Marketplace Products

[Es]

There really should be a way designers can apply to have their products featured in the marketplace. Some of my okay designs which are older appear in the mp whereas my really awesome new designs are nowhere to be found. If we could apply for 2-3 products at a time I'm sure the mp would be an even more stellar place than it is.

[ColsCreations]

We all "apply" by putting good designs on appropriate products and doing our best with writing the meta info on publishing. I'm sure we all think whatever design we just created is really awesome - and there's a good chance they are better than older ones as we learn and refine with time - but there should absolutely not be a system for people to skip to the front of the line based on appealing to whoever would get tasked with reviewing the "applications" and making arbitrary decisions about the design.

When you say your newest products are nowhere to be found - there are reports all over the forums of indexing being quite behind. I looked at the "latest products created" section of your store and searching by exact product title, can find things in the MP up until ones created on the 16th. Those aren't showing yet which means "indexing" is about a week behind. But we're all in the same boat there. Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but I am vehemently against applying to be indexed faster than others or to be "featured".

[Connie]

I wholeheartedly agree!

[Es]

Well I think it's kind of obvious that the way the marketplace is now does arbitrarily feature designs -- sometimes ones that aren't even relevant to the search terms. Zazzle has it listed as "popular" designs but no one seems to know what popular really means. Not only that, of course they are popular if they are on the first page - their placement makes it popularI just think the mp is is only like 15 pages for each search but it's pretty stagnant with a handful of creators being showcased. There should be a system where designs are rotated in and out and I think us designers know what our best work is and it deserves to have a chance.

[Jadendreamer13]

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I’m searching for a product for online, I only view items appearing on the first 5 pages. After that, I refine my search terms and try again. Zazzle isn’t giving any one artist preferential placement. They are featuring the best-selling products associated with the search terms entered. So that says to me that refining SEO and marketing your own products are just as important as creating a good design.

[ColsCreations]

Oh, I agree with everything you just said. Except where it leads in to applying to be featured. That's just a breath away from a pay-to-play system.

[LMGildersleeve]

@EsI agree the Marketplace first several pages in some search terms are extremely stagnant. You see many of the same creators names on those search terms and it feels as though the system is rigged in their favor.

However having said that, I don't think Zazzle would spend the time (and money) viewing our submissions for one reason...money.

The MP does have the "newest" view to show customers fresh designs in those stagnant search terms.

I like how you're trying to think outside the box though. 😊

[Cat]

@ColsCreations said: We all "apply" by putting good designs on appropriate products and doing our best with writing the meta info on publishing. ... I couldn't agree more. I honestly think that Zazzle is remarkably transparent in terms of how their algorithm works - which is pretty unique in terms of online marketplaces.

I also think that we have to consider the possibility that Zazzle knows things that we don't. They have access to aggregate search info, and they know what sells and what doesn't. I'm sure we're all better designers than we used to be, but I don't think we're necessarily the best judges of our own work.... AND I also think that our designs are only as good as what the customers are looking to buy.

Here's a little story to illustrate my point. Back when I first started designing here, Zazzle had a Christmas contest. When they announced the winners, I was taken aback. Many of the winners were designed in a style that... well, let's just say they were a style that I did not personally care for. On a lark, I decided to take that style to an extreme and published a few designs that I thought were beyond ugly, and frankly just stupid. My intent was just to have a little laugh and blow off some steam. I figured I'd leave them up through the holiday season and then delete them, because I was CONVINCED the only thing customers would do when they saw them was to laugh at how bad they were. Imagine my surprise when they started selling! Fast forward to now and those are still some of my best selling Christmas designs... and no, they never got featured or anything. I even received a chat message from a customer who just wanted to tell me how impressed she was with the design!

I have lots of similar stories - usually from when a customer requests something in a color that makes my stomach turn, or a style that I just hate... but my rule of thumb is that if they wanted it, somebody else probably does too, and a lot of those designs have become best sellers for me.

Anyhow, I think the moral of the story for me was that I needed to get out of my own way and trust Zazzle's process. I know it's a hard pill to swallow, but their job is not to level the playing field or give all of us a shot - it's to make Zazzle as successful as it can be. I'm sure providing incentives for us is part of their equation, but ultimately, their job is to increase sales - and I think it's up to us to follow their lead in terms of what works, not the other way around.

Sorry for the looooong comment, but that's my 2 cents.

[Barbara]

@Cat 

The tale of your deliberately awful Christmas designs underscores something I wrote about elsewhere on the forum: My mother owned a shoe store, which did sort of okay but not as okay as she would have liked. One day she was talking with a supplier, and he suggested she try buying 50% what she loved and 50% what she thought was atrocious because her own sensibilities weren't necessarily the rule. She decided to give it a try, and her sales shot way up. She and I were stunned by what we thought of as people's extremely poor taste.

We can all see Zazzle's personal taste in how they design their home page, and those of us who've been here a fairly long time have poked at them for almost consistently choosing the same colors. But do those colors really count? No. What counts is promoting those items that sell. Period. If they were tasked with reviewing designs we submit, whose taste would they use in the decisions? Their own, which would be just as flawed as our own. Furthermore, I doubt they even have the time to review submissions.

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[Cat]

Bwahahaha! I LOVE the shoe store story! I think there's some quote by PT Barnum that goes something like: Nobody ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American public!

[Barbara]

We should take Barnum's assessment to heart!

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[Connie]

Oh Cat, I love that quote! It's SO spot on!

[Es]

Are best selling products really featured first? I don't think so. Sometimes I'll look in a popular category and there a res substandard designs listed in the first few slots and the people selling are pros so they're obviously not earning that much money from their featured products.

I know serious designers try to put their best foot forward always but there should be some sort of system for making sure the mp features awesome designs and substandard design (like for example I saw a neck tie featured in the mp, one sided, with.a small flash of lightening which wasn't sized right and cut off on the neck tie) are flagged and removed

[Barbara]

My sense of it is that there's some sort of combination of sales and views that the algorithm uses. For instance, I have a product whose design got picked up by search engines for images/shopping, and it ranks very high in the marketplace in that design category. However, it's far from being a top seller.

Since actual humans can't possibly pick and choose what's in the mp and what isn't amongst the bazillion designs, it stands to reason that they also can't go through all the designs and choose what's good or bad, getting rid of the latter. Just a single day of trying to do this might make them take a second look at their life choices.

The only way it might be done is for every single design and product to go under review, requiring a large squad of people involved in the process. And would they be able to ignore their personal likes and dislikes? Doubtful.

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[Cat]

Zazzle's also told us that things like adding media (covers, videos, etc.) boosts a product in the marketplace. But they clearly change the algorithm from time to time - as evidenced by the wailing and gnashing of teeth on the forum every time they make a change and a bunch of products that had previously enjoyed top placement fall off the radar!

[Es]

No one knows what items are most popular. When I search the marketplace I find some items I made and they are not the ones under the same search terms that either have the most sales or the most views. Zazzle has yet to announce what "popular" actually means.

[Barbara]

I just tested a specific series of my clocks that have had good sales. In the marketplace, I found the last clock sold on the first page as opposed to the one with huge sales being quite a bit further down in the listing and coming after a few other of my clocks. The difference seemed to be in the date sold.

If number of sales, date of sales, number of views, and date of last viewed are all in the algorithm, and if these considerations are given an order of priority to which we're not privy, we're doomed in trying to figure it out. And what if there's yet another statistic we're not thinking about? Zazzle has to rely on an algorithm, and they might not be much better at explaining it than we are.

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