Personally I agree with Bunshroom and Idiot, I'd love to at least have a way to see who bought - for how much, because mistakes do happen and sometimes you want to correct them! I too priced things wrong and someone bought for more than they should have, I'd like to refund them but I can't. I also appreciate everyone that buys, and even if I don't like the person, I made the choice to make the item public and I live with that choice. I can see that there's toxic people that would use this the wrong way, but that's true to everything in life. I don't think we should be all prohibited from a feature because of a few people who will be toxic anyway.

I'm not opposed to the idea but it won't affect me one way or another. I don't care who buys my stuff, and often things get resold or given away or any other circumstance so the information really isn't all that important imo. I think what's more important is how many were sold (which we have that information). Honestly, you can get a lot of information out of your personal forum groups like repeat buyers, who purchased during slotting, and getting general feedback from interested users.

Writing it out though, I think the anonymity is probably better for shop purchases for those who don't want to publicly slot. If someone wants you to know they've purchased from your shop they often post on your forum or post a comment on your profile.

Okay I'm back! I didn't get to write down all of my thoughts in the morning because I quite literally had to shoot out of the door to make it for my lecture after I pressed the post button.

Another reason for me why it would be nice to know who is buying my items: sometimes people tell that they really are interested in a specific item before it is approved on site/available in CW shop. Or sometimes I will know that a specific item is the kind of item that a someone is often interested or someone suggested a recolor for me and I'm finally releasing that suggested recolor. I might poke them to tell that the item is in my shop but I have no way of knowing if they actually got the item. I just kinda have to hope that they got it if they wanted it. Several times I've had a person ask me afterwards if there is any copies of an item left because they weren't actually able to buy it in time for one reason or another.

Then additional reason : I sometimes mess up slots. I send out invites, delete the event that the item was picked up and then a week later wonder if the invite expired or got picked up because I forgot to mark it down. As an annex to this, general slotting/cw sales history would be nice. My most usual way of messing up is that I have to move people around batches and once they've gone through I have no clue who was in the batch that went through. I try to keep my slotting records pretty clean and accurate to minimize mistake but sometimes I'm a tired human who doesn't mark things down properly. I've had to do some pretty hard braining over poorly organized slots and invites in the past. It's basically 100% the releaser's responsibility to keep track of their slotters.

Then some responses!

I genuinely find it hard to believe that buyer history would lead to more locked items. People who want to monitor their buyers already have their items locked or are not selling in CW shop. In the past I have had items locked solely for the purpose of wanting to know who buys items from my CW shop. This of course leads to a very skewed data because not everyone is willing to ask for an invite. Most of the time I am not keen on asking for invites either.

Not everyone who wants to know who their buyers are does so with a malicious intent. I'm sure there are edge cases in both ends - should the site record the sales history or not.

While this is true it's not really the information that is interesting here.

What I'm interested in is, if and how many repeat buyers there are that exclusively buy from the shop and do not interact in any other way. I won't get that information from the forums, the comments or the sale numbers.

I am interested to know if my forum ping group reaches the people who belong in it. I am interested in knowing how well my shop events reach the people who are following my shop. I'm interested in knowing if there are people who don't follow my group or my shop but still end up buying my items and possibly even several times. This information would help me e.g. decide where to inform about my new release, decide if I should favor shop releases over forum releases, decide what kind of information I should have available in my shop, etc. etc.

This may not be in any way interesting or relevant information to you but I am making notes of my sales all the time in attempt to make my future releases both easily accessible and balanced. There's a huge chunk of data that I have no access to. Especially as I have been moving more more towards increasing number of pure shop releases this information becomes even more relevant.

Can I live without this information? Sure. I'm doing pretty okay for myself. I'm still gonna keep experimenting, making notes and putting in effort in hopes of improving both my own releases and the community as a whole.

You're not publicly slotting when you are buying from the CW shop even if the buyer history is recorded. It is not publicly available information if only the seller and the site staff have access to it. And as mentioned earlier, even if the purchase is not recorded by wearing the item, listing it on owned CWs list, putting it in pet treasures, etc. you are already in that way making yourself not anonymous.

Same way as we can ask "Why do we need to record buyers?" we can also ask "Why do we need the ability to make anonymous purchases?" In my opinion if you really really have to be anonymous for whatever reason in order to make a CW shop purchase from someone maybe in that case you should not be supporting the releaser with your CSC. It's totally okay to not want to support someone. It's just a bit weird to still want to have a backdoor to be able to purchase the items anyways.

