That’s a good example of how optimization works! You refresh the listing, and then it has a better chance in the marketplace so that you actually get sales, instead of those 16k products just stagnating with no views!
It’s a big job now, but unless you listed all those 16k products at once, they were slowly being added to the optimization needed section over many months or years, so you could have worked on them a few at a time and refreshed them so they would have a chance to sell.
Of course, I don’t know your personal situation- perhaps you were very sick or something and had to let your stores go for a few years. If that’s the case, I’m sorry, but unfortunately now you are stuck with a big mess to clean up. Not your fault, not Zazzle’s fault, just an unfortunate “lemon to lemonade” situation.
That’s good to set yourself an hour each day to optimize products. Taking small bites keeps you from getting overwhelmed and burned out. Slowly but surely you’ll get caught up, at least with the most important products that have the best chance of selling.
That’s what happened to me, the hidden products building up because I fell back in September and broke my wrist, negating my ability to work on Zazzle. Now I’m able to use the keyboard again–slowly–so I’m doing just a bit of it each day, first choosing products I think have a chance of selling, and deleting products that have been through this several times already. I’ve also remade a few products that had no text templates. It takes time to do these things, but it’s worth it. I recently sold something I’d renewed several times, and the difference was that I’d added a template the last time I renewed it.
Hidden products can be an eye opener even though we hate dealing with them. If there’s a subset that seems to have something in common that isn’t attracting customers, it’s either time to get rid of them or remake them.
And no, these aren’t our stores. We don’t own them. They’re more like file folders that Zazzle maintains, and though the designs may have been created by us, we’ve entered into an agreement with Zazzle, allowing them to put those designs on their products, to ship them, to deal with customers, to do all the heavy bookkeeping, to maintain the servers where the designs are stored. They and their suppliers have total control over all of it–just as it should be. After all, they’re footing the bill.
I understand that you are sayin but WHY does zazzle have to do this in the first place and require us THE CREATORS to UNDO what they have done just to get our products sold? THEY made all these products hidden and FOR YEARS, I have been begging them to STOP THIS. it does no good to anyone. WE, the creators should have control over our products, NOT zazzle.
WHY DO WE HAVE TO EVEN DO THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE? if Zazzle would just let US manage our stores NO ONE would have to place catch up and UNDO what they have done.
204 is the max amount of products I can make public at a time. I filtered to those that need optimization and then chose 204 and indicated that I wanted them to be public. the number of products that should now be public should have gone down by 204 BUT it does not and no matter how many times I do the same exercise, the number never goes down so I am never sure if it worked. the number should reduce by 204 but it does not. I cannot see any changed except when U go in THE NEXT DAY and do the same steps all over again.
I can understand not liking that so many designs were hidden. Yes let your feelings be known but using caps all over the place tells viewers you are yelling / screaming… instead of communicating in yelling and screaming please try to make your post easy to read out of respect for your fellow designers… it really does makes your post difficult to read and takes away some of the power of your message, IMO.
I have had thousands of designs hidden over time. I take a completely different view of this action. Why are they hidden? Trust me… they didn’t do it just to aggravate you or make you work harder. If the product is not selling and has not sold in a period of 15 months are those designs really helping you? I can tell you from my experience that you are likely better spending your time promoting the designs that are selling and building on the success of those designs by putting that design on other products that might also be appealing to buyers.
Please don’t take my post the wrong way. I’m not here telling you what to do, I’m just trying see if you can put your energy to productive use. Most of the time when I see posts with tons of caps lettering… I ignore them. But I wanted you to know there’s a better way to communicate to your fellow designers and I am truly sorry your designs ended up hidden.
I have spent YEARS trying to get zazzle to stop this and yes, I am yelling at times because it boggles my mind that so many people are ok with zazzle doing whatever they want with CREATORS stores. We the CREATORS spend time, effort, and money creating OUR stores and then zazzle decides what can and cannot be available for sale. I am not taking your post in any way other than how u r posting it. My frustrations is boiling over and YES, there are times I am yelling. it just amazes me that not enough other people are doing the same. Just a bunch of lemmings.
I very seriously ask you not to call me and others who are not following your thoughts “a bunch of lemmings”. This is a way of putting things which I do not like to read and see here at this forum.
An algorithm is simply a set of instructions, in this case it’s if-this-then-do-that. It may be related, but it’s a far cry from AI. If they started kicking people off the platform who painted only cats because the company didn’t like the destroyers of Christmas trees, a whole lot of us would be outraged. But trying to clean the litter pan? It’s a good idea. Annoying, but good.
i’ve been here for years. i have 325,000 products, it was 400k but they don’t remove the discontinued stuff for some reason. after spending countless hours in the past uploading as many products as i could i made a lot of money. but every year they did something to manipulate google adding their own text to my descriptions for a while and now the optimize thing. after they started hiding things because i was past the 100k mark, those hidden things that could have sold at some point and do in my other stores - is hidden. never to be seen from again.
