Can we have an honest discussion about the indexing on Zazzle?

[LMGildersleeve]

I want to first say I am a total Zazzle fanatic. Zazzle has given me an income that I didn't have to spend any money on as a start up. I could go on and on of the benefits of having a Zazzle store. But lately there has been a change (whether intentional or not) that have given me pause.

Indexing... six months ago it was between 24 and 36 hours turn around time we saw our products in our public store and Marketplace. Today, i see a week's delay and I don't think this is the new "normal".

I am totally grateful I can share my products on my social media accounts and the potential customer will see my product. But honestly, I think the bulk of my sales comes from the Marketplace.

I'd love it if someone knowledgeable could visit this post and be honest about if something is being done to fix this (what I see as an) issue. Just knowing it's being worked on would ease my mind.

💐

[Fiorenzo]

The indexing and the time it takes the products to show up in your store is a nightmare on Zazzle. There is no way you can work short-term on sales. That's why I am keeping both product categories AND product collections in my store, and why I have product collections showing on my home page rather than categories. Thank God, the collections have been improved and are updated instantly now. 

[KC]

Also a Zazzle fanatic 🙂

But it's difficult when creating a new template for someone via chat, I've had to tell them that they may have to wait for the product link to work.

I'm also curious about the lengthy delay in store category edits.

Recently, if I make a new product, then attempt to edit the store category shortly after the product is made, the screen freezes and I'm unable to sort it into the correct store category if I missed it when posting. 

Even older products no longer immediately sort into store categories when you make a change, making it very difficult to do any real sort of store reorganization even on a small scale.

(I'm speculating that this is related to the indexing delays?)

[Fiorenzo]

I reported the freezing in the tech forum. When this happens, you can still manage to change the category by editing the product details through the design management button on your product's page.

[KC]

I can physically change the store category that way, but then you still can't see that the change occurred when navigating the store categories. As in, the product doesn't appear in the new category sort for quite some time.

[LMGildersleeve]

@KCthe product link should work right away. It's public, just not in your public store or Marketplace. You don't have to tell the custom to wait if you are giving them the link.

[LMGildersleeve]

Well, it's now obvious Z doesn't really want to talk about this subject. It is what it is I guess.

[Windy]

I too would like to have an update on what is going on with the indexing. Specifically is there a belief that the indexing problems are solvable, or is the the site architecture so convoluted at this point, that a fix can't be done without a complete overhaul of the site? 

[Scott]

Indexer-related issues are bugs, and will be fixed as soon as we can. We are not looking to slow down the speed at which our website operates. There is plenty of data out there that shows that faster websites generate higher conversion, which is good for Creators and for Zazzle. We're constantly working to improve our tools and improve the experience, and speed is an important consideration throughout. So, the fact that indexing was somewhere between slow and broken is not good. Generally speaking, all bugs that are reported to engineering will be fixed as soon as we can. I would guess that at least some of the indexer-related issues impacting the site back on May 12th are no longer an issue today.

There's a lot of ways for indexing to become fouled up. Some are related to hardware, and some are related to the software/indexing code, and some are related to the products and their attributes. Fixing some of these issues can be reasonably simple, but other times it can be incredibly complex.

Also, not all issues that people attribute to indexing are actually that. Moving a product to a new collection or department or category may be not be indexer-related at all. This is why it's so important for us to have example products - so that we can reproduce the issue ourselves. When we can reproduce an issue in a controlled environment then we're able to pull much cleaner data from error logs that we can use to diagnose the issue.

I hope this is helpful. Honestly, I'm not sure what your goal is with this conversation. The request for an "honest conversation" makes it sound like you think we're being dishonest with you, but then later in your post you simply seem curious about whether the bugs will be fixed. I think the moderator team has done a good job about being honest here in the community. Heck, I don't even give ETAs for bug fixes because there's so many ways that the ETA can go wrong.

If you (anyone) have questions then feel free to ask. The team will do our best to locate and share answers as best as we can, but if we're going to have an honest conversation then it should be from both sides. Guessing that problems are due to our site architecture being convoluted is a wild guess, and contains absolutely no value whatsoever. Even worse, others may read a post like this full of industry buzzwords and start to believe it. This is dangerous. The last thing that we need is for people to start believing these sorts of baseless claims and repeating them elsewhere.

So, I guess my own takeaway from this conversation is that we should add a misinformation/disinformation section to our Guidelines.

[Connie]

@ScottHow would we report delays in moving a product from one category to the next? We can't predict how slow it will move, and by the time we realize it is taking too long and then report, and then Zazzle investigates, the product has finally moved over, and so nothing is found and fixed.

[LMGildersleeve]

Hi @Scott and thank you for chiming in. By "honesty" I didn't mean to imply anyone from Zazzle was dishonest. I just wanted some straight talk (any talk) about the indexing on Zazzle. I wasn't aware that many of the problems we are experiencing was not related to indexing.

Would grouping be considered an indexing problem? For instance, my matching color products have stopped grouping since the beginning of March. I have sent numerous requests via the "Group Products" action. I'm kind of burnt out about this one.