I am not saying the entire discussion has been overtly negative, just that when we have these kinds of CW development discussions the conversation usually sooner or later gets someone steered into the topics about CW exclusivity and community toxicity - regardless of how relevant those subjects are to the discussion at hand. It just gives a bit of a bad vibe. It's very easy to think "is this all we really are?" while reading a lot of these discussions. A lot of these discussions are being had to we could develop a better community for ourselves. It's of course important to address these issues but ultimate when it comes to things like accessibility and exclusivity we can't really ban people from having private or exclusive releases. That's why I think it's better to focus on the positive development instead of dwelling on the negativity.

In a way it's a weird paradox how many complaints there are over the current state of the community and yet there is a lot resistance to change at the same time.

Okay! This is not really all of my thoughts yet but this has already turned into a huge wall of text so I think I'll wrap this post up here. ^^ Thank you for everyone who has made inputs so far - one way or the other! It's good that we are having these conversations. If nothing else, at least it shows that we really do care about CWs and the community <3

The other person or me?

Of course you have the right to your feelings. I'm aware that one post won't change them, too.

What I'm putting out there is that I frequently see people who are unhappy about being unable to completely control distribution of their CWs.

I understand that seeing someone you dislike a lot wearing your design might be annoying, and I understand that accidentally coming across a tribute to your lost human or animal friend in the pawn shop could really be upsetting.

But I also feel that people could save themselves an awful lot of pain and that there would be a lot less drama if people would just let go. If you give something away, or especially if you sell it, it is no longer yours.

I keep all the agreements I make regarding other people's private items. I keep them because I'm not a dick, so I try very hard not to break my word intentionally, and to remember when I've given it so that I don't do so accidentally.

But at the end of the day, even people who aren't terrible make mistakes, particularly if they have incredibly huge wardrobes (which the site encourages by offering achievements).

So my question--and it's not just for you, it's for everyone I've seen being really upset about who has or who got rid of their CWs--is:

Do you want to go on spending your emotional energy on being angry or heartbroken over people being people, which you can't control?

Or do you want to develop a different perspective so that you're not the one stuck being unhappy?

Because you can't help how you feel about things in the moment when they happen, but you actually can consciously try to develop thought processes that will allow you to feel less pain.

You can try to remind yourself that a person who is using an item you made for your OC is not trying to steal your OC. They're using the item to represent something entirely different and maybe doing something really creative about it. I own one of Cyroris' items that was made for her OC. (I bought it from her with her permission for a large hunk of CSC, and I will NEVER sell it because I love it and also I said that I wouldn't.) She knows that when I wear it, I'm dressed as one of my own OCs who has nothing in common with her OC except a similar ear shape and colour.

You can tell yourself that the person who is wearing the image of your lost pet is helping to keep your pet's memory alive, even if they have no freaking idea who you or your pet was, and imagine your pet having thrilling adventures in other people's personal universes. (This is what I do when I see my cat out there in the wild; I agreed to release him publicly and I'm not sorry that I did.)

You can try to calm yourself down if you see a gift item up for sale and think about it going to a good home where someone will use it creatively and be glad the person you gifted is letting it go rather than having it sit in their wardrobe collecting dust because they've tried to use it and it doesn't work for them.

And for items that are not personal in any way, you can just remember that you sold them for money. I'm sure that the Angelic Pretty designers, or people like Tory Burch and Michael Kors, have seen folks they despise wearing their stuff, possibly even wearing it well enough to be extra annoying.

Or, you can decide that you want to go on feeling anger and pain over things that you can't control because you think that it is justifiable. Is that a valid option?

Absolutely. But it's not an option that will make you happier, and you can't make the person you're mad at feel the pain instead--the pain is yours alone.

I'm sorry, I should have said but I thought my position was obvious--the other person was the jerk. Not you.

FWIW, Gaia puts usermade items directly into their cash shop or into chance items that are sold in the cash shop. Unless you find an insanely rare "ticket" that allows you to submit a private item with a limited number of copies (or buy it for hundreds of dollars), all Gaia usermade items are public. The creator gets 10 free copies to distribute as they please and absolutely no control over what happens to the rest of them. There is certainly a lot that is wrong with Gaia and there are reasons I don't release customs there now. But it's not impossible to have usermade items on a site without having exclusivity, and I think that while getting my start in releasing custom items over there was awful for my financial well-being, it allowed me to stay emotionally balanced about my customs when I started releasing them here.

