Cynical take: Seems like an excuse for Shopify to add eye tracking to product pages for ad analytics
Or lie to you? VR storefront eh? Bet the product will look a lot better than it actually does in real life.
This is what TFA quoted as an application for the tech, virtual storefronts presumably for physical products.
If you thought recipe articles were terrible today, just wait until you have to pay 0.01 for their life story and then 0.03 for the ingredients only to discover that it will cost you another 0.15 for the actual instructions.
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Research indicates the ideal reading speed for corporate PR emails is 40 wpm and your teamwork KPI at review time will be stack ranked based on how close you move your eyes to the ideal 40 wpm reading rate.
That's the shop's data, not Shopify's.
Bias: my team at Shopify helps merchants launch their shop and get their initial sales.
What's a more likely and more powerful pitch that the marketing team could use to better increase sales of the Shopify platform given this tool they've developed:
1. You can make your stores more FUN! With this little funny tool. 2. You can have more accurate tracking data on what your user is looking at at every moment when they're browsing your website's catalog.
Why not both, really? It's not in Shopify's interest to keep eye-tracking data, but it is in their interest to encourage people to use this feature because we all know this kind of data is a selling point for an e-commerce business.
You really sound like the gun manufacturer that, after a mass shooting, says it's not the people that are flooding the market with guns that are the problem but the individual that did the shooting. This discourse might resonate with some, but not me I guess.
What I'm saying is that individual stores can track their customers however they like, but that there isn't an overall tracking system across all stores.
Shopify's selling feature is that your data is your own. Your customer data is your own and not used by Shopify. That's the competitive advantage over Amazon, who will look at your sales data and use it to compete against you.
It would be penny-wise but pound-foolish to do what you suggest.
Shopify is developing tools that can be used to do harm or to do good. But when they develop tools they know will be used for surveillance, then they can't just wash their hands away. There is responsibility there. Shopify knows how people are using the tools they are creating.
I think facilitating independent shops is positive, but developing more and more tracking functionality to get these shops to be "data driven" is harmful to society. Although that seems to be "the market pull", a lot of times the most ethical choice is not necessarily the most profitable one. Shopify wants to compete with Amazon and they believe a good way of doing that is offering their customers (business owners) better ways to track their customers (shoppers).
All you're doing is giving a third party the gun and your justification seems to be "well if we don't do it, they'll get their guns from amazon anyway". Who owns the data matters, I agree, and I commend Shopify for that, but it's a problematic trend that is being facilitated by these tools anyway. I mean, we should get rid of the guns, not go "we need more good guys with guns". That's my opinion at least.
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