So I have THOUSANDS of products that ZAZZLE has decided need “optimization”. ZAZZLE has made this decision which has resulted in those THOUSANDS of products NOT EVER SELLING because ZAZZLE has decided to make them hidden. HOW IS THIS HELPING ANYONE? THE CREATOR WON’TMAKE ANY MONEY, ZAZZLE WON’T MAKE ANY MONEY EITHER.
In order to UNDO what ZAZZLE has done, YOU HAVE TO MANUALLY MAKE THE PRODUCT PUBLIC ONE AT A TIME!!! You can’t even do it in BULK. I now have to waste hours and hours UNDOING what ZAZZLE has done and in the mean time NOTHING is getting sold.
We ALL need to raise our voices to make ZAZZLE stop this process that hurts all of us. It should be up to US, the CREATORS, to decide what products WE want to adjust and what products we want to leave. I cannot believe all the things that ZAZZLE is now doing to make it harder for all of us to sell anything. it’s like they WANT to lose creators, business, and their website. THEY ARE SABOTAGING THEMSELVES and hurting us in the process.
We have all spent thousands of hours creating products that we are proud of. What right does ZAZZLE have to decide they are not good enough to be public? Am I the only one here who is outraged??? Do YOU like someone else hiding YOUR products? Are YOU OK with this? I am barely making sales at all and to have them do this is OUTRAGEOUS!
Hi, @pichick712 . There is an option to make all the products public again.
Go to your store >> products
Then, as in the image below, click to show 204 products, select the “optimization needed” in the “product visibility”, then go to Bulk Actions: select all non-discontinued products and Actions: make public.
Well, according to an email I received this morning, it CANNOT be done in bulk. it has to be done one at a time. I emailed support because i was trying to do it in bulk and the number of products was not decreasing by 204 and so I emailed support to find out why it was not happening in real time. their response was that this process has to be done one at a time.
I don’t know… doesn’t it take a while for these numbers to update? I mean, those 24 hours. I wouldn’t mind about it, but I get your frustration.
If it has to be done one at a time for it to be effective, then I agree this should be changed.
The update should be in real time. We should not have to wait 24 or more hours to see the results. We have to wait 24 or more hours for way too many things with Zazzle. Maybe if they stopped messing things up, they could focus on their website being a bit more responsive to the creators.
This does work. I had maybe a dozen products needing optimization and select all –> make public took care of them. Immediately after, I still saw them as Opt needed, but by next day the list was empty and they were all public.
Sometimes customer service reps don’t know the correct answers as they don’t know all the specific ins & outs from the Creators side. This is why these forums are so valuable, and why I am really big about testing things out yourself if you can.
Anyway, probably shouldn’t be saying this, but being able to “Optimize” in bulk probably shouldn’t be an option. The whole point of hiding for Optimization Needed is to get Creators to review their non-performing products and either improve or remove them. Being able to make them all public again without any review or tweaking kind of defeats that goal.
For a product to get hidden for Optimization, it’s gone at least 15 months with no sales and not even a single view. If you have thousands of products hidden for optimization, then they weren’t attracting any attention to begin with so getting auto-hidden isn’t costing you sales. Instead, it’s a polite way of saying one may need to re-think their designs or tags or whatever because they are not meeting with any success. It’s not like they are deleting your designs - they’re just giving a helpful heads-up that hey, you need to take another look at these products you’ve published that aren’t doing well.
I spent hours trying on my stores and nothing happened. the numbers never went down.
per their email this morning - "
I have heard back from our Creator Community and can confirm that at the moment, you will have to manually publish each of your products. "
This is just insanity that we have to do it in the first place. We the creators should decide what products we want to show and which ones we want to replace.
It IS costing sales. I have been doing this for 10 years and only made 3,000.00 so I am certainly not setting the world on fire despite my hardest and best efforts. I NEED EVERY PRODUCT PUBLIC because it MIGHT get sold. I post everywhere and it seems that unless u r doing invitations, and cards, u are not making much $$$ at all. Many times the feedback I get is that the products are just too expensive. I am currently living on social security ONLY and I need every product visible because every sale means A LOT to me. Maybe this is not what u r trying to live on but it is for me. I am in my zazzle for hours every single day trying to create products and make sales. I post everywhere but nothing so I cannot afford to have things hidden for ANY reason unless I CHOOSE TO DO IT.