Im for having a log. We have one in normal user shops why cant we have one in cw shops? I actually think it would make more sense to have them in cw shops than it does to have them in user shops, because...releasers deserve as much control of their own items as users have over normal site items right?

[edit] A word on anonymity: If we had a log and you really absolutely had to remain anonymous, you could just have a friend or a rando from the sb or the forums buy the item for you.

I figured, I just figured with it being forum posts and lack of tone that I had best ask. OTL

I believe this would be a nice thing to have. I remember once I gave a link which glitched during Black Friday and it bought the item automatically for them (which wasn't supposed to happen). I would 've love to point those customers to the right direction and refund their csc through the ticket system. I also had someone buy an item priced at 933 csc (show as 700 csc during the sale) and they bought it after Black Friday sale has ended so I would like to give them some of their csc back. I do understand the potential for abuse, since blocking people does not allow them to access my CW shop.

as a small sidebar real quick: i think some of the pushback is always warranted when people feel uncomfortable - the CW community is not drama free, and people have had awful experiences. dismissing those experiences feels a little short-sighted, even if the community has grown up a lot collectively. i've been on the CW wagon for 6-ish years and boy there has been some absolute garbage go down. it's admittedly a lot better these days though! like, A LOT better.

ANYWAY with that being said, I don't see why CW shops shouldn't be treated like user shops. i've always found it weird that blocking someone/being blocked by someone prevents access to their CW shop, but not to their regular shops? this always felt like a strange oversight to me. idc who buys my items, though, and that might be me in the minority. it would also be incredibly useful to know who bought stuff! not only for all of the reasons listed by others in this topic (mispricing, accidental duplicate purchases, accidental purchases in general), but also i just like to know who likes what sometimes, in case i have like...one or two spares of an item, i can be like, oh hey, BobSagat1985 buys every colour of my dress shirts, these are some old and weird colours from 1983 they might have missed that i have leftovers of in my vault, i can ask if they want em. which is an example that got away from me a lot but you get the gist LMAO

You're being patronizing and I'm not responding to you anymore.

honestly i don't really care either way (and assumed this was already a thing lol) since i'm not super invested in cw's, but what if there was a toggle for anonymity?

so by default the shop's owner can see who bought what, but as a buyer when the 'are you sure you want to buy' box comes up there could be a checkbox for 'purchase anonymously' or something like that o:

Adding a second post here; I do like the idea of being able to confirm people who bought items due to a glitch / after a sale / etc. It's impossible currently to tell if someone is trying to take advantage of your kindness or actually get help they deserve in those situations.

However, that's about where the usefulness to this information stops for me personally.

I keep seeing the same point over and over again about people wanting to know who is purchasing X item so they can see if that person wants recolors / might be interested in xyz as well and that's actually against the rules.

Unless a user asks you to contact them, or they joined your ping group / etc this information you collect is actually useless in this sense. You cannot advertise to a user just because they bought copies of your items. You can use that info to ask them why they liked it / etc but that's about it, and I feel like chances are if they didn't tell you personally why they bought the item, then it wasn't information they cared to give.

Either way it doesn't effect me at all. I wouldn't be using it in my own shop, nor would I care if people knew I bought from theirs. I tend to tell people personally when I'm enjoying an item / am interested in future recolors / etc.

It's not something I'd use (though I don't really release new CWs anymore) but I'm not against it. I don't think a handful of people being rude warrants preventing a whole feature from being implemented if it might be useful for others.

I had a shop invite glitch on me one time (one that was sent to me, not one that I sent out) and I feel like a shop history would be kind of nice to have for those weird edge cases at least, assuming that didn't also glitch at the same time.

Also, while random advertising is against the rules, I can see where it still might be nice to be able to keep someone in mind to hit them up with an extra copy of a private or just hard to find item next time they're actively looking for WL items or invite them to a limited group if they buy from you a lot or something like that, y'know?

This is like a month and a half old but I saw it and read it all.

I don't support adding usernames to cw shop purchases because I know for a fact that some people will stop buying CWs from users as a result.

How do I know this? Because I discount first batch spares into one of my shops and then put the higher priced rest of the batches into my CW shop. People will outright pay more money just to avoid me knowing that they're the one buying from me. Why? No idea - I literally have nobody blocked because drama is drama but I move on and stop thinking about people when I stop talking to them.

