--- title: Research — Going Stellar site: https://goingstellar.ro language: en-GB license: CC BY 4.0 count: 51 feed: https://goingstellar.ro/research/feed.xml --- # Research — Going Stellar Studies from our own stores and our own marketplace listings, with the method, the figures and the limitations published alongside. Every article states a measured finding, gives the figures behind it, and says where it does not apply. Each has a plain-text mirror at the `.md` address below and may be quoted with attribution under CC BY 4.0. ## Should an AI-made YouTube channel for kids make songs or cartoons? Made for Kids rules, COPPA and Google's under-18 clause - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · Kids' YouTube - Page: - Markdown: Songs are the safer bet: made-for-kids videos lose personalised ads, end screens and notifications, and songs can also earn on audio streaming. Google's generative AI terms bar use in services aimed at or likely used by under-18s, YouTube penalises templated and hard-to-follow videos, and the audience label is the creator's legal responsibility, as Disney's $10 million penalty showed. ## How do you make money from AI-generated music in 2026: YouTube, distributors, Spotify and collecting societies - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · AI music - Page: - Markdown: AI music can earn on YouTube, mostly from long compilations, as long as each video is disclosed as synthetic and is not mass-produced. Outside YouTube the routes are narrower: some distributors accept fully AI tracks but keep them out of Content ID, Spotify and Deezer limit recommendations, and collecting societies register only works with human authorship. The YouTube entry bar for new channels doubles on 1 February 2027. ## Can Google Lyria 3 sing in Romanian and play Romanian genres? What we measured through the Gemini API - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Measurement · AI music - Page: - Markdown: Romanian is not on Google's list of supported vocal languages for Lyria 3, but in our tests it worked: about 85% of the words we sent came back as written, diacritics were pronounced correctly, and the intonation was odd in places. Functional instrumentals such as lofi, sleep and ambient worked every time, while Romanian dance names like sârbă did not: the model needs the rhythm described in musical terms. The list price of $0.04 or $0.08 per song understates the real cost of a usable vocal track, because there is no iterative editing. ## How to process your own vocal over an AI instrumental with free Python tools on a laptop without a GPU - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · Music production - Page: - Markdown: Clean the recording first, then correct pitch, then shape tone and dynamics, then add space, and master last. Each step has an open-source Python tool that runs on a CPU: DeepFilterNet for noise, a BS-RoFormer model for room echo, torchcrepe with pyworld for pitch correction that keeps your timbre, pedalboard for effects and Matchering for reference mastering. Processing fixes wrong notes, not timing or diction, and singing the vocal yourself changes who owns the result and what YouTube asks you to disclose. ## Which characters can you legally use in an AI video channel on YouTube from Europe? - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · Public domain - Page: - Markdown: Characters whose source works are out of copyright in both the EU and the US: Dracula, the Greek and Norse myths, Frankenstein's creature, the Grimm and Andersen tales, Pinocchio, Alice, Oz, Sherlock Holmes and similar figures, plus SCP Foundation material under its CC BY-SA licence. The source text is free; the famous film design, modern translations and registered trade marks often are not. The 2023-24 format of AI slideshows built on studio characters fails on both fronts: YouTube's monetisation rules and the studios' lawsuits against AI image companies. ## How do you get a D-U-N-S number for a Romanian SRL, and why do Apple and Google ask for one? - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · D-U-N-S - Page: - Markdown: A D-U-N-S number is free, and Apple and Google both require one before a company can open an organisation developer account. In Romania, Dun & Bradstreet is represented by its partner ICAP CRIF, but a company can also request the number through Apple's lookup tool, where Apple tells you to allow up to 5 business days. The details you enter have to match the company's registered legal name and headquarters address, or verification fails later. ## Google Play developer account in 2026: personal or organization, what verification asks for, and what the new rules change - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · Google Play - Page: - Markdown: A Google Play developer account costs a one-time US$25 and comes in two types. A personal account needs a government ID but must run a closed test with at least 12 testers for 14 consecutive days before production; an organization account skips that test but needs a D-U-N-S number, organization documents and a verified website, and shows its address and phone number on Google Play. A personal account can now be switched to an organization, not the reverse. ## What sells on the Atlassian Marketplace in 2026, and how do you read the demand signals for a Jira or Confluence app? - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · Atlassian Marketplace - Page: - Markdown: Installs are concentrated in integrations, admin