The GDPR was approved and adopted by the EU Parliament in April 2016. It came into force on 25th May 2018 and affected all companies processing and holding the personal data of data subjects residing in the European Union. So, How Magento store owners prepare for GDPR effects? In this article, I will hope you can find the answer on your own.

What is GDPR?

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation that aimed at improving personal data protection for European citizens. It has replaced previous regulations implemented over two decades ago. Although the regulations are based in Europe, it means that any businesses, from any regions, have been working with Europe customers will also be affected and need to change. Magento themselves have stated that you should probably remain GDPR compliant, even if your store isn’t based in the EU.

How GDPR affects your Magento store?

The fines on non-compliance might be up to €20 million, or 4% of your prior year’s worldwide annual revenue. So, here are some things you should pay attention:

IP tracking and checking:

It is the process of taking a visitor’s IP address and that IP address will be used to motivate other actions. It will relate to a visitor’s location, currency, or geographic preferences. When you want to set some rules for specific customers, change SKU or modify pricing, it will be useful. Let’s take an example of the Magento One step checkout extension in Cmsmart, use IP tracking to provide the suggestion for a region, currency, zip codes, etc. in the checkout process.

According to the new GDPR guidelines, when a customer from the EU visits your site, you will need to make sure they are asked explicitly if their IP address can be collected and stored. One more thing: any EU visitors are able to either accept or reject your use of their IP address.

Personalized content

There is one fact that consumers tend to buy more from the stores that provide a great personalized experience. This personalized content requires the use of cookies in order to store what the GDPR regards as personal information. To keep complying GDPR, giving EU consumers a choice when it comes to the use of cookies. A statement like ” If you use this site, you accept cookies” seems not to be enough, instead of that, what you need is to make sure that the visitors have made a clear, affirmative action to accept cookies, and of course with a choice to reject them.

Relevancy and Minimization

Only necessary data should be collected to cause multiple copies of that data should not exist. Say no to irrelevant data. The good news is this step will improve the loading speed and reduce time to load, but the bad news is that it may be a lot of time-consuming work. For example, e-commerce websites usually use email as the main channel to contact customers, using a Magento extension for ordering email is so crucial, if order information is stored in multiple locations, you may have to redirect to a single, pseudonymized, location, or ensure that order email data is deleted as soon as it is no longer deemed relevant.

The last words,

This is not an exhaustive list for your Magento store owners prepare for GDPR effects but still, need to consider when it comes to GDPR. To analyze more deeply and get overview information about regulations, go to the official website of GDPR.