I understand your frustration, but Zazzle is a business. They are doing what they think is best for their business and keep their site running smoothly. If a product hasn’t been viewed for more than a year, the chance of it selling is very low because it’s most likely the title, tags, and description are not SEO optimized. You alone have thousands of products not getting views, now times that by 900,000+ (source: Zazzle About page) designers, that’s a lot of products that aren’t getting views clogging up their system. Having all these products up require sever space and cost Zazzle money, so they want people to “optimized” these products to increase their chances of selling. We have to remember that, we are “guests” coming into Zazzle’s home. They have rules, and we agreed to their rules when we come into their house. Hiding products when they haven’t been viewed for more than a year is very reasonable, and it’s not a rule they just made up. It’s programed into their system and many designers here know about this.
I feel that I want to control MY creations and don’t feel zazzle has the right to tell ME, what can be public and what needs to be hidden. I mean I CREATED these products and I SHOULD BE THE ONE TO CONTROL WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS NOT SEEN.
I can see where you are coming from, I feel the same when it comes to my creative time being eroded(owing to having to create cover photos etc. For now you cannot change the way zazz works. So, whenever you have spare time, go in and check for hidden items, then once they are cleared, keep ahead of the items that have not been viewed in 15 mths,14mths,etc till you are viewing them as they reach 12 no views. BTW did you know that just opening each item in a new tab (thereby effectively viewing the, will reset the views. I do this with products that have been created the last year or so, so I know the tags are ok. This then unhides them. Then just close each tab. Once you are cuaght up it is much easier since you won’t have as many items to update and review.
Yes, it’s your creations, but your creations are being hosted on their servers, using their server space and causing them money, so they do have the right to decide what can or cannot be seen on their site. The only thing we own is our designs, not the products. The products belong to Zazzle.
Did the thousands of hidden products got hidden all at once, or did you not look at your stores for a long time, and therefore, just notice it now? Personally, I like to look at my stores on a regular basis because I like to see what sells and what never even gets looked at. Sometimes when I look at a product I designed a while back I think, “what the heck was I thinking. No wonder it didn’t sell.” At the beginning I also thought the more the merrier and put my designs on as many products as possible which also doesn’t always work. Therefore, I often check the “most viewed to least viewed” and either click on the least viewed, so that they don’t get hidden or delete the ones I decided I no longer like. Zazzle is in the business to make money and since we don’t pay to have our product on their site, they have the right to run their business as they like. There’s nothing else to it.
@Cat It USED to go right back to hidden in most cases. Sometimes a few of the products would stay public. I haven’t tried it in a long time, so I don’t know if they changed that or not. I thought there was some discussion about it in the forums, where people were wondering why they set it to public and it went right back to hidden, but that might have been the old forums.
Zazzle is not denying you possible sales, when nobody is even viewing your products to buy them! They are actually helping you by showing you which products are not being viewed, so that you can optimize them and hopefully get sales! Even if Zazzle didn’t hide them, they basically wouldn’t show up in the marketplace anyway because they’d be on page 100 or something, due to not getting any views. Customers aren’t going to scroll through that many pages!
Don’t look at the total number all at once. Take a few each day- evaluate if they are really worth the effort, and if they are, fix up the titles and tags, and change to public. Just work on it a few minutes each day, and pretty soon you’ll have them all done, and hopefully get a lot more sales!
@Wildart Actually, just viewing them won’t unhide them. You have to either manually go into edit Details and change the view to Public, or do it in batches in the back end after viewing each one.
@Lais That’s a change, then, because it used to be they’d go right back to hidden if they weren’t actually viewed. On the other hand, I have a bunch of products that I viewed/ optimized, and set back to public, but the “Last Viewed Date” didn’t change!
@ColsCreations did confirm that you can do it in bulk without actually viewing each product. So that’s good to know.
@pichick712 I try to keep on top of things so that I don’t end up with thousands of products that need optimization! 15 months is a long window that they give us. And frankly, if the products aren’t selling or even getting views, it’s no big loss to me if they are hidden.
Unlike most other sites, Zazzle doesn’t charge us for our listings, and their limit of 100k is very high. Meanwhile, they are spending massive amounts of money to host all our listings indefinitely! Naturally, they want only the products that have the best chance of selling, to make it worth their while to host all of our products, so it’s not unreasonable for them to hide the ones that are dead in the water anyway.
I just got an email from Spoonflower that they will start hiding designs that don’t have SALES in 2 years. Because they are trying to keep the marketplace fresh and clean for their customers. At least Zazzle doesn’t hide products that have at least one sale in it’s whole history, even if it hasn’t been viewed since for 10 years.
I tried that once and the products went back to being hidden the next day. I think you have to do some actual tweaking in order for the product to remain public
that is a lot! 
My best store (the oldest one- the second one only been going a little while) doesn’t even have 1,000 products (close to it tho), It sure is tedious I agree, but as suggested further down you can bulk unhide. Thank goodness…see I am still learning after all this time.
BTW if you take my store status from beginning of this year, before I added a whole lot more, most items are sellers, so I guess all that tedious effort every month or so is worth it in the long run. I also deleted many products a couple years ago when the tags would have been identical, and those were not viewed or sold. Tags have a lot to do with this.
Why are people defending them? they are making off of us. it’s in their best interest to keep our products that WE created public in case something does sell. pretty soon they may just make that decision. THIS HURTS US ALL. what is wrong with people that don’t see this? SMH
I received a message that said it cannot be done in bulk. now either the person WORKING AT ZAZZLE has no clue or that is how it is.
You can know ahead of time. We’ve been told that products get hidden if they go a certain length of time without being viewed. You can sort the products in your stores in order of last viewed date, then go to the last page. These are the products that have been the longest without a view, so are the ones that will be hidden next - unless somebody views them.
My point is that WE should be able to control the narrative on OUR stores. WE ARE THE CREATORS and it boggles my mind that everyone is OK with SOMEONE ELSE dictating what is visible and what is not. WHY SHOULD WE HAVE TO REACT TO THEIR ACTIONS WHEN WE ARE THE CREATORS OF THESE PRODUCTS! What is wrong with everyone?
This is me speculating, okay? I believe that when products are hidden they won’t be sorted anymore to appear in the search results, this means that the software that is always running to organize them in the marketplace will no longer have to consider them, and therefore not spend that much time.
To illustrate that, imagine an array where each entry has a number and you have to organize these entries from the highest number to the least number. There are different ways to do so, let’s say you already programmed your software to do it the most efficient way (the least time-consuming), still, there is a big difference between having 1,000 entries and having 1,000,000 entries to organize, right? Now imagine your program doesn’t have to run just once in a while, but all the time because these entries’ values keep changing. It costs a lot.
When I get those “optimization needed” messages I quickly decide whether I think the design is okay and then I do a bit of marketing. We have to realize that we have to do the marketing - write blogposts, tweet items, create mockups or such. I focus on the designs I really like and then I promote those. I’ve got a lot of designs I am not very proud of, so I simply let them be hidden. But I also got some I am proud of, and so I try to market them as best as I can. Our shops are not our shops in the real sense of the word - we have space on Zazzle for our listings without having to pay for it. So Zazzle is interested to keep the content fresh. Just my 2 cents.
I am very grateful to Zazzle showing me the products that are not working and telling me that it would be good to change it a bit or make better tags and titles. Because of this I made better products and deleted some old and very bad ones. I never get a lot of hidden ones as I check my store daily and take care of the hidden ones needing optimization right away.
why not let THEM create the products for you while you are at it?