toolkits, time tracking, test management and diagrams: the top 50 apps hold more than half of all installs, and the median app has single-digit installs on Jira. Small Forge apps still get in, mostly in reporting gadgets, admin utilities and diagram-as-code, while Atlassian charges no revenue share on Forge revenue up to $1 million per partner. The end of Data Center, on 28 March 2029, is the main engine of new cloud demand. ## Why do most new Shopify apps fail, and where is there still real demand in 2026? - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · Shopify App Store - Page: - Markdown: Most new Shopify apps never get a single review: in our random sample of 400 listings on 19 October 2026, 62% had none, and 79% of the apps launched in 2026 had none. The shelf is filling faster than merchants arrive, and the reviews that do arrive go to a few apps per niche. The demand that is left is easiest to find where a platform change reset a category, and it can be tested from public data before any code is written. ## Who makes print-on-demand products for Romanian stores in 2026, what it costs to start, and which rules apply - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · Print-on-demand - Page: - Markdown: Romanian online stores can sell printed products without owning a printer, through EU-based platforms such as Printful, Printify and Gelato, or through Romanian workshops; the public accounts of the local players we checked show steady, modest growth rather than a boom. Owning equipment means prices that dealers mostly give only on request, and the PNRR can no longer fund it: as of 19 October 2026 the open money is regional EU funding with short windows. Printed products still carry the full set of EU labelling and product-safety rules. ## How do ghost hunting and spirit box apps pass App Store and Google Play review? - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · App Store review - Page: - Markdown: Neither Apple nor Google bans paranormal entertainment apps, and neither accepts a 'for entertainment purposes only' line as a defence for fake features. The apps that stay listed read real phone sensors, describe what they actually do, and say plainly that they do not detect spirits. The bigger obstacle on the App Store is guideline 4.3(b): a crowded category has to show a meaningfully different experience. ## How do you take a deposit on Shopify in 2026: part of the payment now, the rest later - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · Shopify deposits - Page: - Markdown: Shopify has a native deposit mechanism only for pre-orders and try-before-you-buy, and it works only through an app that schedules and charges the balance itself. Deposits at checkout through payment terms, deposits on draft orders and partial payments in the admin are limited to Shopify Plus. Everything else comes from apps, whose low-rated reviews point to the same weak spots: billing, storefront scripts and the second payment. ## How do Shopify stores use WhatsApp in 2026: Meta's official app, per-message pricing, opt-in and COD confirmation - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · WhatsApp commerce - Page: - Markdown: Shopify stores connect to WhatsApp either through Meta's official Cloud API, used by Meta's own app and many third-party apps, or by automating a number linked as a device, the route behind the account bans merchants report. Since July 2025 Meta charges per delivered template: in Romania $0.086 for marketing and $0.029 for utility messages such as order confirmations. Abandoned-cart reminders count as marketing and need marketing consent. ## How do you convert a PDF bank statement into a file QuickBooks can import: QBO, CSV or OFX? - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · Bookkeeping tools - Page: - Markdown: QuickBooks imports bank transactions from files, not from PDFs. QuickBooks Online accepts CSV, QBO, QFX and OFX uploads of up to 350 KB and 1,000 lines; QuickBooks Desktop takes only Web Connect .qbo files, which Intuit ties to a bank with a contracted identifier. Converters fill the gap between the PDF and those formats, at prices from about $3 per statement to $100 a month, and the main risks are misread amounts, duplicate transactions and where the statement files go. ## What do AppSumo and Product Hunt actually bring a small B2B software product in 2026? - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · Launch platforms - Page: - Markdown: Launch cash, reviews, traffic and a few links, but not recurring revenue on their own. In published AppSumo campaigns founders kept roughly a quarter to a third of gross sales after AppSumo's share and refunds, and took on lifetime support. A Product Hunt launch lasts one day on a moderator-curated homepage; the best-documented small launch we found produced 5 paying users. ## What can an AI chatbot really handle for an online store in 2026, and where does it go wrong? - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · AI customer service - Page: - Markdown: An AI chatbot on a store can reliably answer product, shipping and policy questions from the store's own content, and it can answer "where is my order" only when it is connected to live order and courier data. It goes wrong on refunds, exceptions and policies it paraphrases, and a 2024 tribunal ruling held a company liable for what its chatbot told a customer. Vendors price per resolution, per conversation or per seat, and they do not define a resolution