Collections Marketplace Representative Products For Search

[klstock]

In the collections marketplace channel, under 'search pages' it says "Zazzle will show your primary collection cover image for highly relevant product searches", and you can select up to ten products and when a customer searches they will see your collections cover photo instead of the product photo.... 

Do you have to do this in order to get the "view wedding suite" white button to appear and for the collection to be listed in the new "collections" tab showing near the category/filter dropdowns?

I tried this for a wedding collection, but I did not like that my collection cover image rather than my product image would show up in search results, that is confusing to me and to customers. 

[klstock]

Here's an example: do a search for "tropical wedding invitations", then scroll down to click on the "collections" button (on the left side of where you find the usual category/filter/sort by dropdowns)....

Now you will see what appear to be several duplicates of the same collections. But if you click on each of those, each of them go to different products. The customer would not know this, they would just see a bunch of repetitive images. 

[ColsCreations]

I made a post about this a few weeks ago, with screenshots and step-by-steps of how seriously confusing this is:

New "Collections" Button on the Menu Bar of Filter Options on Results Pages

And said the same thing you have - that customers won't know why they're seeing a a bunch of repetitive images.
I think Zazzle has admitted to themselves how confusing this is and that's why they did this whole thing which didn't go as intended. And even if they are successful in removing all Collection covers that showcase only a single product, the problem still remains - that of customers still getting repetitive images and not knowing what to make of it. Only it might even be more confusing as now those repetitive images are all showing multiple products. I think mixing Collection covers with product thumbs in the MP is a terrible idea but they seem intent on riding the idea out until they have some undeniable evidence that it is hurting the bottom line.

Anyway, for this

Do you have to do this in order to get the "view wedding suite" white button to appear and for the collection to be listed in the new "collections" tab showing near the category/filter dropdowns?

I believe the answer is yes. Using my one and only cross-sell wedding collection (where I specifically UN-checked the options for any product thumbs to be replaced by the Collection cover) and comparing various searches of products/Collections of others, it def appears to me that the answer to this question is yes.

[klstock]

Thanks Cols, I am going to look at your thread for more info

[klstock]

Anyone who lands on this thread, please see the thread ColsCreations linked to - the screenshots and explanation are very helpful

[Connie]

I pointed this out to Zazzle several times, but apparently they don't care! It IS super confusing to the customers to see the same image several times. I suspect certain designers are using this method to "flood" the first page with a bunch of links to the same collection, hoping that if a customer sees the same image a bunch of times, curiosity will get the better of them and they'll click on it. But if they do click, they get a different product than what is showing!

[CreativeLeahG]

I did a video on how to complete the collection requirements and one of the things I stated was that I would only add a collection cover to an invitation or save the date and nothing else and the reasoning was very logical in that a customer starts their buying process for events with those two items so it makes some sense to know there is a whole bunch of matching  items and I would have those two items front and centre with the other items as small icon almost items at the edges.  For all other items I’d keep the single product cover because the customer now needs to see clearly if they want those extras and what they represent. I also changed the settings on some products to show the single product view not the cover photo.

I also made Zazzle aware that when we add a cover to a watch ( as an example) we would then have that same cover repeated if the customer wanted to view a different model! They couldn’t see it! That is VERY confusing and definitely a sale killer. This was the case for all items with covers where different versions were available via Zazzle ie MUGS etc. I haven’t checked since to see if this issue was remedied. 

re multiple product covers for collections, as my more recent post shows, search engines appear to favour multiple product images over single ones. I assume because Google believes these to be of greater interest and value to customers. However as identified one shoe does not fit all and it’s creating issues of magnitude in the MP.

i would remedy this myself by urging creators to merely use multiuse images when sharing to social media so these images are not specifically on Zazzle and yet direct to Zazzle. Now the issue with this for me is that I’m not creating any images ( I created many previously) when they don’t go to our own product store pages but a landing page. I would encourage the same re video covers. Customer awareness begins these days in many cases from those social media sites so that’s the direction I’d have gone to fulfil the aim of multi image covers and videos in order to preserve the efficiency of the MP in allowing customers to see what they’re buying.