is this true? re Zazzle hiding us from search

[TRW]

Is it true that if your products are priced above 10% royalty that Zazzle is hiding those listings from marketplace search?
before the latest changes, I was making roughly an even number of non referred, self referred and 3rd party referred sales. SINCE the change, I have made NOTHING other than 3rd party referred sales, almost all earning less than $1 for me since zazzle is giving away my work to someone who simply pasted a link. 

if that is not the reason why no one is finding my designs anymore... I would love to hear some other potential reasons why things changed so dramatically right at the same time!

[PenguinPower]

No, I don't have anything set at royalty of anything below 15% and I can still find my items in a marketplace search.

If there's anything impeding searches right now, I'm going to have to say it's product spammers.. I just searched "bigfoot aprons" and while the first three -four rows or so were bigfoot aprons the rest of the thumbnails on the page were blank black aprons with various titles, mostly about unicorns, apparently showing how mythical they are, because there were none in sight... and assumedly bearing the tag of bigfoot as well... 

[Cat]

Holy Moly. Take a look at this search: Bigfoot Unicorn Aprons | Zazzle

I'm not really sure why anyone would be searching for bigfoot unicorn aprons, but it is disconcerting.

I have to think you're right and that at least some of the technical difficulties that we're all experiencing (verify that you're human, etc) are due to some sort of spammer bot clogging the marketplace with these bogus products.

[VivianD117]

did you report them or should I?

[PenguinPower]

I just reported the 2 stores I saw in the aprons spamming all black items... but I doubt it will hurt if there is more than one person who reports. Not to mention you may find other stores from the same scammer.. I noticed 2, but there's probably more. 
But seriously... why do people do this. I cannot imagine there's any profit in it. No one is going to buy their plain black, mislabeled items.... even if it's mostly automated, it's a waste of time. 

[Cat]

I'm wondering the same thing. It seems more like an attack designed to grind Zazzle to a halt rather than a money-making scheme.

[SJoy]

I am wondering how they are even getting the black blank items to surface so high in search results when I try to tag to the best of the design and can barely get views on some things. Geesh 😞

[Cat]

Good question! AI maybe? Clearly they've figured out some way to game the system and trick the algorithm.

[KeegansCreation]

Now that you put it like that, this does look like a DDOS attack using black aprons.

[jophb]

Sheesh that 'Nurse' person truly just spams black designs with different titles and tags. Yikes.

[Cat]

Pretty sure it's a bot.

[TRW]

and you are searching logged out and incognito? 

[PenguinPower]

Yes

[TRW]

tbh  I have asked Zazzle multiple times to please remove the spam product, and low quality content etc etc... they keep saying everyone has the right to sell here... except the people LOSING are the ones following the rules! 

@Cat I assume all glitches are because zazzle is messing around changing code to make updates, often unnecessary ones