the same way. Since 2 August 2026, EU rules require that people are told they are talking to an AI. ## How do you sell configurable, high-priced products on Shopify by request for quote: native draft orders, hidden prices and RFQ apps - Published: 2026-10-19 - Topic: Desk research · Shopify quotes - Page: - Markdown: Shopify has no storefront request-for-quote feature, but every plan with B2B can make a company's checkout end in a draft order that staff review, reprice and send back as an invoice with a checkout link. Hiding prices is the weak point: a theme can hide them, but Shopify's public product endpoints and the Storefront API still return them, and Google's product feed requires a price that matches the page. RFQ apps add the form, the hidden price and the quote-to-order step; their low-star reviews are mostly about prices still showing and priced options lost from the quote. ## How do Shopify stores in Eastern Europe handle cash on delivery: COD forms, fees and order confirmation - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · Cash on delivery - Page: - Markdown: Shopify treats cash on delivery as a manual payment method: the order is created unpaid, no money moves through Shopify, and there is no built-in fee or confirmation step. Stores that sell mostly on COD fill those gaps with apps: a COD order form that bypasses checkout, phone confirmation by one-time code, rules that hide COD, and fees added by an app. Refunds for cash orders still happen outside Shopify. ## Can you create YouTube in-stream campaigns through the Google Ads API? What Demand Gen lets you automate - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · Google Ads API - Page: - Markdown: Classic Video campaigns cannot be created or updated through the Google Ads API; it only reads and reports on them. The documented route to an API-built YouTube in-stream campaign is a Demand Gen campaign whose ad groups select only the in-stream channel. We checked an AI research report on this against Google's API documentation on 11 October 2026 and list what it got right, what it missed and what had changed. ## Which EU rules change how online stores sell in 2025–2027? A dated checklist - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · EU e-commerce rules - Page: - Markdown: Between December 2024 and mid-2027, EU law adds product-safety details to every online listing, bans generic green claims, puts a duty on cheap imported parcels, starts the packaging regulation and the battery passport, and phases in national e-invoicing. We started from two AI deep-research reports, kept only the dates we could confirm at the source, and list the ones the reports got wrong. ## The European Accessibility Act and online stores: what it requires and who is exempt - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · accessibility law - Page: - Markdown: Since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act requires consumer-facing online stores in the EU to be accessible to people with disabilities. Microenterprises that provide services are exempt, but the test is narrower than most summaries say: fewer than 10 persons and a turnover or balance sheet not exceeding 2 million euro. We checked the claims in an AI research report against the directive text and found the threshold misstated. ## Do feature-request votes predict app installs? What a public backlog told us - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Markets · Feature-request backlogs - Page: - Markdown: Votes on a platform's public feature-request tracker did not predict installs. Across the ten ideas that passed a first filter, 4,339 votes had turned into about 440 installs spread over about 40 competing apps: roughly one install per hundred votes. The ticket's status carried more signal than its vote count, and the status was the part most often misread. ## How small B2B software companies actually got their first paying customers - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · Customer acquisition - Page: - Markdown: We checked eleven founder accounts at their sources. The first paying customers came from people the founder already knew, from problem threads the founder answered by hand, or from one launch inside a concentrated community. Only one came from a marketplace listing, and that founder had nearly a decade of experience in the ecosystem. ## What is different about Google Ads for an online store in Romania, and what does Google's documentation actually say? - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · Google Ads - Page: - Markdown: We took an AI deep-research report on Google Ads for Romanian e-commerce and checked its claims at Google's own help pages on 11 October 2026. The account mechanics are the same as anywhere else; what differs is European: Shopping ads go through a Comparison Shopping Service, EEA consent signals need two extra parameters, and several 2026 deadlines in the report have already passed. ## Does the app name or the tagline decide marketplace search rank? - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Measurement · Marketplace search - Page: - Markdown: On the Atlassian Marketplace, our listings ranked in the top 20 for a query when the app name contained it, and below 170 when only the tagline did. Renaming moved three listings up within hours, and lengthening a name that already matched cost one listing fourteen places. Rank followed the name. ## Do app marketplaces bring customers by themselves? What we learned