Are you also the developer of the similarly named "Zazzle Analytics" extension?
If their claims are accurate, I would like to know how it is possible for them to get our store sales stats.
They have this on their website under "reporting": "Provides reporting for search results, collection pages and store's product tab. With zazzle analytics you know how many order a store has received, a collection or a keyword received in all time."
It also states "With zazzle analytics, in a blink of an eye you get an overview of your competitor how they are doing right now and you can plan yours accordingly."
I am not a fan of these analytics programs scraping our information or gathering it in whatever way they are. It's one thing to get your own data for your own store, but another to be able to go to other peoples stores and get it.
How do you get information on a store's best selling products?
From your extension page : ✔ Creator Insights: Explore other creators' stores to gain inspiration from their best-selling products and strategies. Benchmark your performance and learn from top sellers in your niche.
I am really curious how extensions like this get information that is not out in the open on the site for a reason.
Transparency and compliance are very important to us, and we ensure the extension adheres to Zazzle's terms of service. If you have any concerns or further questions, feel free to reach out—I’m happy to clarify!
OK then ...
I'd been recently discussing Zazzle Analytics in an off-site conversation with some other Designers so had checked it out as much as one could without actually installing the extension. Whoever is behind that extension is choosing to remain anonymous, saying only they are "a group of Zazzle designers". So when I saw your post promoting an extension with similar name and logo, scraping & compiling the same data, I thought it was the same app with an updated name and the developers had decided to reveal who they are. But you have explained you are not them (though you are using we/us as if there are more than one of you?), that you were a user of ZA and decided to make your own spin-off.
To keep things straight for everybody
@azmarcrafts is representing Zazzlytics here as its developer.
Now the questions (all of which apply to ZA as well).
1) If you opt to install this Chrome extension you get this
I understand the need for permission to "manage your downloads" since there's an option to download images, but what is the extension doing that it needs permission for the first two things? I noped right out of that, not things I would grant permission for even just to check it out first-hand in a browser I never even use except for testing.
2) Your video on the Chrome webstore page shows you can install it as a "7 day free trial" with no information anywhere as to what the cost is after that. If you have to install something to find out how much a subscription would cost, that's not being very transparent. What are your subscription plans?
3) Based on a screen-grab from your video:
(For the sake of privacy, I blocked out the pictures and text that would have identified the product and its Designer.)
The green blocks are public things that anyone viewing a product page can see.
The blue blocks are private things available only to the designer while signed-in to their account.
The red block is something only Zazzle could know.
The yellow blocks appear to be stats formed based on your own algorithms/criteria.
How are you getting the data for the blue & red blocks? And assuming it's authentic, is this not a huge breach of privacy?
4) Really minor thing but it's bugging me. In this sample, it shows 23 orders in Last Month, none Personalized. But this was a wedding invitation so every single one of them would have been personalized.
I'd very much like to see Zazzle chime in here as to their position on apps scraping private data from their site and making it available to anyone.
I can't see anyone else's private sales or order stats currently. I believe @ColsCreations blue blocks are correct in the fact that they are private data. I would like to know where, I myself, can publicly access another designers sales and orders data. Where on the site, without the help of an extension, can I find and see these stats that I was under the assumption were private to each user?
That is a huge issue for me that my sales and orders stats are available for anyone to look at. Not just for your extension, but for others that I have heard about as well.
Thank you for addressing my questions.
It's not your fault the info is out there for the taking, but I do still find it frustrating that this type of info (specifically our product sales/order data) that should be private can be dug out and sold to other shops via paid extensions.
2. Transparency About Pricing
You’re absolutely right that pricing should be clear upfront. While the pricing information might not be visible on the Chrome Web Store page itself, it is displayed on the options page, which opens automatically once the extension is installed.
Great. Then you won't mind me sharing your pricing plans here so that noone else has to install it just to find out.
I did end up installing the extension because as I said I don't use Chrome for anything but testing things so won't be an issue to remove it and re-install a clean version if I feel that's necessary after removing the extension.
Here's my experience from poking around the free version.
*Note the free version is available to anyone. The "free 7-day trial" is only for people subscribing to the paid plans w/ more features. If you click within the app (easier to type than extension) to subscribe, you're taken to the actual homepage for the app, which I'm not going to link to for the same reason @idraw gave above.
I checked this out as an anonymous shopper on Zazzle, i.e. not signed in to my account. Here's a screenshot of what I was able to see looking at one of my own products.
The only things you can see is public info from the product page. Except Total Views which is no longer shown publicly. And in this case it is the same number of views reported in my back-end. No intention of subscribing just to check if the other data pulled would be accurate or not. The Download All button is also non-functional w/o a subscription.
Viewing the Products page of a store, there is a bar at top of page with a Best-Selling and Trending tabs. The Trending tab shows you nothing without a subscription. The Best Selling tab shows you what are purportedly the three top-selling products in that store. If you subscribe, you can see more. For both my stores, the three products shown matched the first three products shown in my backend when I sort by "Orders (All time)". (Edited to add: for another designer, it showed three products they said hadn't ever sold.)
I get the same type of info regardless of whether I am viewing my own stuff or other Designers, and like I said, I was not even signed in to my Zazzle account when doing this.
If I click on the Creators tab in above screenshot:
It says you need a subscription to view their Best Sellers, even though you can see the first top three in the free version if you go to the store's Products page. It shows the total number of products in a store which is sort-of private. You can search on Zazzle by store name for a rough idea, but that's all. Here it shows I have 507 products. My backend, filtered to Public, says I have 509. (Also, @azmarcrafts , you have a typo here, We're "Members' not 'Mombers'.) The Pro badge concerned me as I know many sellers choose, for good reason, to display only the Pro badge with no level on it. So I checked a couple of sellers I know hide their level that way. For them, it shows a Pro Basic badge, which is good or bad depending on how you look at it. It's good that this app isn't able to find and reveal your actual level, but wrong that it shows you at the lowest level instead of just saying "unknown".
With the cooperation of some other designers, we checked the number of product views the app is reporting against what our backends show. It was correct 50% of the time, the other 50% showed 0 views.
There seems to be a difference of opinion in what one would consider public or private information. For me, if I can't see it as an anon shopper on the actual pages on Z, it's private. If one has to employ programming skill to harvest it through the source code, that doesn't to me count as being public info. It says that there are perhaps some holes Z should plug up. I know most designers hold things like number of orders close; it's nobodys business but their own. High-level designers, and those with maybe random products that did well so are at the top of Z pages, they already have issues with people copycatting them. Apps like this that make that even easier, that's just unethical IMO.
The good news is that the free version of this that anyone can use, it's not revealing anything except Views (which may or may not be accurate) and Most-Ordered. People would have to pay to subscribe to see more than that, and since I am not going to do that just to test, I can't say whether the additional data we deem private would be accurate or not.
