Should You Rent Out Your Customer List?

The Co-ops

If a cataloger doesn’t rent or exchange its list, should it join a co-op database? Does doing so void the catalog’s privacy policy?

The co-ops don’t actually rent a particular customer file. They use the transactional data (i.e., buying history) in combination with the transactional data from other contributors to the database to build models. As a practical matter, most of the names a co-op selects from mailings have purchased from several different catalogs. The Abacus rule on modeling excludes any household that has made only a single purchase from one of its Alliance members. So unique names aren’t selected for someone else’s model and use.