I first started noticing such solid color products back when masks came out and wondered about that strategy as it seemed almost like cheating, like the products that are nothing but a "your photo here" which I think Zazzle did crack down on some. I know of one store that is nothing but collections of products in many solid colors, like 300 wrapping paper rolls that are all just different colorname.images and not even tiled as you said. Interestingly, despite the different image names, many of the products are color grouped, as many as 17 together. And here I can't even get a handful of products grouped that use the same image. 😕
I know that for home decor and ties come to mind also there is a market for solid color things to exactly match a color scheme, but a customer can easily do that themselves with a create-your-own by simply applying a background color, they don't need to pay the higher price for a marketplace item.
I'm very curious now what Zazzle's position is on this so hope they answer you.
Now that I started looking, there are a lot of stores devoted to solid-color products and some aren't even using an image at all, just applying a background color to otherwise blank product and publishing. Huh.
Yep. It's Decorating 101 to pair patterns with solids so if one wants to offer a few solids in exact coordinating colors for their prints to offer a cohesive collection, I have no problem with that, it's actually pretty smart to do so. I do take issue though with stores that are nothing but a bunch of solid color items as discussed above.
I was searching a specific product category tonight for keyword and came across not one, but two, solid-color products that are, unbelievably, Editor's Picks.
The first one was just solid white, achieved by choosing white as the background color and then adding a single . of text outside the print area to get it to publish. Despite the fact that this is intentionally gaming the system, it got an Editor's Pick and takes the 20th spot out of over 94K results. 🤔 The second was solid gray, achieved by using a solid gray .png, and was on page 3 of the results.
There were numerous other solid-color "designs" including one on the fourth page that was color-grouped to 28 other solid-color versions! (Sidenote - how does that even happen when each .png of color had a different name?)
That led to a bunch of solid-color digital-downloads. Seriously. No comment on someone being silly enough to spend $10 to download a color, but it makes my head spin that they're even in the MP.
