I should also address one of the chief concerns Leah raises in her blog post. As the primary (and only) programmer building the SHD (Snuggle Hamster Designs) website I do have access to all the data you choose to upload there. Leah is right that this means I can benefit by studying your products, your sales, and so forth. Her expressed concern is that I could use that knowledge to benefit my own stores and sales. It’s a reasonable concern because there is that potential. So I might as well directly address it.
I created my first design on Zazzle in February 2023. For several months after that I crafted hundreds of products. I went on a blitz. But then I started work on the SHD website. Originally just to help our own stores by increasing our visibility beyond Zazzle. That’s why “Snuggle Hamster Designs” is the name for both our own 14 stores and the 182 stores you’ll find on SHD now. Sorry for the confusion. But for the past 17-ish months I have been engrossed in programming the SHD website to serve our users. After having many months of solid testing by our gracious beta testers we finally opened up in April for public use. In the past year I created a handful of merch designs to promote our website. And recently I opened a new store for fun. I created 9 designs for it and put them on 21 products. Unfortunately I haven’t had time in the past few weeks to get back to that.
The bottom line of the above is that I am not using your data to burnish my own stores’ sales. I’m busy creating a service for you guys. I believe I can make significantly more money as a programmer than I can as a graphic designer. As much as I love the creative outlet of Zazzle, I’m spending 70+ hour weeks now working on delivering one new service after another to help you all with your sales. I’m a lifelong programmer with over three decades of industry experience. I also do artsy stuff for fun.
I should point out that I have two other staff members who are working very hard to help me deliver great things. Gargi has been a friend and colleague for decades. She’s one of the best graphic artists I’ve ever met. I invited her early on to join me in this. She has more stores than I do and is creating new products daily. But she is also creating most of the stunning social media post templates, cutout masks, stock backgrounds, and advertisement graphics we rely on. Curiously, she has no interest in analytics. Doesn’t use the sales reports and other tools I made for her own stores. Let alone anyone else’s. She stubbornly follows her own muse and creates amazing things.
Hui was my first beta tester. She’s provided enormous value by finding so many bugs and helping countless people learn how to use our system even before I wrote any documentation. Like me she’s very interested in analytics. She is under a strict nondisclosure agreement because she has access to a lot of our data. But for her own reasons she has expressly avoided delving into other designers’ sales reports and such. She has been around for many years and is already a successful Zazzler in her own right. She deeply values her independence and unique style in her work.
None of us is stealing your designs. None of us is doing the hard work we are so we can take your ideas and apply them to our Zazzle stores. We are doing it to help you guys increase your sales and hopefully profit by having enough of our free users paying for access to our premium services. That’s our business model. Plain and simple.
Leah suggests that you should seek analytics options that “offer solid assurances they cannot access/view the data you submit”. Of course we can’t do that. Neither can any web-based or otherwise internet-connected service. Nor is that even, in my opinion, a good thing. At the very least I need to be able to see your data in order to support you when you notice bugs or have unusual questions. My sales reports were not prepared to handle other currencies until our first international user ran into errors for example. How else could I fix or improve our tools if I couldn’t look at your data? If you buy a spreadsheet from someone and have a problem, you’re largely on your own. In a pinch you could send your copy to the proprietor for help. But then again you’re sharing your data.
Beyond basic support, I’m using an ever growing data set to develop and test our analytics features. It’s not enough to just use our own personal stores’ data to do this. The various analyses we offer behave very differently for each Zazzler who imports their data. There is no meaningful way for me to know this and improve our services without seeing these differences for myself.
People ask me profound questions like “what should I do to improve my sales?” I could rely on solid marketing principles to give generalized advice. But the whole point of what we’re doing is to be able to give tailored answers to such questions. And to use data over time to find out if our hypotheses are correct. To that end we’ve even offered each person who signs up for Premium a free personal consultation as a bonus. That’s us literally looking at your sales reports and other analytics and giving you personalized advice based on them.
We’re not hiding the fact that we have access to and use your data. We are announcing it loudly and celebrating it. This is a critical part of how we are helping Zazzlers. And our fundamental approach to analytics is to help you understand your own business and how to improve it. Not to mimic what other Zazzlers are doing. That’s anathema to every tool and guidance we offer. You benefit by sharing your data with us. And we benefit from studying your data so we can better understand how to help you.
On a side note. We have never used the modest success of our stores as a selling point for the SHD service. You’ll never see a “look how much more money we made by using our fancy-pants system!” ad from us. I don’t even advertise our Pro status. I suppose I could boast about how many high earners we already have using SHD as a much better testimonial. But I don’t even credit any of their sales to SHD. In truth it’s hard to measure the causes of success or failure in any business. It’s ultimately up to you to determine if SHD is helping you. What we advertise is that we offer lots of services and explain how their use could help you. We’re open-handed about all of it.
More generally, we’re open-handed about pretty much everything. I think this is part of why quite a few people have already brought their stores to us. We’re eager to welcome many more. Come talk to us in our Discord server. Ask us and everyone else questions if you want. Maybe we can help you too. Cheers everyone.
You’ve also made it easy for me to analyze my own data - something I definitely struggle with!