Data retention policy

Basics

Most of the data we accumulate is prompted by Zazzle designers importing their stores and visitors exploring our content. We do not guarantee users retention of any of our data. Our principal policy motivation is to retain or delete data based on whatever best serves our business goals.

Note that this topic is apart from our privacy policy.

Storage costs

Storage costs are currently one of our greatest material costs. We have an incentive to get rid of wasteful uses of our storage. Our Premium agencies can reasonably expect us to have a strong preference for retaining their data. Mainly because their subscription fees pay for our storage costs.

Meanwhile Basic agencies are free of cost to their owners. We have more of an incentive to reduce what we consider wasteful use of our storage space used by Basic agencies.

Stale data

One of the most basic considerations for us in whether to delete or keep some piece of data is whether it is "stale". An example of stale data is a product detail page for a product that no longer exists on Zazzle.

Although store owners are primarily responsible for keeping their stores up to date, we reserve the right to update catalogs that are not kept up for extended periods of time. Think more like months here than days.

Once a store has been neglected for a long time and its contents become ever more invalid, we have a strong incentive to disable that store and eventually to delete its contents.

If you block or ignore essential email notifications about your account and thus make it impossible for us to get in touch with you then we probably will remove your content because it will become unmanageable.

Inappropriate content

We reserve the right to delete content that we consider inappropriate for our site. An example of this would be fake products that don't actually exist on Zazzle and instead exist to promote content unrelated to the print-on-demand industry. One extreme example would be a fake store created solely to advertise a multi-level marketing (MLM) pyramid scheme.

We also will remove copyright or trademark violations upon formal requests in compliance with US law.

Minimization over deletion

If we find that we need to remove content to save space, we are likely but not guaranteed to give you some time to make corrections yourself. But we are also likely to try to simply reduce the storage space used.

Consider a concrete example. Let's say we find we have a massive set of old, rarely-seen products. Most of the storage space used by it will likely be images we imported from Zazzle. For many of those old products we might opt to delete some of all of the gallery of images, keeping only the main/thumbnail image.

Another example is that we might shrink images down to conserve space without deleting them.

In good faith

Don't overthink this policy too much. If you wonder if we will delete some of your content, try putting yourself in our shoes and apply a basic smell test. Is your content stale? Is your content inappropriate? We probably won't delete your content. Are you paying subscription fees? You can feel even more assured that we're retaining your data.