IT SHOULD BE MY DECISION TO REMOVE AN ITEM NOT ZAZZLE’S. I get messages about having to “optimize” items and suppose I don’t think they need optimizing, I am screwed because Zazzle will take the item down. What gives them the right to do that?
WTH with Zazzle arbitrarily "optimizing" items and then removing them if you don't choose to optimiz
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Hi @pichick712 ,
You can learn more about Marketplace Optimization here.
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I know what it is but you have no right to do it. 99.9% of my items have never sold and so YOU are going to decide to delete them? HOW ABOUT U SPEND THOUSANDS OF HOURS CREATING THEM, MARKETING THEM TO THE BEST OF YOU ABIULITY only to have some stranger take them down!
Zazzle doesn’t delete products that need optimization. They just get hidden from public view, but are still in your back end. You don’t have to optimize them if you don’t think they need it, just make them public again using the drop downs and open the product page to give them a view for good measure to “reset the clock”.
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Of course they have the right. It’s Zazzle’s playground, they just let you play in it.
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Zazzle is free of charge for creators, and that’s everything.
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so that gives Zazzle the right to take down our creations simply because they didn’t get enough views?
do u know how much time that would take? why are they doing it in the first place?
Whoa.. chill pill… they haven’t been deleted, just hidden. You can easily unhide them, and it doesn’t take much time at all… You can view all of your hidden items, do a select all, and do a bulk action to unhide the items. That means you can do up to 204 items at a time.
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I think it would be fairer if zazzle removed them only from the marketplace and not hide them so that the person promoting them doesn’t end up with broken links. You might think so what if it doesn’t sell anyway, but a website with broken links doesn’t leave a good impression. For this reason I now think twice before I decide to promote a Z product on my website, I rather promote my products from another POD and know my links continue to work
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I have over 30K products in my stores and it takes me about 5 minutes to check all my stores and do a bulk action to unhide all the items that have been hidden. (nothing is deleted)
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Yes, because it’s their website.
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I agree - maybe perhaps set them as direct only so links won’t be broken (pinterest comes to mind)
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I don’t mind it, I check the back end quite often and it gives me a chance to update, change or delete things, I sometimes look under ‘Last Viewed Date’ while relaxing with a coffee but if I don’t don’t get round to it it’s just a prompt to check on things.
As it says, it gives tips or reminders to
Improve and / or update titles, tags and descriptions.
Add a cover photo if you want to
Promote products on social media or your own website
Check the quality of the design and determine if it should be deleted or revised
Jan
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It doesn’t take a lot of time to check in on products that need optimization and do a bulk “make public” if you wish. Personally, I see it as a favor. If my design hasn’t been viewed or bought in that long, then I absolutely NEED to change something - titles, tags, descriptions, categories, or remake the design to be more appealing. I have lots of products… if Zazzle didn’t tell me I needed to optimize some, I’d forget all about them. And the thousands of hours would truly be wasted. By hiding them and giving us a chance to improve them (which, lets face it, everything can be improved somehow), it allows us to make our stores and the marketplace better and better.
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Sometimes all that needs changing is the style/color of the product. When something goes out of stock, Zazzle hides it. So of course it doesn’t get any views. In those cases (which happen often enough) the fix is just to choose a different style/color. I had it happen today with a gift box that sank to the end of store pages when I sorted by Last Viewed. It was a Mahogany gift box but that was out of stock (and thus hidden) so I changed it to Golden Oak and that takes care of that.
Zazzle has every right - their websites/their rules… but as frustrating as I know it can be (I have more than a dozen stores and thousands of products), I also know that Zazzle gets more views and is higher ranked than any other POD out there. Their algorithm to hide products without views is inline with search engine algorithms. A website needs to keep a “positive” ratio of fresh / viewed pages and links (and each product listing is unique in this way) to be deemed relevant. If it wasn’t ranked as high when it comes to being relevant in searches, there would be very few creators that made any $ at all.
In regards to your products specifically - I viewed several that are in your Easter store. Every single one has title and description in ALL CAPS with the tags literally being a cut/paste from the description. Clearly you have not read/implemented even the basics of Zazzle’s guidelines for Titles/Descriptions/Tags.
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1, Zazzle has every ‘right’ to delete whatever they want, whether we like it or not is another matter. It’s their business, their rules.
- I would like to CONFIRM optimizing works, even the tiniest of tweaks. I’m selling so many old random designs now. I’d even suggest routinely tweaking old unseen items without the prompts as it does seem effective.
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I was just going to post the exact same thing 
Anyone that has an entire store of products that have no views, no sales, and have been on this site for two years. Maybe it’s time to do something differently?
Ask yourself why you are not getting any views? Does anyone even know your store exists… get a relative or friend to at the very least go on your store page and look at some of your products to give you feedback. It could be very valuable to you AND get products some views from someone who actually may help you with your designs.
That would be my first job one if I were in that situation. I hope that helps someone
Keep your cool. Everything takes time and Rome wasn’t built in one day
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The 15-month “expiration” used to bother me a lot because I was negligent, but now with the notifications we get, it’s been easy to keep up-to-date. When it first showed up, I was all but knocked flat by the number of products in need of renewal, but I went through them a bit at a time and got caught up until it’s now only a few at a time, which means I can also take the time to see what may be causing those products to get left behind. I’ve come to appreciate it, and that definitely includes the notifications.
Side note: Notifications for optimization are almost simultaneous with the products being hidden and so seem superfluous. If the product is hidden, it’s obvious it needs to be optimized.