI-written text about your sales, cached in your own database so that reopening the same report does not bill you again. They contain no customer data — the same aggregates that were sent, written out as prose. To clear them early, ask your host or developer to empty the srbc_ai_insights table; the next view regenerates them.

When it is sent, and to whom

Requests are made only at the moment a summary or recommendation is generated, or when you ask a question — not on a schedule and not in the background. Summaries are cached for 24 hours, so repeatedly viewing the same report does not repeatedly send data.

Data goes to the single provider you select and to no other. It goes directly from your server to their API — it does not pass through Zorem.

Provider	Endpoint	Terms and privacy
Anthropic (Claude)	`api.anthropic.com`	Commercial terms · Privacy policy
OpenAI (ChatGPT)	`api.openai.com`	Terms of use · Privacy policy
Google (Gemini)	`generativelanguage.googleapis.com`	Gemini API terms · Privacy policy

What your provider does with it

Once the digest reaches your provider, their terms govern it — not ours. Two things are worth checking on your own account before you enable the feature, because they differ between providers and between plans:

Whether your data is used to train models. On paid API plans the major providers do not train on submitted data by default, but free tiers can behave differently — Google’s free Gemini API tier is used to improve their products, while the paid tier is not. If this matters to you, use a paid API key rather than a free one, and confirm the current position in the policies linked above.
How long requests are retained. Providers typically hold API requests for a limited period for abuse monitoring. The exact window is set by them and can change; it is stated in their policy, not controlled by this plugin.

If you are in the EU or UK. All three providers process requests on infrastructure that may be outside your region, so enabling AI means a transfer of store data to a third-country processor. The data is aggregate country sales rather than personal data, which is what makes this straightforward for most stores — but if your organisation keeps a record of processing or requires a data processing agreement, the agreement you need is with your chosen AI provider, not with Zorem. Zorem never receives this data.

Country anomaly alerts send nothing

Anomaly detection is not an external service. It is a statistical calculation performed on your own server against your own database, and it works whether or not you have an API key. No data leaves your site for this feature at any point.

How your API key is stored

Your key is encrypted before being written to the database, using a secret derived from your site’s own WordPress salts. It is never returned to the browser after saving — the settings screen shows a masked hint only, and it is never sent to Zorem. Full detail, including what happens if your salts change, is in Setting Up AI.

How to stop it completely

These are three different things, and doing only the first will not stop you being billed if the key is in use elsewhere.

To…	Do this
Stop the panels appearing	Untick Enable AI Insights at WooCommerce → Settings → Sales by Country and save. No further requests are made.
Stop this store using your key	Tick Remove the saved key and save. The key is deleted from your database.
Stop being billed for that key entirely	Revoke the key in your provider’s console — Anthropic, OpenAI or Google AI Studio. Removing a key from WordPress stops this store using it; only the provider can deactivate the key itself.

Billing is directly between you and your chosen provider. Zorem does not process, proxy or see any of these requests, and adds no charge of its own.