We call this the "session path" taken from link to link in a website. We'd like to figure out what led someone to a certain outcome. Like guessing why they left by following the path of pages they visited until the last page in that session. Maybe it was a missing page or boring content.
I believe Zazzle does collect and analyze the path from a customer search to their purchase. Or at least a simplified form: what was the last search the user did just before they added something to their cart that they ultimately bought? As you might imagine, they aren't likely to publish this information in the form you and I would like for our own benefit.
However. I think they do publish it in a manner that helps Zazzle with their marketing. Zazzle serves up something called a "sitemap" that Google and other search engines can slurp up. It's full of hundreds of thousands of links to different things. Some of them are links to select stores and select products. But some are essentially searches. Here's just one of the hundreds of thousands of searches that Zazzle stuffs in the sitemap:
https://www.zazzle.com/s/anime+girl+posters
The sitemap doesn't contain more than these links of course. It won't tell you what someone purchased after doing a search like that. But my hypothesis is that the search someone did was actually more like "anime girl". When they made a purchase I think Zazzle put together the "anime girl" part with the product type they purchased ("poster") to come up with "anime girl posters".
If you're wondering if there's any way you can use this information, the answer is yes. SnuggleHamster.com offers a Niche Analysis tool. We have imported 371,000 of these searches ("niches") published by Zazzle. We're not the only services doing this. But those other services mainly focus on helping you find single keywords. Our approach is to compare your product against all 371k niches at once in real time. This is also called a "reverse search" because it starts at the endpoint and shows you possible paths people could take to your product. Here's what the Niche Analysis section of our Product Insights page looks like for one product:
The "Query" column is showing the searches/niches. You can click on one to pop open another tab showing Zazzle's search results for yourself. We use a proprietary nicheness scoring algorithm to sort these by how niche we believe one of these searches to be. On the right you can watch as we perform each of the searches in real time and show you where in the search results your product actually falls, if anywhere.
This is a pretty powerful tool for finding out how real Zazzle customers might be finding and perceiving your product through the lens of what they were searching for. Of course most of the people searching didn't buy your product. But it's really nice to know when you've got a chance of being found by them in the first place.
I should point out that Niche Analysis is a Premium agency feature. You'd have to pay the $19/mo subscription fee for you and your agents to use it. There are plenty of valuable free features otherwise.
I know this isn't what you were asking for directly. But I think you may find this is the closest thing to it out there. I've already made some interesting discoveries using the Niche Analysis tool on my own store's products. Here's one discovery I shared recently in the forum here.
