DigiScrapStation Blog

Monday Musings April 27

Monday, April 27th, 2009 | Monday Musings

Today is going to be a little more of an informative post instead of a muse. But, I thought I would share this with you all.

I opened myself up to a can of worms the other day. There was this post at DST about how the stores take care of customer invoices and there was concern over privacy issues. At DSS every invoice is copied to all designers so they can see how the sales are doing, what is being sold and how their products are selling. They use this information to help determine what to work on next and how to set their sales and prices. Well, these invoices only had the name of the customer on them as the rest of the information was taken out several months ago.

The store’s privacy statement at the time did not say anything about this. All it promised was customer information was not going to be sold or used to harass customers—well here is what it said exactly:

Your information is safe with us. We will never use information collected here to harass you, nor will we ever sell this information. If you wish to subscribe to our newsletter, you will be able to unsubscribe very easily.

But, it seems some people were unhappy with the sharing of what was being sold to whom. They felt that what they purchased was nobody’s business and the least amount of people to see it the better. It looked like it was some designers who were the ones most upset since they were the ones to purchase commercial use products and did not want it spread around just exactly what they purchased. I could understand that. Digi-scrap designers have to be very competitive and figure out unique and interesting things to produce in order to sell anything anymore.

So, I stripped the name of the customer out of the invoices that are copied to the designers. The only thing now on those invoices is the order number and the products sold. I also changed the privacy statement and added the following:

Store designers receive a copy of all Order Confirmation emails strictly for the purposes of tracking their own personal sales and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. These order confirmation emails only contain the list of products purchased, and do NOT have the customer’s name, email or any other personal information on them.

Of course, that is not good enough for some, but that is as far as I am willing to go. The designers at DSS find this information that is shared with them in a timely manner to be most helpful. They do not have to guess how that coupon sale went, or how that discount sale went. They can see immediately. Then, if their sales are lagging towards the end of the month, they will know in time perhaps to have a sale or work a little harder to send out ads and postings on blogs.

Customers do need to know that no financial information is on the store web site. Customers are taken off the site to PayPal to pay for their purchases and nothing is brought back to the store web site but the fact that the purchase was paid for.

I am working on getting a SSL for the site. Well actually I already have one, but on some browsers it brings up a warning that the website is certified by an unknown authority. I have talked to the hosts about this and asked that they fix that, but it has not been fixed yet. They have really taken up a lot of my time trying to get that all worked out.

Please feel free to contact me using the store contact link if you have any questions regarding your privacy and the information

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