There seems to be a constant stream of issues with the collections tool, but I had not seen anyone lately post about this particular issue so I’ll add it to the pile, I suppose.
Today the collections tool decided it does not want to sort the products in my Christmas card collection how I want them sorted. I go through and manually sort everything how I like it, save it, and then it rearranges my products into a nonsensical order again.
Also I noticed many of my products (wedding invitations) when viewed on the marketplace search, are showing the collection suite photo as the main photo instead of the product photo, so it’s displaying a whole suite of products as the main image instead of the particular invitation/product (which Zazzle advises us not to do because it is confusing to customers). I made sure I have the “primary” photo on each product set to my mocked up image for that product but it still displays the collection suite photo as the primary on the marketplace. This error is also not consistent, as sometimes it will display the suite collection photo and sometimes it displays the correct one, even on the same product.
If the solution is once again to just refrain from doing anything with collections until the Zazzle tech team fixes all the errors, then I guess I just won’t post any new errors until team Zazzle can confidently declare it to be a functioning program.
For the collection suite photo that might be a setting you have checked. In the collection backend go to the “Zazzle Marketplace” in the upper right. In there scroll down to “Select 10 Representative Products for Search.” If you have any products checked those will show your collection photo instead of the product photo for your product.
I think you solved the collection suite photo issue - I will know for sure when it updates the changes, but that would make sense. Thank you, I had not seen that before.
Any idea what the benefit of that feature would be? To my understanding the collection images are typically ones that would showcase multiple products within that collection (suites), and Zazzle guidelines advise not to use such images for the cover photo of individual products which I agree would be confusing, so this feature seems counterintuitive to that, but maybe I’m missing something.
Thank you for posting this. I had not seen it (I clearly can’t keep up with all that is going on)
I took a look at one of my event collections that have all the mandatory slots filled (sigh) and in the Zazzle marketplace section it says “Coming soon” … I think I’ll just stay clear of my wedding store, it has no visitors any more anyway since I added all these extra required products …
Just updating, unfortunately both errors I mentioned are still happening.
Collection items are still sorting randomly.
Collection suite photos are still showing up instead of my product photos for some of the products (and not consistently) on marketplace - even after I changed the option for the “10 items” to use the collection cover photo instead of the product one - there are no products selected for that feature. The products all have their own “primary” cover photo also and I think everything is correct on the back end - so this seems to be an error/glitch, not just a settings issue.
I have no idea, I hadn’t read the guidelines to not use images with multiple products for cover photos. I used this feature in one collection, I chose the 4 products that I have featured on the main picture. IDK if that is a good strategy or not. I just happened to notice that’s how it worked the other day when I did searches to see how that collection’s products were placing. I guess not surprising that it’s getting no views or sales since my products don’t have any editor picks and place at the end of searches. And my own sharing doesn’t seem to help either.
You’re lucky you can do anything with your collections. Myself and many others are having issues with even being able to SEE our collections. Specifically, when listing new products and trying to add to a collection we are getting a “Create Your First Collection” button appearing!