DATA Analytics Tools for Zazzle - Risks and Promises - Pros and Cons

[JimCarnicelli]

A fellow Zazzler has graciously prepared a blog post discussing some of the potential risks of using third party services for marketing promotion and analytics. I thought I'd give it a boost.

https://grafixdeals.com/supporters/posts/64072

And as someone who has a third party service for marketing promotion and analytics (snugglehamster.com) I thought I would point out that most of the potential risks she spells out are valid. Risks are indeed there when you share data about your Zazzle stores with anyone. They could take inappropriate advantage of the insights gained. I would encourage you all to read up on what any such service promises about the sanctity of your data and the importance of your trust. Here's our privacy statement for example. Perhaps talk directly to the proprietors of those services. And consider asking your friends and colleagues what they think and whether they trust the service. Find out whether you feel confident before sharing sensitive information.

What do you all think about this Zazzler's post? Have any horror stories to share? Other insights?

[bkthompson]

Thanks for this - and for sharing that article. I can understand why sellers should be extra cautious about who has access to any of their store data, and for the record - I have really appreciated the way that SnuggleHamster has gone out of the way to assure me that my data is safe and not being used for nefarious purposes. 😉 🎉 You've also made it easy for me to analyze my own data - something I definitely struggle with!

So yes, I see the point of the article and the value in doing your due diligence and being cautious. But I also believe that there is value in partnering with trusted vendors!

[CreativeLeahG]

In future Jim, if you share a blog post please create a unique title and do not copy mine word-for-word as using the same title word-for-word can cause issues with Google rankings just like it does with product titles. Many Zazzlers find this frustrating as it impacts sales. Copying my blog post title will similarly impact my views. I’ve since changed my title to avoid this problem but for future reference and as a courtesy please avoid this practice. Thanks,

[JimCarnicelli]

It's standard practice when posting a boost-type link to an existing document like this to use the identical title. This link post will get your blog post more views. Both from the Zazzle forum and via Google. This was the courtesy.

[CreativeLeahG]

No it's Not Jim - that's bad form. Using my Blog title to self-promote. My members may believe it is my thread having seen the existing post. Is there any point me having a blog if others can copy titles and hijack the discussion elsewhere? At least use your own title. I'm grateful you linked to the original article but I'm asking respectfully you don't copy my titles again. Thank you.

[JimCarnicelli]

One thing worth noting. Leah's blog post does note that one can find free data analytics tools out there. Thankfully SnuggleHamster.com is among them. Our basic sales reports are free for Zazzlers to use. Only the Alignment Analysis report requires a Premium subscription ($19/mo) to use. And of course we do have other analytical tools that go beyond sales analysis. But we can ignore those since the original blog post is narrowly about sales reporting.

[JimCarnicelli]

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.

[CreativeLeahG]

This is a reassuring and not so much at the same time in that your main partner herself doesn't use your tools and with very modest sales, surely she'd be a good advocate of them? 

I'm very old school, I like to see results before I part with cash especially when purchasing tools designed to increase my income. Has the developer (whoever) got a track record of success (either on this platform or another print-on-demand) to validate their ability to provide advice on marketing/promotion or any other aspect of earning money on Zazzle. If that's not the case, then I'm out. There are a LOT of people now selling courses and materials, tools for Zazzlers and some have a huge following. A following that upon closer inspection is not earned because their own success on Zazzle is limited. This for me is cause for concern. 

As a developer yourself and a good one from what I see I'd personally promote what you can demonstrate success with which isn't sales on Zazzle but in creating tools which may or may not help BUT do increase exposure (ie your website presence offering). This for me is a more transparent approach with a greater likelihood of success.

If it were me I'd reverse the offering ... subscription for the web presence and free analytics. Just my two-penneth. And until you have some level of success yourself on Zazzle I'd steer well clear of offering advice on how to be a success on Zazzle 😉   Your site presence offering is your greatest asset.

[JimCarnicelli]

I appreciate the insights. I think it's critically important never to oversell. I prefer to undersell. And when we do have something to boast about, I want it to be accurately stated and beyond any stretch of interpretation. I'm proud, for example, to boast that as of this moment 99% of all stores imported to SHD have shown up at least once in Google searches:

This is an indisputable, provable fact. I don't have to impute this indirectly. This is the sort of caution that I prefer to exercise in talking about SHD. I don't know about you, but I get a "greasy" feeling when I look at some of the tools and materials out there making unrealistic and unverifiable promises to Zazzlers.

