I just read the announcement where Zazzle says they will be prioritizing products with cover photos. If so, then doing a search by “popular” would not be accurate, it would be arbitrary and misleading. I used to have several beach and tropical invitations that would be on the first and second pages of results because they have sold well. Now I have to dig a few pages in to find them (and they have cover photos!). If you do a search for “tropical wedding invitations” or “beach wedding invitations” and look at the results that show up on the first page, about half of them have zero to do with “beach” or “tropical”…
The cover photos are extremely time consuming. If a person wants to do them on items of their choosing, and has time for it, great. I try to do as many as possible, but if you are doing a collection that has 20 - 30 items in it, there is no way I have time to do cover photos for every single product, and some don’t need it. Some look good as they are with the focus on the product and artwork.
There is cost and time involved - is there an increased cut for the designers who are now functioning as a free art department? Yes in some cases, it may generate more sales - and yes the designer would profit from sales - but if the designer is the one incurring the fees (canva pro for example, or some are purchasing product mockups) and the designer is the one taking the time to make these cover photos - which takes time away from making OTHER stuff - then a bigger chunk of the profit should go to the designer.
Your points about cover photo creation are excellent and well thought out. Extremely time consuming, I agree. Misleading in search, probably. Functioning as a free art dept for Z, yep. Having to purchase product mockups, extra cost for creators, doubtful that it would be recouped in sales of the product. Being reimbursed by Z for creating the mockups, doubtful at best.
I personally think having the dissonance of these “cover photos” will make the site look haphazard, as a customer I want to see the product, not other items around it so that I have to discern what the product actually is. (Less is more)
Having thousands of products, and having Zazzle lean toward creators doing cover photos, would drain my energy even more, taking away from whatever the time invested for the profit I would hope to make on the product.
From a business standpoint (shop/business),personally it does not compute, doing extra/cover photos, in addition to keeping up with optimization, hidden products, new products, discontinued products,affiliate percentage taken out, Z affiliate links in their bulk customer emails,changing the volume bonus, reporting bugs, glitches, server errors, customer requests and complaints in chat, copyright infringement, and spam in the forums..The royalty we make does not begin to cover the time invested. So, investing and diverting my time for cover photos does not make sense financially, even if Z says they have the stats showing that it has great results (for them).
I am strongly expressing the hope that Z would concentrate on fixing the numerous existing problems, and put the brakes on adding more complications for the time being.
The shops who choose to put the effort in, you may or may not see results and may or may not be promoted by Z for doing them. All I can say is time is money, and time is an investment.
Other shops hold various points of view, I respect that, really don’t want to start a debate about cover photos. Do them, or don’t. I invest my time in what works for me, over many decades in business.
I am only expressing my own business viewpoint,just a mite frustrated.
Thanks,@Klstock, for starting this thread. Gave me the opportunity to agree with you and to express my thoughts.
Most of my sales are from 3rd party referrals (most of which I assume from Zazzle links) and have dropped dramatically since the end of 2022, down from previous years in January. The only sales I made this January came through my own promoter links, and I wonder if Zazzle prioritizing items with designer made cover photos is part of the reason. I don’t have the time or money to spend on mockup templates to be Zazzle’s “free art department”. Very disappointed here.
I actually love cover photos. I have seen a huge increase in sales and activity in my store since I have started using them. I had virtually no sales for the first 8 months of 2022 and then in November and December I had my best months ever on Zazzle with a slow trickle of an upturn starting over the summer months when I started using cover photos here and there. And it was the items with covers that were getting the sales for the most part. January has been better than average for me so I am happy with my progress.
I have a very niche store, so being able to showcase my art in a more relatable way through cover photos has allowed me to broaden that niche base I believe.
The investment in mockups for them, I am considering as a promotional investment as well since I can share much better images on social media and Pinterest. I have not invested a huge amount in them though because I am still a very small seller and just work hard to stretch the ones I have in different ways.
That being said, I totally agree they are very time consuming and that there is no way to get them on all products. The products that you mention that already have good insitus are not the ones I believe many people will be making cover photos for, so I don’t think there is much danger of getting pushed down in search results for those items. The more competitive items with cover photos will be things like stationery and posters and such that are basically indistinguishable rectangles in the marketplace. Also, I try to focus on the products that I think have the least chance of getting discontinued.
I think most big retailer websites have a huge amount of varying images for products so I don’t think they make the marketplace look cluttered or bad at all. All just my opinion on how it looks and my experience with using them so far.
