If customers can even “see” the product page, (I say this because I am getting dropped back into the design tool straight from the marketplace again) it makes it very important to make sure your collections have a cover photo so that way it populates in the products photos at the top with the button that says “View Collection” on it. When that button is clicked from there it quickly scrolls past everything and lands on your collection below all the cluttered products.
I have had this happen too. Why this is labelled a bug by @James_H seems odd, since if it happens more often, the team should be experiencing the same thing and already on it!!
Elke
@James_H Thanks for your reply. You can explain away the drop in sales as a summer demand issue, but my coaching clients data showed equal if not higher sales during summer months in the past (2025) because we teach creating an evergreen inventory that brings in consistent sales even in the summer months. These clients are seeing a significant decrease. Yes, there can be other explanations, but you have yet to state that the customer sales conversion factor has not gone down during the implementation of this new feature to rule out that the “moments” are a factor.
A/B testing rely totally on what the tests look for. As a scientist, PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, I know that the data is only as good as the parameters.
Dismissing this as summer lag with lower sales is not what I expected as a generic way for you to explain away the issue many are facing.
Can all the sellers that are chiming in here in the chat have products in their store that sold well last year in Q3 but no longer sell equally well in 2026, with some sales dropping almost 50%?
If you can tell us that overall 2026 Q3 Zazzle revenue is equal or up compared to 2025, then this entire thread is for not, and these sellers need to fill the gap in their inventory.
But if the data shows that revenue is down, despite sellers historically selling well and now they are not, then there is still ambiguity on the cause of the revenue drop being experienced by sellers.
Elke
definitely not summer lag… especially when self promotion increases and the quality of design (subjectively) improves.
This has been an issue particularly since site changes in Apr 2025. 2026 particularly has been abysmal
Hi @Elke_Clarke,
Thanks for coming back on this, and for sharing what you’re seeing with your clients. You’re right that the seasonal point doesn’t fit everyone. An evergreen catalogue that held steady last summer and dropped this year is a different situation. I didn’t mean to brush that aside, and I’m sorry it came across that way.
You’re also right that A/B tests are only as good as what they measure. Our tests look at the whole customer journey and the marketplace overall, so they can show whether a feature works for customers broadly. They can’t explain on their own why a particular store or product performed differently from last year. That’s also why a marketplace-wide revenue figure wouldn’t settle this either way: the overall picture can look very different from what a single store is experiencing.
Testing doesn’t stop once a feature launches. As with every new feature, Moments is being monitored now that it’s live, and the team will keep refining it based on how it performs. That includes the feedback raised in this thread, which has been shared with the team.
Thanks again for pushing on this. Discussions like this help shape how features develop.
Best,
James
Regarding sales comparisons for last year and this year, August was the month I experienced a drop. I compared volume for assorted products: Aug 2025 (1,127 pieces) vs. Aug 2026 (578 pieces). On other sites, sales were either stable or increasing.
@James_H Thank you for your response. I look forward to the ultimate success of this initiative and trust the Zazzle team to take actions to continue to modify it for maximum profitability for all parties involved.
@Adi_O I love when people like yourself use data. Data does not lie. Thank you for sharing. Elke
I’ve been concerned about the drop in my earnings too, so I decided to dig into my own sales history rather than assume that Templates or Moments were necessarily the cause.
I compared one of my historically strong, evergreen product categories across 2025 and 2026. Importantly, this particular product type does not have the Moments feature, so it gives me a useful comparison.
I also adjusted the figures to remove differences in royalty rates, so I was comparing underlying sales performance rather than simply the royalty amount I received. The rates were not the same across the two years: in 2025 this category was around 15% for the first few months before increasing to 23.7% (after the April 2025 increase in fees), while in 2026 it was 23.7% early in the year and then 25% from April through July. The decline began in July while the royalty rate was still 25%. I subsequently lowered the rate to 20% in late August and then to 15% in late September as an experiment to see if it improved sales, but the decline continued. Even after normalizing both years to the same royalty rate, H1 2026 was still about 62% above H1 2025.
What I found surprising:
- January–June 2026 earned me about 62% more than the same period in 2025 on a rate-neutral basis.
- Then in July, earnings in that category dropped sharply — about 34% YoY.
- August was down 44%.
- September was down 42% for this category, and 25% for total earnings vs 2025.
- My decline started before the August rollout of Moments/Templates.
I also looked at individual products in this category. A number of listings that had sold well during the first half of 2026 suddenly produced no sales at all during Q3. That makes me wonder whether changes in search visibility, rankings, competition or which products are being surfaced may be playing a role too.
None of this proves that Moments or Templates have had no effect. They may well affect some product types or customer journeys differently. But in my own data, a significant part of the decline is happening in products that aren’t using Moments at all, and the downturn began before templates were introduced.
It might be useful if some of you are willing to look at your own results in a similar way — particularly:
- July–September 2025 vs 2026
- Jan-June 2026 vs Q3 per category or product type to see if any had a dramatic drop
- product/category performance rather than total earnings alone
- number of orders rather than royalties alone
- products that do and don’t use Moments
- whether previously strong products suddenly stopped selling
I know I was surprised by the data so you might be too. If several of us see the same timing or category pattern, that could give us a much clearer idea of what is actually going on.
'Moment’s went into A/B testing starting by June, since there are comments about it in the forum back then. Templates started testing at least by July 3rd based on forum comments. Just figured I’d mention.
I understand that but I don’t think it’s enough to explain such sudden and dramatic drops. Personally, I think there was a change to the search algorithm.
Or a change in the amount of marketing Zazzle makes. Someone mentioned that they noticed a drop in visitors through Google Ads or something along those lines (there’s so many replies on this thread, I couldn’t find the specific member who mentioned this).
@Jen_Mercado I mentioned earlier that my Paid Search traffic has been down by about 50% since around August 15, and my earnings have dropped by about the same amount.
What I also found interesting is that Google announced a change to its automated bidding system around the same time, starting August 17. It affected campaigns using strategies such as Target CPA and Target ROAS, especially when campaigns are limited by budget, and Google itself said that it could cause temporary fluctuations in traffic and performance.
I’m definitely not a Google Ads expert, and of course we have no idea how Zazzle’s campaigns are actually set up, but I do wonder whether something may have changed there in terms of campaign settings or how the advertising traffic is being distributed.
Another possibility is simply a broader change or test in Zazzle’s marketing strategy, and that is probably something we will never officially know 
Has anyone’s zrank gone down recently? Mine has, just wondering if this is affecting people’s zranks.