Postlude

Description

Postlude — Review Recovery for WooCommerce.

A shopper who has just written “it arrived damaged” has told the store about a
problem and, usually, nobody has asked them about it. Postlude reads what the
review says against rules the store writes itself, and where a review
describes a problem one of those rules looks for, it shows that shopper a short
note beside their review offering to put them in touch with the store. The
shopper writes a message; the store gets an email and a screen listing every
request that came in.

Postlude ships no rules. Each rule is a short name, which only the store sees,
and a description of what the reviewer says, such as “The reviewer says the
card arrived creased or in worse condition than listed”. A store can hold up to
16 rules. For each rule the store writes the offer the shopper sees, the
button’s label, and whether the button opens a request form (with the store’s
own instructions at the top of it) or goes to a web or email address. An offer
is a remedy, never an incentive, and it may never be conditional on removing,
changing or withholding a review.

That is the whole of it. Postlude is a service-recovery tool, not a review
tool.

What Postlude does not do

Postlude never edits, hides, filters, delays, intercepts or deletes a review,
and it never asks a shopper to change or withdraw one. The Frequently Asked
Questions below say exactly what it does write.

Nothing here promises anything about your ratings. What it offers is a way to
hear from an unhappy customer while there is still something you can do for
them.

External services

Postlude is an interface to an external service, and it cannot work without
one. This section describes that service in full.

Nothing is sent before you enable Postlude

Installing and activating the plugin contacts no external server at all. No
registration, no telemetry, no update check, no remote fonts or assets — the
admin screens and the storefront make no outbound request whatsoever while the
plugin is installed and not yet enabled.

The first request Postlude ever makes is the registration below, and it is made
by your own press of the “Accept the agreement and enable Postlude” button on
the Setup tab (WooCommerce → Postlude, which opens Setup until Postlude is
switched on), after you have read the disclosures printed above that button.
Until you press it, nothing about your store or your shoppers has left the
site.

That tab asks for a business name and a contact email, and pressing the
button records your acceptance of the Terms of Use published at
https://postlude.red-phoenix.team/terms and of the data processing agreement
published at https://postlude.red-phoenix.team/dpa, together with the version
date of each. The record is kept in your own site’s database. Have those two details to hand
before you enable, and read the agreement and the screen’s disclosures before
you press it. When a new version of the agreement is published, the Setup
tab asks you to accept it; your earlier acceptance is kept.

Which service, and what it is for

Review text is sent to the Postlude analysis service at https://postlude.red-phoenix.team.
The service acts as a processor on your instructions. It reads the review text
and answers with which of the rules you have switched on the text matches, and
how confident it is. It returns no prose. The only wording of yours that
reaches the underlying model is the description of each of your rules, sent
with the review text as the question that rule asks. The rule’s name is not
sent to the model. There is no other way to send the model a question, an
instruction or a prompt through this plugin.

The service is operated by Red Phoenix Team OÜ, the makers of this plugin.
Behind it, the text is scored by a third-party model vendor, typesafe.ai, in the
United States. The current list of sub-processors is the one in the data
processing agreement at https://postlude.red-phoenix.team/dpa.

Where the data is processed

Postlude processes the review text in the European Union, and passes it to the
model vendor that scores it, typesafe.ai, in the United States, which acts as
a sub-processor. So the text leaves the EU. This is the same statement the Setup
tab makes inside your admin, and it is the statement to reconcile with your
own privacy policy and your own transfer arrangements.

What is sent, and when

Postlude makes five kinds of request, and no others.

1. Registering your store — first when you press Enable.
Carries your store’s domain, the business name and contact email you type into
the enable form, a plan field that always reads starter (the service, not
the plugin, decides your plan), the word woocommerce as the platform, your site’s language and the plugin’s version.
This is what lets the service issue your store a site key and prove the domain
is yours. It carries nothing about any shopper and no review text. The same
request is sent again on the two other buttons that need it: “Check verification
again”, which re-reads whether your domain has been verified, and “Replace the
site key”, which issues your store a new key and stops the old one working. It
is also sent, with your existing key, when you accept a new version of the
agreement; that re-reads the registration and issues no new key.

2. Analysing one review — when a review is analysed.
Carries the review text, scrubbed and truncated as described below; a reference
to the review inside your own store of the form wp-comment-123; the ids of
the rules you have switched on; and the product title where the review has a
product. The request also has a language field and a submitted-at field, and
Postlude leaves both of them empty.

3. Analysing your existing reviews in batches — beginning when you press Enable.
The same per-review content as above, sent for several reviews at a time, over
the approved product reviews your store already had. This pass is started by the
same press of Enable that registers the store — it is not a separate decision
you make later — and it then works through your back catalogue in the
background, over as many requests as the backlog takes. It is the largest amount
of review text Postlude ever sends, so it is worth reading the two sections
below before you enable.

That first pass sends only reviews Postlude has not analysed yet. Afterwards,
the History tab (WooCommerce → Postlude, then History) offers two ways to run
it again. “Analyse reviews not yet analysed” does the same: reviews already analysed are skipped, are not
charged again, and keep their verdicts. “Re-judge all reviews” sends every
approved review again, analysed or not, to be judged under the rules and match
breadths set now; the screen states how many reviews that is, and each review
sent uses one analysis from your store’s monthly allowance, including
reviews already analysed. A re-judge replaces the earlier verdicts, stops a
rule you have since switched off from tagging the review, and leaves a tag you
marked as wrong marked. A re-judge that stops and is started again begins from
the first review and is charged again for every review it sends. Because a
re-judged review is stamped with the time it was re-judged, the dashboard’s
figures for a period count the reviews re-judged in it, including ones first
analysed in an earlier period.