Computer processing takes time, you know. It takes 24 hours for changes to appear everywhere. The website has thousands of customers every day and from different regions. I know it may feel frustrating sometimes… but we gotta understand it.
But if the product hasn’t even been VIEWED in 15 months, it’s EXTREMELY unlikely that you’ll ever get a sale on it! I agree with ColsCreations. This can be a positive thing, because it’s alerting you to the fact that you have to revisit your designs, titles, and tags, and keep them up to date with what is actually selling.
What I do is periodically check my Optimization Needed, and make hard decisions if it should be kept or deleted. If I have other products with the same design that ARE selling, I know the design is good, so I try to improve the tags, and add a cover photo, then set it back to public. I make sure to actually click on the item to give it a view and reset the 15-month clock. If the design has flaws, I fix them and publish a new product. Some things are out of stock permanently, so I leave those, just in case Zazzle brings them back some time. And others are irrelevant now, like masks. So I only work on things that have a good chance of selling.
It does take a while for the list to reset. But I think if you do it in bulk and don’t actually view each product, they will go right back to being hidden, since they still don’t have views in 15 months or longer.
I know this won’t help with the hidden products, but I took a look at a few of your stores, and you have beautiful designs, but I think you would really benefit from making “Cross-sell” collections, especially for Christmas. What this means is having a bunch of products with the same design in one collection. Zazzle seems to be promoting these the most, and I’ve noticed a lot more sales on my cross-sell collections than the other ones. They’ll tell you what products to add when you make the collections.
Since your designs are good, I think you probably have a title/ tag issue that is causing the lack of views. Unfortunately, I’m not a pro at that myself, so I really can’t give you any good hints, beyond looking at the tags that similar designs have. I do a lot of trial and error.
I spent time creating those products. it should be UP TO ME to decide what I want to do with them. How would you feel i f thousands of your products disappeared?
i think they are spending too much time making things harder for creators. Every other software program I work with has results in real time. Maybe they should work on “optimizing” that.
I see it like this: if a product needs optimization it’s because the chance someone sees it in the marketplace and buys it is very small(*), so they are telling you “Hey, take a look at this and maybe change the title or tags”, they could just still let your product public and tell you nothing, and you would have to figure it out by yourself.
(*) and how do they know that this chance is small? it is related to how the algorithm works to rank your products in the search. Possibly every product has a score, let’s say, that is updated from time to time and this score depends on the number of views it gets, the number of sales, and other factors; the higher the score the better chance your product will be found in the marketplace, the lower the score the least the chance… I’m just saying this because I study Math and, you know, there’s a lot of math, particularly graph theory, involved in these things, it’s not something that has no base.
Look, I’m not a specialist on this subject. After I get my Math graduate degree I will maybe have more time to learn about it and apply it at my own store and increase the sales. But I see you’re spending too much time and having little return, so know this may be good: there’s a principle called “the 80-20 rule” or “Pareto’s Principle”, it basically states that 80% of your income comes from 20% of your products. You can read about it on the internet, study it, and try to apply it to your business. So you don’t have to worry about all of these products being hidden, focus on the 20% of your products that are actually generating your sales.
Again, I’m not a specialist but I intend to study it in the future and apply it to my Zazzle stores.
I wonder if you know that you need to view each product you make to register it (can’t remember the correct word here), kind of making it visible to the market…we were told this ages ago. So each of my products has at least 1 view. I put more work into :
…the product type/desing that sells
…Designs I really love and maybe will transfer to another product/option
…Expanding niche products taht sell consistently.
I also take one day/morning/evening every now and them to review products that haven’t sold or haven’t sold in awhile, or have no recent views, This way I keep on top of hidden products.
I am sorry if you already know of all this, but you’d be surprised to know how much I still dont know after
16 years here. I sold my first item around 6 months after I started. At that time my biggest sellers were postage stamps(now obsolete here), a small price per item, but often bought in bulk…today’s equivalent would be postcards I would think. Often bought in multiples. I am not great wedding designer, but I will still work on these since my taste/art is unique(well all of our art is LOL) but can appeal to someone who wants something different. It will take me AGES to complete a collection on that, so I try not to hurry, and put more thinking time into it when I am riding in a car, or otherwise not actively doing something else. Hope this helps somewhat…