and because they were hidden, when you unhide them. they go right to optimization. why? because no one looked at them? well they couldn’t because it was hidden. its not a polite way of saying anything. its very rude to find out that after spending hours the day before unhiding all my stickers, that this morning i have 128 pages of stickers (at 204 per page), that i have to unhide again because it needs optimizing. and its not like they make it easy to fix things. because the site isn’t laid out that way. i have well over 2000 images, each would have to be adjusted all the time. that’s like having a grocery store and just because they put the cereal box on a hard to reach shelf, i now have to go in there weekly and change the logo on the box.
they are basically erasing the design because its now hidden in the search and worse in my store which makes no sense at all. and google? they stop indexing your store if they have broken links. affiliates, the same thing and i can’t advertise the store if the product is missing. customers can’t have matching items because there are only 3 things left. and if you do nothing - it doesn’t matter if there is a rule for 100,000 designs, i only had 4,000 things left in the search, they just keep chipping away at it. then there is nothing. they are robbing our time with this nonsense. there is nothing to update. statistically not all your images would ever be viewed due to the sheer volume of people that are here.
because they hide the image before 15 months. i had 4 views after i unhid it and they hid it again anyway. i’ve had products hidden after a few days of making something. that 15m rule isn’t followed. i’ve been selling on pod’s for a long time, i know for a fact that it can take up to a year before people see you have the work, that google picks up on it, that you rank high enough to be seen. and for people to think about getting it. they may have viewed a different item, just not the thing that you are looking at. because they count the views on the product not the image. i don’t erase my items. that’s a waste of time and customers do want these things. i made silver seller in 4 years before they started messing with the systems. now i get 2 figures if i’m lucky. if you have a tiny store, its easy to fix this. this is just a huge waste of time now. i thought i would get sales for this holiday and they keep hiding puzzles and ornaments and its really frustrating.
statistically that might be true. but you don’t know what product will do well. i had one single magnet, sell to one person, and i made $1500 on that one single item. its hidden now. i don’t know why. you don’t know what what will sell and when. i have many popular images, they sell on all sorts of stuff, yet they are hidden here. no other pod does this. you won’t know if suddenly mousepads are popular. and should i really heavily promote - postcards and tissue paper just because those no money items are the more popular? no.
statistically it would be IMPOSSIBLE to have all images looked at due the volume of people and returns in the search. and the fact it seems to remove 80% of products per image, despite it being able to sell on other products - it makes no sense for the site to arbitrarily remove items for servicing. no other sites does that.
exactly right. i see my store as a brick and mortar store where i have a business partner that keeps changing the location of the store, moving the doors around, removing all the products and dumping into a hole in the floor. and no matter what i try to fix the store, he goes and undoes it all again. i have even more products than you. before they removed quick create (why did they remove the most useful thing here?) i was making 400 products per image.
all last week i removed all the discontinued stuff (why can’t zazzle remove this? when they can add the label). and unhid everything. today - labels - 15,202 are hidden again. 75 pages of 204 each (i asked for a 1000 each at least that makes sense here). why do i have to waste my time like this? and this is just for labels. all the mens shirts 37 pages. it was zero yesterday. as i’m unhiding things - i’m making sales. yet they hid everything again. on christmas.
all these people cheering for it, must have really small stores. i never liked seeing stores that had 3 products in each section then complained they didn’t make sales. i made a ton of sales when they were visible. its super hard making money here now. i was hoping i could get a little extra cash if i spent the time unhiding things, but, nope. and what happens if i did some how optimize all 200,000 things? 4 months down the road it will just say it again.
zazzle clearly isn’t making money on this. i don’t get why they remove things and never return them. i stopped uploading ever since they removed quick create. and the thought that a customer would know how to transfer a design - doesn’t ever happen.
i can’t fathom how this is best for their business.
if they are basing it on views alone, a person that creates AI can upload it with a bot then view it with a bot so they are always in there. i was making a lot of money every month, a real paycheck. now i make lemonaid stand money if i’m lucky. i think they think they will trick google into thinking there is a lot of new content because everyone is changing everything at once. but in reality google will stop indexing the site. . and having less choices means buyers have less choices and they won’t come back if there are less choices.
if they don’t want stuff clogging up the system, they should have fewer weird products like - poker chips and guitar picks? cookies and cakes? i didn’t look at the new stuff. that clogs the search.
we aren’t guests, we are sellers that makes the site money and without our products - there would be no zazzle. i remember them begging others to come into their store. the guests are the buyers looking at the wares. the rules when i first came here were a lot different. we had to make our own HTML pages, we could use a ton of keywords and in any order, they had a quick create letting you make as many as you wanted in packs of 100. they had a lot more products then. descriptions were keywords. there were affiliates, the list goes on and on. and bit by bit they stripped things out making it harder to sell. then they added this hiding things if you have a 100k for all stores, i have 300k, at one point 400k, they hid a ton. i haven’t uploaded in a year because they removed quick create. they are still hiding things. so no. there is no way they can make money by hiding all the products. i can understand the point in reducing clutter in the search, but why remove it from my store also? that makes no sense. its the holidays, so did they unhide ornaments or puzzles? no, not only did i unhide it - they re-hid it. that’s insane.