4. Sending your rules — when you save them, and before analysing when needed.
Carries the name and description of every rule you have written, switched on
or off, and an internal id for each. It carries no offer text, button label,
link address or form instructions, nothing about any shopper and no review
text. It is sent after you save your rules whenever the set has changed since
it was last sent, and again before an analysis if the last send failed; while
it fails, no review is analysed. The service stores the names and descriptions
for your store, deletes a rule when a saved set leaves it out, and deletes all
of them when your store’s registration is deleted. When a review is analysed
against a rule, the service sends that rule’s description to the model vendor
with the review text; the rule’s name is never sent to the model vendor. Do not
put personal data, such as a customer’s name, email address or order number,
in a rule’s name or description.

After you edit a rule’s description, reviews it judged under the earlier
wording keep their verdicts and are marked on the reviews screen as judged
under earlier wording, with a link to “Re-judge all reviews”, which is charged
as described above. Renaming a rule marks nothing.

5. Reporting a wrong tag — when you press “Wrong tag”.
Carries the rule the tag belongs to and the model version that answered, and
nothing about the review or the reviewer.

What is never sent

No reviewer name, display name or author identifier. No reviewer email address.
No reviewer IP address. No WordPress user id, customer id or account
identifier. No order data of any kind — no order id, line items, SKUs, prices,
totals, purchase dates, shipping or billing details. No star rating or numeric
evaluation of the review. The service rejects a request carrying any of these
outright, by key name, rather than accepting it and discarding the value.

The message a shopper types into the request form, together with the name and
any order reference they give, is not sent to the analysis service. It is
stored in your own WordPress database and emailed to you.

What is removed from the review text first, and what is not

Before the text is sent, Postlude tries to remove email addresses, phone
numbers, order numbers and IP addresses from it. This is best effort and it is
not a guarantee. The known gaps:

• It cannot remove names. A review reading “I am Sam Shopper and my kettle broke” is sent with the name in it.
• It cannot remove a user id, or an order number belonging to some other order.
• It matches an order number introduced by English prose (“order number 100234”), written with a hash (“#100234”), or carrying a short letter prefix on a long or multi-part number (“WC-100234”, “ORD-2024-001”), and it replaces any bare run of seven or more digits. A number in none of those shapes stays — “Bestellnummer 4821” is sent as written.
• Some phone shapes are missed, “020 7123 4567” among them.
• Anything the reviewer wrote that is not matched is sent exactly as they wrote it.

At most 1,000 characters of the scrubbed text are sent. That is a ceiling on
what leaves, not a window onto the start of the review: scrubbing runs first and
shortens the text as it replaces things, so wording past the shopper’s 1,000th
character can still be inside what is sent.

The accurate summary is “only review text, with obvious identifiers removed”.
It is not “no personal data is transferred”, and Postlude does not claim that.

Usage counters

The service counts how many analyses your store has used against its allowance.
Those counters are held against a site key issued to your store, and the key
resolves back to your store, so they are pseudonymous rather than anonymous.
They carry no review text and no shopper details.

Analysis draws on one monthly allowance per store, set by the store’s plan:

• Starter (free): 10 analyses a month.
• Growth (€5 a month + VAT): 100 analyses a month.
• Scale (€20 a month + VAT): 1,000 analyses a month.

Every store starts on Starter. The allowance is shown on the Setup tab
(WooCommerce → Postlude, then Setup) and renews at 00:00 UTC on the 1st of
each month.

New reviews, the pass over your existing reviews, every later run of it and
every re-judge all draw on that same allowance, so a history run can use the
whole month’s allowance.

When it is used up, Postlude stops analysing new reviews until the allowance
renews, and it stops quietly: a shopper is shown no offer and the review is
stored with no analysis, so the reviews screen shows it as “Not analysed”
rather than as a review in which nothing was found. A history run that
reaches it stops too, and the History tab reports it as a completed run rather
than an error; it does not resume by itself, and you can run it again once the
allowance renews on the 1st.

No review is changed either way.

Plans and payment

Prices are in euros and exclude VAT, which is added at checkout. Starter is free and needs no payment. Growth (€5 a month)
and Scale (€20 a month) are bought on Stripe’s hosted payment page, through
Stripe Managed Payments; Link, by Stripe, is the merchant of record for the
sale.

The Setup tab shows a link to that page for each paid plan and, on a paid
plan, a “Manage subscription” link to Link. The service supplies these links
in its registration responses and the plugin stores them in the
postlude_billing option. The upgrade links are Stripe Payment Links
(buy.stripe.com) carrying your store’s site id, so the service knows which
store paid. Showing them makes no request; only clicking one takes your own
browser to Stripe or Link. The plugin never contacts Stripe or Link and never
sends them anything about your store or your shoppers. Your payment details go
to Stripe, not to your store and not to Postlude. Stripe’s terms and privacy
policy: https://stripe.com/legal, https://stripe.com/privacy. Link’s:
https://link.com/terms, https://link.com/privacy.

Stripe tells the Postlude service when a payment is confirmed, and the service
moves your store to the new plan. Your store learns of the change the next
time it reads its registration from the service; the “Check plan status”
button on the Setup tab does that on demand.

Plans are sold under the Terms of Use at
https://postlude.red-phoenix.team/terms.

The service’s terms and privacy policy

Terms of use: https://postlude.red-phoenix.team/terms
Privacy policy: https://postlude.red-phoenix.team/privacy
Data processing agreement: https://postlude.red-phoenix.team/dpa

What shoppers are told

The notice beside the request form reads: “The store may use an automated
service to read review text. Your name, email address and order details are not
sent with it, and email addresses, phone numbers and order numbers found in the
text are removed first; anything else you write in the review is sent as you
wrote it.”