publishing on four with no audience - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Markets · App marketplaces - Page: - Markdown: They do not. We submitted apps to Shopify, Google Workspace, Atlassian and monday.com without an audience of our own. Listings went live, people installed some of them, and paying customers stayed close to zero. Each marketplace failed in a different place, and the platforms' own rules explain part of it. ## The EU Omnibus price-reduction rule: the 30-day lowest price, explained for online stores - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · pricing law - Page: - Markdown: When an online store in the EU announces a price reduction, it must show the lowest price it charged for that product in at least the 30 days before the reduction, and any percentage must be calculated from that price. We checked an AI research report against Article 6a of Directive 98/6/EC, the European Commission's guidance and the 2024 Aldi Süd judgment, and kept only what a merchant needs. ## Where to get street-level postal-code data for Romania, and how reliable it is - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · Romanian postcodes - Page: - Markdown: The only official bulk file of Romanian postcodes with street ranges is Poșta Română's 2016 workbook on the national open-data portal, reusable commercially under OGL-ROU-1.0. It covers streets only in Bucharest and 47 large localities; everywhere else the code belongs to the whole locality. Newer-looking free sources we checked either lack postcodes, lack streets, or repackage the same 2016 file. ## The most common mistakes in Romanian delivery addresses, and how to correct them - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · Romanian addresses - Page: - Markdown: Most broken Romanian addresses fail on five things: a postcode that does not match the locality, a village written without its county, a street type fused into the street name, two incompatible versions of ș and ț, and block details lost in free text. We checked each rule against Poșta Română's own data and the UPU addressing sheet, and found that several popular ‘fixes’ are wrong. ## How does Shopify App Store search rank apps? What is documented and what is folklore - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · Shopify App Store - Page: - Markdown: Shopify does not publish its App Store ranking formula. It documents a handful of things: term matching against your listing, behaviour after a search, a boost for Built for Shopify apps, and a statement that positive reviews lift an app in search. Most of the rest of what circulates as ranking advice is inference, and some of it breaks Shopify's own listing rules. ## Shopify B2B in 2026: what the native features cover and when a wholesale app is still needed - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · Shopify B2B - Page: - Markdown: Since 2 April 2026, Shopify's own B2B tools are on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans, not only Plus: company profiles, up to three market catalogs, volume pricing, quantity rules and net payment terms. Plus keeps unlimited catalogs, catalogs assigned to individual companies, deposits and partial payments. Wholesale apps still matter mainly for per-customer pricing below Plus, registration flows and themes or apps that native B2B does not support. ## Which Shopify platform changes and deadlines open or close app opportunities in 2026? - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · Shopify platform - Page: - Markdown: In 2025–2026 Shopify moved its AI-agent endpoints to the Universal Commerce Protocol, gave B2B and customer accounts new surfaces, and set hard end dates for Shopify Scripts, script tags and older catalog and cart APIs. We checked every date against Shopify's developer changelog and Help Center, and list what the AI research report we started from got wrong. ## Returns and exchanges on Shopify in 2026: what the platform does natively and where apps fill gaps - Published: 2026-10-11 - Topic: Desk research · Shopify returns - Page: - Markdown: Shopify's native returns now cover more than most comparison articles admit: return rules, self-serve return requests, refunds to store credit and a report of returns by reason. The real gaps are narrower: customers cannot request an exchange themselves, and return labels inside Shopify exist only for US domestic orders. ## Three ways a browser shows you a page no visitor gets - Published: 2026-08-31 - Topic: Measurement · front-end - Page: - Markdown: Three defects on this site passed every screenshot and failed every measurement: headless Chrome refusing a phone-width layout, lazy loading that never fires inside a sideways-scrolling strip, and a scroll-driven animation that hid content permanently. A fourth, in CSS grid, pushed a footer column off the screen at phone width. All four were found by measuring, and the numbers below are from this site. ## Four corrections before our market scanner meant anything - Published: 2026-08-30 - Topic: Market sizing - Page: - Markdown: A category's lifetime review count says how big it once was, not whether anyone is arriving now. Here is what we had to fix before the output was usable, including the correction that changed our strategy. ## The data failures that cost most never raised an alarm - Published: 2026-08-28 - Topic: Data quality · monitoring - Page: - Markdown: Our costliest data failures ran for days without an error, an alert, or a broken page. Each