There are people I won't slot on my items for assorted reasons, but I honestly do not care if they buy from my CW shop/spares shop later. The items I care about are already under private/locked/limited offer.

Also I think, as mentioned by several folks here, it just runs the risk of harassment by the select few folks who care overmuch about their public item being bought by someone in the public. Like...it's just gonna create more issues.

I was unaware though that blocked people couldn't view/buy from a user's cw shop. That's interesting and strange considering there's no opportunity to use that for harassment/block avoidance so idk why it wouldn't just work like the rest of the shops do. I wish someone on staff would address that. I can't verify on my own because I'm not blocked by anyone.

I actually think it would be more beneficial to remove purchaser names from all cw purchases (in regular shops too) so that people didn't end up paying more for the not-discounted copies just because they don't want to interact with the releaser.

You make some really good points! As much as I'd like to be able to know who of my friends owns my stuff for reasons of gifting, I'm now convinced that things should stay the way they are.

I've changed my mind.

(As someone who is actually friends with you and has accidentally bought from your shop instead of your batch extras shop, though, I wouldn't assume this is always caused by active avoidance. Sometimes I just buy things from the new CW feed on impulse without thinking to look if the item is in any user shops.)

I have often wondered why you can't buy CWs (that are unlocked and publicly available) from people who have blocked you, especially after finding out that they don't even have to see your name in their notifications.

If a person who blocks you puts their item in a user shop, where they CAN see who buys it, you can still buy the item! What kind of reasoning is that?

I honestly don't care if people that I block buy my CWs. I'll take anyone's CSC because whether or not I like someone, anyone who buys from my shop is helping me either buy or submit more CWs.

I feel like 90% or more of CW-related drama is caused by forgetting that CWs are really only tokens of friendship or signs of affiliation/support if they are given as gifts.

If you put something up for sale and someone else pays for it, it's not yours any more. Another person wearing your items in no way implies that you are friends with them or they are friends with you.

So maybe the anonymity is a good thing after all, simply because some people on this site take buying and selling things much too personally.

I just came to say that you brought up a good point. It is pretty stupid that the one system that has anonymity is the one system that is harsher in terms of blocking. I can kind of see where in shop search for regular items, you don't have to go into the shop, you don't have know who owns it, etc. but as far as I know, you still can go into the shop. I guess the only reason is that CW are more special, so everything surrounding them just seems to be more complicated.

Makes me realize that it would be nice to have a buy button on the CW search pages so that you don't have to go into the shop, but I think that's a discussion for a different thread. It's a bit off topic here.

I'm not sure how doable this this... but would it be possible to have a user option to just, purchase anonymously from any user shop (be it sP or csc purchases)?

Like on the https://subeta.net/preferences.php?act=prefs page... "when purchasing anything from a usershop keep your username private". Can that just, be an option?

I don't think it's up to me to tell others how to purchase, it's up to each individual; frankly I could see a lot of reasons to do this.

1. Drama/grudge avoidance. Maybe you're friends with a person who has beef and you don't wanna be involved. Maybe you have beef but that's a good deal.
2. I dunno if it still happens but waaay back in the day it used to be ridiculously common for people to comment you every time you bought something from their shop. It was a sweet gesture but 43984545 comments later it was heckin' annoying. Like I get it, thanks, I'm just doing my quests though.
3. People missprice items and attack those who purchased them. Not assault, but aggressive (be it passive or blunt) comments about how opps I missed a zero please give me my item back. All is fair in pricing and purchasing, but hey... no name.. no one to cast blame to but ones self (we've all been there, it sucks but.. aye).
4. Surprise gifts. Idk. Why's Andrea buying all these items from my shop... oh snap so and so's birthday is tomorrow I bet that's why. Maybe this doesn't happen... maybe it does. Maybe I'm just buying 37 Breena because I have a hoarding problem.

I have one and only one unpopular CW so I was staying out of this. One person did buy it from my shop once OMG, I am dying of curiosity! But I shall survive not knowing.

But since brought it up and she's whip-smart and makes excellent suggestions usually I will be OT here and say I'm opposed to the global anonymous purchase option. It's useful in general shops to know if someone's doing false inflation/hoarding or just if something got made Achievement material and lots of different people are buying it. It can change how you price/re-price things and let you know if you want to re-stock the thing. (This doesn't apply to CWs.) So a general anonymizer would be an opportunity for abuse. It's already against the Rules to say that they bought something from your general item shop, this is interpreted by Staff as targeting.