I don’t pay much attention to followers either. Most are likely other designers trying to scope out the competition.
However, just because a follower’s member profile section is all blank or mostly blank, does not necessarily mean there is anything suspicious. They could just be a customer or affiliate.
· A customer or affiliate is more likely to use just their first names or nicknames. Remember that a member profile is public, a designer might want to use their real name to be more presentable, but it doesn’t benefit much for a customer or affiliate to do so.
· If a member doesn’t upload a profile image, then Zazzle will just show a lined figure placeholder image.
· If a member doesn’t upload a profile banner, Zazzle will just show one of their various geometric pattern placeholder banner. There’s very little reason for members who are just customers or affiliates to pretty up their profile with a photo or banner.
· A customer or affiliate would also have little reason to write anything about themselves in the About section so that would be blank.
· A customer probably does not even know about creating collections. Collections have always been something more useful for a designer rather than a customer so their collections section would likely also be blank.
· Some customers come here just to shop and are not keen to use Zazzle like a social site thus would not be interested in following people or liking products and so would have both the Following and Likes section blank.
· If a member is not a store owner, the Store section would also be blank. There is also a choice for those that are stores owners, under Advance Settings, to not show their store in their public member profile.
· If a customer has not written any reviews then their Activity section would also be blank.
I have customers that have reviewed my products. So out of curiosity I clicked on their name (many just first names) leading to their member profile page. I have quite a lot of reviews, so I checked only about 20 to 30 of them and 100% of the ones I looked at have no banners for their member profile and thus show one of Zazzle’s various geometric placeholder banners and 100% have empty About section. Some have profile photos, most don’t. For some, their member profile sections are all blank except the Activity section showing their reviews. Some of my customers do follow a handful of stores and for some my store is not among the ones they follow. A few only follow my store and the rest of member profile section (excluding the Activity section where the reviews are) are empty . Then there are others that follow a lot of stores and there are ones that like a lot of products. So since the percentage of customers leaving reviews to sales is generally very low I think it is just as likely that there would be plenty of my customers that could have followed me and didn’t choose to review any of their purchases nor add anything to rest of their member profile sections so their member profile would on a whole appear very blank.
A poster above mentioned about checking followers names against names in Sale History to check if they are really customers. This is not the most accurate way to check. In the old forums, it was said (by one of the moderators?) that names on Sales History are not necessarily the customers name but the one it is being delivered to.
However, the followers that some of you mentioned with no names at all do seem like bots especially since Zazzle redirected their profile page link to Zazzle’s homepage seeming to imply they have been found out and cancelled by Zazzle.