I recently queried my database to find out how each of our users' royalty revenues had changed in the months before and after joining SHD. If I wanted to I could boast about some of those numbers. But in truth that would be deceptive. Some people are making significantly more now. Is that because of us? I have no real way currently to credit us with those improvements. And some people are making less now than before joining. Should I also take the blame for their losses? And that's why you don't see me advertising something like "earn 20% more using SHD" or some BS like that. That would be shady and unjustified.

I respect your point about waiting for others to demonstrate their own improved processes and successes before diving in. I'm like that too. I am not often an early adopter. And people should be naturally skeptical of the new thing. We are 4 months out of the starting gate here. Still brand new.

I also understand your point about credibility. Should you listen to some programmer who has only been on Zazzle a bit over a year and isn't a Pro Diamond seller? I suppose if all I had to offer was advice then maybe not. But then again, I'm not really offering general marketing advice. The primary service SHD offers is tools for you to analyze and improve your own stores.

Take our recent Cutouts feature for instance. I've made software and we have made hundreds of image masks to make it super easy for our users to instantly get a product image with a transparent background. Is a Pro Diamond seller going to do a better job of this for you?

Or take our Alignment Analysis sales report. Is a Pro Diamond seller going to do a better job creating charts and tables numerically indicating the disparate weighting between your catalog and your sales broken down by department?

I have no doubt earned far more in my career as a programmer than most hairstylists have as such. But you should probably not trust me to cut your hair, in spite of my earnings. The hairstylist is a specialist. I'm a specialist in software engineering and data analysis. That's a reasonably compelling argument in favor of using our free services at least. And considering our paid premium services too.

I'm intrigued by your suggestion that we should offer the analytics for free and the web presence and SEO stuff as a paid service. Quite a few people have told me I should charge for hosting everyone's stores. It does cost me quite a bit of money to do that hosting. Even after all the optimizations I've built along the way. I understand but I think this is better. Most of our users are most immediately interested in the free exposure. That gives them indisputable value straightaway. And gives us the opportunity to promote our other paid services. In practice I think probably fewer than half of our users are interested right now in doing more than get some free exposure. And that's fine. This is the route we've chosen. Time will tell if it's the right one for us. For now it seems to be a very good one for all our users.

[CreativeLeahG]

Jim you once shared your sales figs with us and they were modest ( on the forum so no confidential info shared here.) But isn't that store the store you don’t use your analytics for? Gigi’s store? I am so confused with all this now. But either way my blog post was just answering general concerns (no service named) as were put to me by my members. Hence posted on my blog ...not here. 

I don't just have a background on Zazzle, I have a background in sales, marketing and management and was a seo content writer. These are skills highly relevant to my success on Zazzle.

Meanwhile it’s not blowing your own trumpet to showcase sales success it is essential to establish credibility . That is just common sense. It will serve you well if you have that data but obviously it would need to be a store where your data analytics software is being put to good use. 

Re your diamond questions, I haven't got time now to answer in detail but yes in most cases they are far better placed to offer the insights than someone with no track record in sales, design or marketing. The main insight of course being that analysing your own data is NOT going to improve your sales significantly. The list of reasons is exhaustive. Having barely anything to analyse being the most obvious. I'll perhaps do another article on the reasons why.

Cut outs can be obtained free by a leading provider so why would a Diamond seller need to develop a tool for this and try charging for it?

Everything in sales is about fulfilling needs. I'm good at that. Hence people are so quick to see what I am offering in this regard and then adopting it into their own business model. 

I will leave it at that. Your site service is very good from what I can see but this post is data analytics, posted I assume so you could showcase your service in this regard. I hope it has served you well.

I wish you great success.

[CreativeLeahG]

ps the reason for saying I would charge for the site service is because that is where the value is for you and your customer base as I see it. It's a lot of work and you deserve to be compensated for it but that's something you'll determine in due course as you said. 

