What to Tell Shoppers About Their Try-On Photo: Privacy Notice Copy

Your product page now asks a stranger to upload a photo of themselves. That is a bigger ask than 'enter your email', and shoppers know it.

A clear notice does two jobs. It lowers the hesitation at the button, and it keeps your store honest about what happens behind it.

What should a virtual try-on privacy notice say?

Short and specific. Published try-on notices from retailers and app vendors tend to share the same shape: a one line summary, what is collected, how long it is kept, which processors are involved, an age limit, and a consent step before upload. Your version can be much shorter, as long as it is true.

Think of the notice as the label on the tin. Nobody reads a wall of legal text on a product page, but everyone reads one honest sentence next to a button.

Which five points should you cover?

1. Purpose: the photo is used only to generate the try-on preview.
2. Retention: how long it is kept, or that it is not saved at all.
3. Processor: that a third party generates the image on your behalf.
4. AI training: whether the photo is ever used to train a model.
5. Deletion: how a shopper can ask for their photo to be removed.

Each point needs an answer from your try-on provider, not a guess. If the provider cannot tell you plainly, that is a finding in itself. Our guide to whether virtual try-on is safe lists the questions worth asking before you install anything.

Your own privacy policy should name the try-on feature and the provider too. Some try-on vendors put that job on the merchant in their terms, so read yours.

What does sample notice copy look like?

Here is a template for a store whose provider processes photos in memory and does not save them. Swap in your own facts.

Your photo is used only to show you how this item might look on you. It is processed once to create the preview and is not saved. It is never used to train AI. Read our full privacy policy.

And here is a version for a store with an in-store kiosk, where a photo is kept briefly so a customer can try several pieces in one visit.

Your photo is kept only for this visit and deleted automatically after 2 hours. Tap Delete My Photos at any time to remove it right away.

Where should the notice go?

• Directly under or beside the try-on button, in the same text size as the button label.
• At the upload step, before the photo leaves the shopper's device.
• In your privacy policy, with the feature and the provider named.

If shoppers must tick a consent box before uploading, some try-on tools build one in and let you replace it only when your own notice covers the upload. Check how your tool handles this. Placement advice for the button itself is in where to place the virtual try-on button.

Regulated regions add their own demands. If you sell into the EU, our post on GDPR and virtual try-on covers the open question of whether a try-on photo counts as special category data. Ask a qualified adviser before you rely on any template, including the ones above.

Which claims should you avoid?

• 'Deleted immediately' when your provider keeps logs or caches for any length of time.
• 'Never shared' when a processor generates the image.
• 'Secure' with nothing behind it. Say what actually happens instead.
• Anything copied from another store whose provider works differently from yours.

A notice that promises more than your provider delivers is a liability with nicer typography. Ask for the provider's data terms in writing and match your wording to them line by line.

Corlen's published facts are the ones in the templates above. On Shopify and the API the photo is processed in memory and never saved, the kiosk deletes after 2 hours, and no face recognition is run. The details sit in the Data Processing Agreement. To see the shopper side of the flow, try the live demo, and for setup on your store see the Shopify page.