kept producing numbers on schedule; only the freshness of the data was wrong. The mechanisms we used to catch them are general; the intervals inside them are ours. ## Cost per order is wrong by exactly the confirmation rate - Published: 2026-08-28 - Topic: Measurement note - Page: - Markdown: In cash-on-delivery retail, dividing advertising spend by orders placed gives a figure that is smaller than the real one by a factor you can know in advance. We published the optimistic version first and were corrected. ## The bug on a browser we did not have - Published: 2026-08-27 - Topic: Debugging - Page: - Markdown: Product titles overflowed on phones and nowhere else. Three environments that claimed to be the mobile rendering all said the page was fine. Counting one CSS value across the live page found the cause without ever reproducing it. ## A negative search result is not evidence of absence - Published: 2026-08-27 - Topic: Post-mortem - Page: - Markdown: 12 of 20 app listings sat rejected for over two weeks because the reviewers' questions lived in a ticket system, and the mailbox search that would have found the notifications was never validated. ## When a bug wears the fallback's message - Published: 2026-08-27 - Topic: Failure analysis - Page: - Markdown: A parcel tracker reported missing credentials for every parcel. The credentials were there. A broad except clause kept turning each attempted fix into the same reassuring sentence. ## The ignore pattern that deleted a live module - Published: 2026-08-27 - Topic: Post-mortem - Page: - Markdown: A data directory was ignored without a leading slash, so the pattern also matched a source package deeper in the tree. The package was never committed, a mirror deploy removed it from the server, and the only surviving description of what it did was its test suite. ## Two signals, or a person - Published: 2026-08-26 - Topic: Address repair - Page: - Markdown: Every plausible rule for automatically repairing a broken delivery address, measured against real orders — and why most of them were rejected. ## Geography predicts refusals. Shipping cost only leaks the answer. - Published: 2026-08-24 - Topic: Measurement · refusal risk - Page: - Markdown: A refusal model trained on roughly 628,000 finished orders scores AUC 0.686 on an honest temporal holdout, and its riskiest fifth of orders holds 39% of all refusals. The first version scored 0.55 because it was reading the answer off a field that only exists after the parcel comes back. Most of the address rules we were confident about did nothing once we put a control group next to them. ## The right decision, in the wrong order - Published: 2026-08-24 - Topic: Fulfilment engineering - Page: - Markdown: A duplicate-order detector flagged 52 orders as duplicates in one day. Roughly 29 customers still got the same parcel twice, because two automated steps ran in the wrong sequence. ## Zero ads is not an answer - Published: 2026-08-24 - Topic: Competitive research - Page: - Markdown: Searched by domain, an ad transparency archive returned zero ads for three subjects. Their owners were running 17 and 13 ads at the time. Here is the check that works, and the recommendation it killed. ## The test was green, the effect was absent - Published: 2026-08-20 - Topic: Migration post-mortem - Page: - Markdown: We switched an old automated system off after confirming the new one produced shipping labels correctly. One module was still in shadow mode, and 114 orders over three days shipped without a gift the customer had already paid for. ## A detector that fires on nothing - Published: 2026-08-18 - Topic: Detection engineering - Page: - Markdown: An event trigger set at 2.5 sigma produced 166 events on a device lying still and 151 while something was genuinely happening. Fixing it takes three conditions, not one. ## The CPA spike was a measurement failure, not a performance failure - Published: 2026-08-12 - Topic: Measurement · forensics - Page: - Markdown: A store's reported cost per acquisition appeared to jump, so the budget was cut. Reported conversions had fallen from 158 to 44 a day while real orders held at 100 to 110 a day. Performance was fine, the tracking was not, and the budget went back. ## Brand search ads do not add traffic. They replace it. - Published: 2026-08-04 - Topic: Paid search · natural experiment - Page: - Markdown: An account suspension gave us a natural experiment across three online stores. Organic click-through collapsed while brand ads ran and recovered above baseline within a week of them stopping — on two of three. The third is why this is a test, not a rule. ## A target CPA does not know what an order is worth - Published: 2026-07-09 - Topic: Unit economics · measurement - Page: - Markdown: We built one profitability engine that counts only delivered orders, net of VAT, down to the individual SKU. When we compared its verdicts with the target-CPA gate we had been running, the verdicts inverted. The formula below is a planning gate, not realised profit. ## An inactive pixel was not a warning. It was an outage. - Published: 2026-06-20 - Topic: Measurement · conversion tracking - Page: - Markdown: On cash-on-delivery stores running a third-party checkout, the advertising platforms were receiving no purchase event at all. The only visible symptom was a pixel marked inactive, and we read that as a warning for a long time before we read it as an outage. What follows is the mechanism, the fix, and the check anyone can run.