I had a cancellation on Sunday with a reorder today. Another cancellation this morning and a reorder seven hours later.
Using my common sense, this is only a guess, but I think that customers are perplexed having too many other options when shopping and choosing a product-design they want.
My only other cancellations this year was March 5, so this has raised a red flag for me.
Question. Please let me know if you experience this or similar. Thanks!
Molly, I think you’re probably right especially with the way our landing pages are set up now. When a customer clicks on our design and the first thing they see above it is a row of other designers’ products, it creates confusion before they even get to the item they intended to buy. Then, when they scroll past our design, they’re encouraged again to “swap” for another designer’s product.
That kind of layout can easily make a customer second‑guess their choice. It’s not that they don’t like the design it’s that the page is giving them too many alternatives at the exact moment they’re trying to make a decision.
They’re overwhelmed by options and the page layout isn’t helping them stay confident in the design they originally chose. Your experience definitely raises a red flag(in my opinion)
My mother thought she was buying one of my designs, but nope, she didn’t—for the same reason. We both were very disappointed.
The same thing occurred with my brother, I sent him a direct link and he text me with an image of a another designers product that had loaded on my landing page and asked me is this your product, I said no .. got him back to my product and he asked me why Zazzle does that… its a good question. But had he not text me I never would have gotten the sale.
I had something that happened a while ago, where the customer kept trying to upload or add images that were copyright. It kept getting flagged and cancelled, the customer attempted about 3 or 4 different times. So, I wrote to customer service about it, thinking it was suspicious, and they told me that was what was happening and not to worry about it.
I’m not exactly a top seller here, so I can’t say that I have enough data to draw firm conclusions. But from what I can see in my own shop, I don’t think that is really the main reason.
One factor does seem to be the price, though, almost always. Customers also seem to look for discount codes after they have already placed an order. And unfortunately, every search algorithm is a little stupid. If you have just placed an order and then browse somewhere else and suddenly get a Zazzle ad offering a coupon, wouldn’t you cancel the original order too, if you had the option?
In my shop, I’ve mostly seen large orders being cancelled and then placed again. I have a feeling that sometimes customers enter names incorrectly, because it is quite noticeable that these were always custom products. Or perhaps the next order simply comes with a new discount code.
I can also see from the most recently viewed products in my shop that large orders were usually preceded by several visits over a number of days. So I don’t think Zazzle is really an “impulse” shop at all. People seem to make considered purchases here: they search first, save the things they like, then personalize them and add images, and only then place the order.
For a while, I kept looking at what I could learn from cancelled orders. The prices were always different, or my commission went down. That suggests to me that they had found some kind of coupon or discount.
So I think cookies are probably more of a problem than the templates.