Our data principles
Everything in the Stockisto directory is built from openly published information: public company registries, businesses' own websites, and public certification registers. These are the same facts you could find yourself with a browser and a lot of patience. We industrialised the patience. We never take data from behind logins or paywalls. We never buy datasets with someone else's strings attached. We never copy content that belongs to another platform. The five principles below are the commitment we hold ourselves to.
1. Open sources only
We build only on information that is open to anyone:
- public company registries,
- businesses' own websites, and
- public certification registers.
Some facts sit behind a login, a paywall, terms you must accept, or a dataset licence. We treat those facts as closed, and we leave them there. “Hard to obtain” is fair game: facts scattered across thousands of sites, unstructured and tedious to collect. Assembling them is the work we do. “Not meant to be obtained” is not fair game.
2. Facts, not content
We collect facts about the world: that a store exists, where it is, how to reach it, and which products it sells. For products, that means a name and a picture, as a shopper would see them. We do not copy content that is another platform's product or its users' work. That means we never copy:
- reviews and ratings,
- editorial writing,
- photos beyond product images, and
- curated database records.
A simple test: if it would vanish when that platform shut down, it is theirs. It stays there unless the owner chooses to bring it here.