I had to step away from Zazzle for over a year and when that was all over, I came back to a massive number of products which had been hidden by the system. This was due to these products not having been clicked on (viewed) by anyone for a long period of time. I wanted to review each product with the idea of perhaps returning it to the market place, but the job seemed overwhelming. I found a method that worked for me and I got my entire backlog of hidden products/products needing optimization cleared out by taking action routinely over a period of just a few weeks.
My main roadblock was a feeling of revulsion when opening the products page and seeing an endless list of products waiting for attention. I felt not only revulsion, but also an intense sense of boredom! Therefore I broke the task up into smaller parts that I felt I could tackle. Here’s how I did it:
I went to the products page in the backend (officially called the store management area) and I searched for something specific. I typed “Christmas” into the search bar, and then clicked the radio button for “optimization needed”. Now I was no longer looking at a daunting list of 523 products. Instead I was seeing a much smaller set of products, maybe only 54. I bookmarked this set, and I named my bookmark “Current Clean-out”. Each time I came into Zazzle over the next week or so, I clicked that bookmark, which brought me directly to the Christmas products needing optimization. I looked at that particular set of products and, one by one, decided if I wanted to take action on the product, such as:
- Upgrade title, description and or keyword tags.
- Give the product a cover photo, or create a better cover photo.
- Delete the product. I nixed anything I deemed to be outdated, such as my shirt for the Omicron variant of Covid. No one ever talks about that these days. I also deleted a fairly large number of products which are no longer a reflection of the best work I can do.
- Delete and remake. I did this in cases where the idea or the design still seemed worthwhile, but had not been done to very high standards.
- Unhide product. Very important! (This can be accomplished either in the Edit Details area or the More Options area.) I have read that if you simply UNHIDE, the unhiding might not take effect unless you also make some other change. Because of this, I always upgraded my tags if no other action seemed appropriate.
Once I was done with the “Christmas list”, I then chose a new search term and made another small manageable set. I tried terms like “blue” and “postcard” and “flowers” and “mug”. Working from that new small set of products needing optimization, I conquered those items over a period of a few days and then made another set and another. Meanwhile, I was able to carry on creating new products, because I was only spending a few minutes a day on the task of optimizing hundreds of products.
Maybe others facing a daunting set of products needing to be optimized will find this helpful.