I still don’t understand how Zazzle configures placement of items in the marketplace. If you look up “birthday cards for African American Women” or “birthday cards for black women”, only 2-3 pages come up. There has to be more. In one of the searches all you see is a man holding up a sign with an age on it…over and over. In the first search there are a bunch of “sweet 16” cards with only the color of the dress different. So many of them. I have birthday cards for African American Women and only one shows up. Does nobody at Zazzle monitor the marketplace so customers have the best shopping experience. Exactly how are items chosen to be in the marketplace? Is quality a factor?
@Jstonge I think it is more how you search. Try looking up “African American birthday cards” instead. This brings up 3,847 results for me. Also, by adding the word woman to the search “African American woman birthday card” I get 522 results.
This issue of near-identical products crowding the marketplace has been discussed several times. That is akin to spamming in my opinion, and that practice should not be allowed. As Best as I can remember, Zazzle has not responded to these complaints, and this practice has been allowed to continue.
Zazzle’s marketplace search isn’t curated or hand-picked by a team monitoring “which products deserve a spot.” It’s driven by matching: the system looks at your product title, tags, description, and category, and ranks results based on how closely those match the shopper’s search terms. There’s no manual gatekeeping step where someone decides quality or approves placement; it’s algorithmic relevance matching, similar to how most marketplace search engines (Etsy, Amazon, etc.) work.
That also explains what you’re seeing: “birthday cards for African American Women” is a fairly narrow, specific phrase. If a product’s title/tags don’t contain those exact words or close variants, the algorithm may not surface it strongly even if the design itself is a great fit. The repeated “sweet 16” or “man holding a sign” results you noticed are likely just products whose titles/tags happen to match something in that search term very precisely and repeatedly - not evidence of curation or favoritism.
If you want your own listings to show up more for searches like this, the most effective lever is usually tightening up titles and tags to include the exact phrases shoppers are likely to search (including natural variants like (as @S_Joy mentioned) “African American,” “Black,” “women’s birthday,” etc.) rather than relying on the design/category alone.
I searched in my way for “birthday+cards+African+American+Women” and get 173 results. But not one sweet sixteen.
We probably need to step back and keep in mind how keyword-based search actually works. The system isn’t semantic; it’s largely literal matching code. When a customer enters a whole sentence, individual words can drown out the core intent.
That’s why classic search syntax still matters:
-
Link essential terms with a plus (
+term) -
Exclude unwanted results with a minus (
-term) -
Lock in exact matches using quotation marks (
"exact term")
If you don’t use operators, the algorithm will just grab whatever matching word it encounters first.
But, there is s sort of problem:
Results for “great dane -dog birthday” leads to 591 results, and there are really Great Dane dogs. But if I check “newest” and 15,816 results - first I see, not relevant at all if I do not check for this option.
Let’s analyze the first product:
Dog Let’s Pawty Birthday Invitation
Dog Let’s Pawty Gender Neutral Birthday Invitation
- this is the full title and description -
Not one Great Dane tag at all.
Excluded “dog”, but this does not work on zazzle. So, the -term is here not working in the same style the internet teaches me. The first 3 pages with results does show me one single Great Dane design. This is not fine at all.
You are right. Adding “woman” reduces it significantly. When I search
”birthday cards for African American women” like a customer might, only 3 pages come up.
You are correct. I have been one of those.
Thank you James. I appreciate your response.