My plan is to do covers for those products that don’t look good with Zazzle’s in situ images, which happens to be a lot of them, so I’m picking only those products I think could use a little love. I’ve begun spending more time designing my own pins for Pinterest because it’s easier and because the return might be greater.
I wonder, did Zazzle calculate how much time it might take a designer to create, say, ten thousand cover photos? I did. It could take a year of doing nothing but that for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Yup. Same here. Or when I want to show front and back on the same pic. There are products with truly lovely Z mockups already available, no sense to change them with your own. Other Z mockups look nice but need some slight enhancement, such as more contrast. I know it is not encouraged to use Z mockups as your custom ones but I interpret this as using them 1:1, and as I got told via email at the start of this feature, it is allowed to use them or parts of them to make your own.
Fully agree. IMO, the results are more than worth the time and effort needed. I have an artistic approach, though, and I cover the pet/animal lover niche, which literally screams for custom mockups. I can understand that this may not suit the ones that tend to focus more on quantity and large shops. Matter of preferences.
IMHO, cover photos should not influence search results and marketplace rankings. Although, it has to be said that focusing only on sales isn’t 100% fair, either, cuz new designers will have a hard time getting visibility. A mix of successful and random designs (and designers) would be the fairest bet. Even if this may lead to having some less appealing results on front pages. My two cents.
My zrank did go up one once my sales started increasing, but not just for adding cover photos. I know if I can’t maintain the sales as I add products, I will not maintain the zrank. You only need a 4 to be in marketplace searches.
(this wasn’t meant to be just a direct reply to you Fiorenzo. I meant it as a general reply- hit the wrong reply button!)
As far as the cover photos getting bumped up in the marketplace, I feel like this is the compensation for the hard work, monetary investment, and time it takes. It may not seem like enough compensation to some, but for me, as a small seller, the increase in exposure is valuable. I know this is a biased opinion based off the fact that I am a smaller store. My opinion may change over time, but for now I like it.
I’ve been working on my covers for months and it really works. Many items sell out within a few days of posting the cover. As a rule I am placing on the products that are sold every day. If you don’t have it and it has just been sold, I create the cover and in a few days it is very possible that it will be sold again. My Bestsellers have a cover photo and new products too. It’s laborious and tedious, but it makes my products stand out significantly. I can also take advantage of them to create reels that I publish on my social networks and that make the product stand out. I can even post the reels here. I agree with many of the things you say against, but it works for me and I will continue putting covers. January has been my best month on Z after 5 years and I have been very pleased to see it finally starting to work.
I had a pair of sunglasses that sold (sunglasses don’t sell particularly often for me). I was excited so I went to the MP to check where they were and they were way back on the 7th page (they must have been found in search). Nevertheless I gave them a cover photo as though they were sitting on the beach. This took forever because I added shadows. Adding shadows takes forever. When I checked a few days later they were still on the 7th page and I soured on adding cover photos.
Yesterday, in the wake of this announcement, I checked where they were. Now they have popped up to the first page. So I think they really are prioritizing cover page products. Cover page+already sold is probably the winning combo so I am concentrating on adding cover photos to things that sold but only a couple times(things that sell frequently can probably stay high ranked on their own without a cover photo).
One thing I did yesterday which I wish I had done all along, was make my isolation (done via masking) of the product into a Photoshop smart object so I could just slot in others of the same product and slot in a fresh background on the layer below. That makes this process go slightly faster although it is still slow.
Unfortunately there are some things where buying a mockup is necessary unless you are _really _good with the warp tool (as those who make mockups for sale must be). I have not found a convincing way to bend Zazzle’s flatlay duvet cover over a photo of a bed so I just went ahead and bought from a person on Creative market who could.
Covers are likely to work better for some of us than for others. Those who focus on a variety of small niches won’t be featured regardless of covers because they’re too small an area for Zazzle to consider featuring them. One of my little arenas is music theory, so it’s exclusively musicians who buy my products. Another is artisans, people who have small shops where they create specialties. It wouldn’t be profitable for Zazzle to feature them.
Zazzle focuses more on stationery than anything else because it’s where they excel. Even so, though one might think business cards would be a good bet, they aren’t unless they’re either generic or for businesses that aren’t truly unique like dentists or beauty salons. Those who focus on specialties rely on customers running searches, not on the curated listings.
