Let publishers see customer email addresses

Feature requests
,
1

Please include email address in the information we get for each purpose.

Email is the most reliable unique identifier available to publishers, and the one most likely to be identical across platforms (i.e. Itch, Backerkit, and here).

Customer emails allow me to answer questions like:

* What percentage of my customers have purchased multiple products?

* What percentage of my customers go on to back my crowdfunders?

* What percentage of my crowdfunder backers go on to purchase my products?

If this suggestion is implemented, email would also allow me to answer questions like:

* What percentage of my customers are following me from Itch (versus new from this site)?

Finally, as a small publisher, I know a decent number of my customers from the communities I’m active in. I’ve had people reach out to me for customer support through Discord, and being able to search orders by email would allow me to better support my customers.

2

I did want to acknowledge that there are privacy concerns with revealing customer emails. However, I think Itch’s approach towards that is quite a good one: they make it very clear what you can and can’t do with that information, and that if you abuse access to customer emails, it’s a terms of service violation and they’ll boot you from the site.

3

Thanks for the suggestion, and for taking the time to explain the use cases. We can absolutely see the value that customer email addresses provide for things like cross-platform analysis, crowdfunding attribution, customer support, and understanding repeat purchasers.

After considering this, however, we’ve decided that RPG Trader will not provide buyer email addresses to sellers.

The main reason is privacy. When someone purchases a product on RPG Trader, they’re sharing their information with RPG Trader in order to complete that transaction. We don’t believe buyers should have to share their personal contact details with every seller they purchase from in order to use the marketplace.

We also want buyers to feel comfortable making purchases without worrying that doing so may result in unsolicited marketing emails or their details being added to mailing lists they didn’t explicitly join. A policy that forbids abuse of contact details still exposes buyers to the same privacy concerns.

That doesn’t mean creators can’t communicate with their customers, however.

RPG Trader includes tools that allow sellers to contact buyers through the platform when needed, including order notes and buyer email tools. This provides a way to offer support, share updates, and communicate with customers without exposing personal email addresses.

More information about contacting your buyers is available here: Contacting your buyers

If buyers need support for a purchase on RPG Trader, you can always ask them for their order ID, allowing you to look that up in your RPG Trader dashboard to verify their purchase.

We understand that this means some types of cross-platform customer analysis won’t be possible, and that’s a trade-off we’re comfortable making in favour of buyer privacy.

That said, we’re always interested in hearing about the underlying problems creators are trying to solve. If there are ways RPG Trader can provide useful analytics, customer insights, or additional support tools without exposing personal contact information, we’d be happy to explore those ideas.

4

I feel like there’s a middle ground here of having an opt-in on the checkout page. It won’t fully satisfy the original request, of course, but some of us won’t mind sharing our info with creators that we support.

5

Thanks for taking an ethical position on this. Its also a very sensible position, given Australia’s privacy laws.

(For those from non-privacy compliant jurisdictions: Australia, like most civilised countries, has a Privacy Act, which says what you can and can’t do with personal information: what you can collect, what you can do with it, how you handle and use it, who you can transfer it to, and what you have to tell people about what you’re doing. One significant restriction is a ban on non-consensual transfers to privacyless regimes, with ongoing legal liability on transferers for what happens afterwards. The safest general principle is therefore don’t collect unless you have to; don’t keep unless there’s an ongoing need; and absolutely do not share unless the person consents. Which is a pretty ethical way to do things anyway…)

6

Thanks @mharbrow - appreciate the input here and the reference to Australian privacy laws.

That’s a big part of why we aren’t planning on sharing buyer names (or other info) with sellers. That being said, even if we didn’t have those laws in Australia, we’d still err on the side of respecting the privacy of buyers.

We’re sticking with this idea:

I know we could include a checkbox at checkout, so buyers can choose to consent, but that would create imbalanced data across orders and make it harder to keep track of things. It would also be a lot harder to put back in the box if we need to change things in the future.

So, for the foreseeable future, we won’t be sharing buyer names (or other info) with sellers. If a seller needs to offer support to buyer, you can ask them for their order number to confirm their purchase. You can also communicate with buyers through order notes and the dashboard email tools: Contacting your buyers

7

One potential solution, if people keep bringing this topic up in future, is a partial email reveal. 90% of the email is shrouded, so for example i####o@w######s.com with a set number of hashes to help obscure the length of the component parts. The first part of my email is “info” but because of the specified number of hashes this is unclear and the same for the second half which is “whiteharegames” in this instance.

8

That’s an option we could explore, if we decide to go that route. We’ll keep that in mind for the future - thanks!