[ColsCreations]

There are so many points & counter-points being discussed here it would take volumes to address all of them, but this here is the notion that compels me to add my three cents to the discussion:

Meanwhile it’s not blowing your own trumpet to showcase sales success, it is essential to establish credibility . That is just common sense.

 In context, I very strongly disagree with that.

Let's say I am a jewelry designer, everything I make is unique & 100% handmade, and every other weekend I have a booth at the craft fair where I make a few sales but get great feedback on my work. So I think, OK, I want to take this to the next level - having an on-line presence to advertise and sell my work to a much broader audience. But I know nothing about how to set that up and frankly, would rather spend my time creating than learning how to do that. So I hire someone to build me a website and e-shop. That entity does not need to have any experience (nevermind success) in creating/selling jewelry. I'm hiring them for their programming expertise, not asking them for advice on how to improve my metal-working skills. If I asked them how many bracelets THEY have sold, I'm sure the answer would be zero. I would expect it to be zero; their credibility as a programmer is not based on anything other then their experience with .. programming - which is the service I am hiring them to provide.

You can apply this same analogy to all kinds of tools we as designers here on Zazzle choose to use and even pay for. This could be anything: a site that lets you upload an image and convert it to svg format; a background removal tool; a pin scheduling tool; a tracking tool like Google analytics; an AI tool to compose description or suggest tags for you ... the list is endless. When you (used in the general sense) look at all these things, do you evaluate their usefulness to you based on how successful the creator of them has been as a Zazzle shop? No. Of course you don't because that is totally irrelevant to the usefulness of the tool to you.

If the number-crunching analytic data provided by a tool, free or otherwise, is of interest to you, then the data provided by that tool for you to interpret as you will is all that matters. You are getting the service you signed up for. Whether the person(s) who created that tool is a successful Zazzle designer or not is completely irrelevant.

If I have deep pockets and am looking for a tutorial on how to be successful on Zazzle, I'd def want that course to be from someone who has actually been successful as a Zazzle designer themselves. But these analytical tools aren't promising success, they're just offering hard data that one may or may not find helpful and what you do with that data is up to you.

Everyone has different talents, interests and backgrounds and thus has something different to bring to the table and a seat at the table doesn't always correspond to one being a high pro-level Zazzle seller themselves.

[CreativeLeahG]

The analogy doesn't fit the situation.  

I was talking specifically about someone offering advice on how to increase sales on Zazzle when they have no experience of that. Giving a bit of friendly advice is one thing, charging for it means credibility is VERY important. A more apt analogy would be .... someone sets up a service selling advice about how to make money on Zazzle and they themselves have no experience of making money on Zazzle or very little to no evidence of earnings (ie no analogy required ...it's obvious). You will note the post I was replying to was edited, hence my response now lacks a bit of context. But that's what I was referring to.

No one is disputing Jim's very evident skill as a programmer. He has credibility as a programmer, his work speaks for itself. 

I suggested his biggest selling point is the site presence that he offers as that offers the most value (in my opinion) ...more context here. 

[Connie]

As a free SHD user, I'd rather not pay for the site presence. I can't put much time into my SHD storefront, and it wouldn't be worth it for me to pay, when I don't use it much. But I love the fact that it's free and there for me if/ when I get some time to really use the service.

[CreativeLeahG]

I didn't realize the referral ID of snh was added, but now I do it makes sense it is free as it's a reciprocal arrangement.

[wheresthekarma]

Thanks for posting this Jim. I haven't read through all the comments on this post yet, but I will let people know that I have been working with you as a beta tester for SHD. I want everyone to know that I gave Jim permission to use data from my Z-shop for this site to help him develop it further. Jim has always been super sensitive about sharing any of my info. He will always ask my permission to share anything. I'm just saying, if there is anyone I trust with the data of my Zazzle shops, it's you. Now, Im biased, I have known you for awhile now, whereas others haven't gotten that opportunity, but I would not say this if I didn't mean it being someone who knows you. 

[CreativeLeahG]

For updated details on my views re Data Analytics Tools and to learn how to access FREE Data Analytics Methods using FREE Data Analysis tools that teach you how to uncover profitable niches for Zazzle visit my blog here. 

Also useful: Caution re sites offering to increase product views and things you need to know about affiliate sites.

[CreativeLeahG]

Update re this here