We all want to sell and to sell more, but no cover image will get my bladesmith business card up front even if it does happen to sell relatively well. It just isn’t, to coin a phrase, in the cards. (And just try to find a suitable mockup out there for the person who forges steel. )
I appreciate hearing everyone’s opinion on this. And I do understand that sales can often improve with a mockup cover photo which is really great. But I would like to add that good design is good design, even without a mockup cover photo. And I hope that Zazzle will recognize that and still put those products in a good marketing position in amongst the cover photo products.
I started a reply over here but decided it was better suited here …
I think they’re referring to their home page and the landing pages for categories being where the favoritism will occur, which does sound rather punitive, but we need to wait and watch to see how it all falls out.
It’s already fallen out.
I was doing a lot of browsing last night and products with cover photos are definitely being favored. On the homepage, as the category “icons”, as the images for the suggested tags (the ones that used to be blue text boxes) … I did a lot of navigating using Zazzle’s sidebar menu (instead of searching for specific terms) and the most of the time, the first several pages of products shown by default all have cover photos. If you’re trying to break into the wedding invite market, good luck. Of the first three pages (180 products), not only are they all cover-photo products, 78% (140) are flagged as Editors Picks and the rest are either flagged as Real Foil or Downloadable or some combination of all of the above. One category that notably had very few cover-photos was Leggings. So if one is rushing to do cover photos, that might be a product category to start with, to get a leg up on the competition.
I am of the same mindset as @TRW in that I really dislike this whole independent cover photo approach. Some of them are really well-done so this is not an affront to those making them, it’s just as TRW said, it makes the MP look like an unprofessional hodge podge to me. And it’s visual sensory overload. There’s just so much going on. Even if you drill down to something specific like say Home Decor - Pillows - Square - Zippered … instead of getting 60 pillows that are obviously the same product except for the printed design on them you get 60 scenes to process. It makes my brain hurt and makes me feel like I am on Etsy or eBay where everything isn’t coming from the same legit company/manufacturer.
And then there’s the covers that are confusing. Like wedding invites that show more than one piece of stationery so you think it’s a suite but when you click it it’s just one thing. Or ones for tissue paper that make it look like a stiff hard card or sign when that’s not how tissue paper is in real life unless you’ve laminated it. You wouldn’t know from the pic alone it’s tissue paper. And then there’s the fact that the point of cover photos is to show things in-situ thus the product/design you’re trying to market becomes a smaller part of the overall image since you have to fit it into a scene and that seems backwards to me. If I need to fit my product pic into a 300x300 square I’d want to use most of that to show my product, not make my product smaller just so I can also show a chair or a vase or room background or whatever.
Numerous designers have reported their sales increasing noticably after adding cover photos but I am of the mind that this is because Zazzle is making things with covers more visible than those without, not because the cover itself is influencing shoppers to hit the buy button. It does seem Zazzle has gone all-in on pushing cover images so I’m sure they did lots of testing & analyizing of customer browsing habits & preferences, but I’m firmly in the category of not liking them. If Creators could add optional covers to be viewed along with the previews Z provides but at the end of the previews, not as the default view for the MP, then I’d be on board with it. Then you could still provide an idea of how your design would look in real life, but without the MP looking like such a mess. .
This: “…And it’s visual sensory overload. There’s just so much going on. Even if you drill down to something specific like say Home Decor - Pillows - Square - Zippered … instead of getting 60 pillows that are obviously the same product except for the printed design on them you get 60 scenes to process. It makes my brain hurt…”
I LOVE the possibility of making my own covers, but I absolutely came to the same conclusions and will focus on highlighting the design & product and adding additional useful info (e.g. if it’s a specific size, a photo template, etc) and views (e.g. the backside) rather than providing insitu scenes. While lovely insitu-covers look great on an ad or page/collection banner, if you have let’s say 2 pages full of pillows, I personally prefer to see the different designs (front and back) at a glance in a consistent look rather than having to spot them in dozens of different setups of made-up scenes. I see it well on the Christmas cards I complemented with Christmas-ish covers, they look lovely when seen alone, but when you browse the collection, the brain simply gets overwhelmed. On the marketplace, however, it looks fine again, and it will help to stand out against the competition when you don’t have your own unique style/designs.
Yes, I think your combination is a good one. Side note – some of the mockups that are “smart” mockups do not work on Photoshop elements – which is too bad.
@ColsCreations , I’ve been trying really hard to not think about all the cons you mentioned, but they continue marching through my mind, with the ultimate question being: Will those willing to create thousands upon thousands of mock-ups end up swamping a huge number of designers to the point where those designers abandon ship?
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