I did my first four covers yesterday. (Two were for different versions of same product color-linked together.) I did some both searching and just navigating to see where the products were before and after adding the covers.
Product A (never before sold) was in the middle of Page 4 of 496 results. I noted that of the first five pages of results, all but two of those 300 products were using the same Zazzle-provided in-situ. (The other odd two had their own covers.) I submitted my cover about 3pm. It was visible within minutes in the back-end and on the product page but took a few hours to show as the MP thumb. I don't know when it "went live" but when I checked at 9pm, it was not only live, but my product had jumped up to #17 on the first page of now 517 results. Wow.
Product B (also never before sold) was hard to judge as it didn't have any one particular keyword I thought was more meaningful/popular than the others so it was hard for me to find using any one keyword, I had to add others to narrow it down for it to come up without scrolling many pages. After the cover, with one main keyword + product type typed into search, mine comes up on first page as #35 of 1,074. Wow.
Product C (has sold), very much to my surprise was already coming up in the #1 spot for several keyword + product type searches. I checked this anonymously in another browser with no cookies/browsing history to make sure it wasn't giving me biased results and nope, got same exact results in same exact order. So, very cool but made me afraid to add a cover for fear of messing that situation up somehow. But I added the cover and whew, still coming up in the #1 spot for various searches, but now it also comes up as one of the pictures for suggested terms so I guess that's cool, too.
So boy oh boy, yeah, covers are super important now. Somewhere outside of my full-time job and two side-hustles (not related to POD or graphic design at all) with Zazzle being my third (it's the least lucrative but most enjoyable) and all the regular responsibilities of adulting to tend to, I'm going to have to start devoting some of my precious R&R time to making covers. Weirdly enough, focusing on something in the forums to test or analyze is how I wind-down now as it clears my mind of other things but yeah, covers are going to have to become my priority if I don't want to completely fall off the radar in the MP. My low but regular sales have already tanked. 😞
They're super important right now with covers quickly advancing your product in result pages, but as time goes on and they become more and more common, the ranking algorithm will have to go back to prioritizing sales & views so if everyone in your niche has covers, your cover isn't helping you anymore than theirs is if that makes sense. It'll only be the ones without covers that will be buried by the algorithm.
Also, several have suggested that Zazzle should partner with a mock-up provider or provide their own templates for us to use. I don't see that happening. Because ...
1) that wouldn't really be much different than the in-situs they provide now and us choosing which view we want as the default thumb
2) if 6,000 designers are picking their mock-ups from the same pool, that wouldn't achieve the individuality Z apparently wants to see in the MP
3) and, just my unfounded opinion, I kind of think that Z prioritizing self-made covers is an intentional way of weeding out what we have in the past referred to as "spam accounts" and even legit designers using Quick Create (which last i read hasn't been re-enabled yet). People can still come in and create an account and flood the market with hundreds of t-shirt designs straight from a stock site, but without covers those products will no longer dominate the search results. So I think in the long run it may make the MP better for both customers and designers BUT I think it definitely moves Zazzle from the "something you can do as a hobby and still have moderate success with" category to the "something you need to treat as a full-time job to be successful" category.
I started a reply over here but decided it was better suited here ...
I think they're referring to their home page and the landing pages for categories being where the favoritism will occur, which does sound rather punitive, but we need to wait and watch to see how it all falls out.
It's already fallen out. 😉
I was doing a lot of browsing last night and products with cover photos are definitely being favored. On the homepage, as the category "icons", as the images for the suggested tags (the ones that used to be blue text boxes) ... I did a lot of navigating using Zazzle's sidebar menu (instead of searching for specific terms) and the most of the time, the first several pages of products shown by default all have cover photos. If you're trying to break into the wedding invite market, good luck. Of the first three pages (180 products), not only are they all cover-photo products, 78% (140) are flagged as Editors Picks and the rest are either flagged as Real Foil or Downloadable or some combination of all of the above. One category that notably had very few cover-photos was Leggings. So if one is rushing to do cover photos, that might be a product category to start with, to get a leg up on the competition.
I am of the same mindset as @TRW in that I really dislike this whole independent cover photo approach. Some of them are really well-done so this is not an affront to those making them, it's just as TRW said, it makes the MP look like an unprofessional hodge podge to me. And it's visual sensory overload. There's just so much going on. Even if you drill down to something specific like say Home Decor - Pillows - Square - Zippered .... instead of getting 60 pillows that are obviously the same product except for the printed design on them you get 60 scenes to process. It makes my brain hurt and makes me feel like I am on Etsy or eBay where everything isn't coming from the same legit company/manufacturer.
And then there's the covers that are confusing. Like wedding invites that show more than one piece of stationery so you think it's a suite but when you click it it's just one thing. Or ones for tissue paper that make it look like a stiff hard card or sign when that's not how tissue paper is in real life unless you've laminated it. You wouldn't know from the pic alone it's tissue paper. And then there's the fact that the point of cover photos is to show things in-situ thus the product/design you're trying to market becomes a smaller part of the overall image since you have to fit it into a scene and that seems backwards to me. If I need to fit my product pic into a 300x300 square I'd want to use most of that to show my product, not make my product smaller just so I can also show a chair or a vase or room background or whatever.
Numerous designers have reported their sales increasing noticably after adding cover photos but I am of the mind that this is because Zazzle is making things with covers more visible than those without, not because the cover itself is influencing shoppers to hit the buy button. It does seem Zazzle has gone all-in on pushing cover images so I'm sure they did lots of testing & analyizing of customer browsing habits & preferences, but I'm firmly in the category of not liking them. If Creators could add optional covers to be viewed along with the previews Z provides but at the end of the previews, not as the default view for the MP, then I'd be on board with it. Then you could still provide an idea of how your design would look in real life, but without the MP looking like such a mess. .
I'm glad someone caught that. 😉
Yeah, tissue paper is super hard. Like @LauraLee, I spent hours a month or two back looking for a mock-up for it but there just isn't anything very good for it. I honestly think Zazzle's "boring" view of just the full sheet is the best way to show it. I really need to figure something out though because tissue paper is was my top-seller. It's not a high-dollar item but it kept me in the game so to speak. Likewise for return address labels, my second best seller. I think Zazzle's in-situ for them is perfect but now I guess I need to make my own that is somehow better so as not to fall off the MP.
That would be lovely but I don't understand how one would do that. Whether it's tissue paper wrinkled and "folded" and sticking out of a bag or wrapping paper actually folded around a box or a blanket draped and hanging over sides of a bed - how does one adapt the design to accurately reflect all the bends and folds and wrinkles etc, and at the right scale? With wrapping paper rolls for example, Zazzle's in-situs do all that for us somehow and I trust that it's accurately showing how the design continues from this side of the box, around this corner, up to the other side of the box ... if you know what I mean. My Photoshop skills are a little dusty but I can handle "regular" mock-ups, either templates where you just add your own image to the mask layer, or even making your own and having to struggle with shadows and lighting. But I don't understand how you take something flat, like tissue or wrapping paper or a beach towel, and accurately show the design when it's crumpled up or folded, creased, draped etc..
oh of course! you are right, duh silly me... 🙂 🙂 mind you, I have cut out (clip)the shape of a duvet (in a cover image) and made that a template to cut(clip) from the image, after arranging it to the same angle and stretched it to mimic the dimensions. I do this all in a free program called inkscape.
here is one of the cover images ...
