"optimization" or recipe for failure?

[pichick712]

So I have THOUSANDS of products that ZAZZLE has decided need "optimization". ZAZZLE has made this decision which has resulted in those THOUSANDS of products NOT EVER SELLING because ZAZZLE has decided to make them hidden. HOW IS THIS HELPING ANYONE? THE CREATOR WON'TMAKE ANY MONEY, ZAZZLE WON'T MAKE ANY MONEY EITHER. 

In order to UNDO what ZAZZLE has done, YOU HAVE TO MANUALLY MAKE THE PRODUCT PUBLIC ONE AT A TIME!!!! You can't even do it in BULK. I now have to waste hours and hours UNDOING what ZAZZLE has done and in the mean time NOTHING is getting sold. 

We ALL need to raise our voices to make ZAZZLE stop this process that hurts all of us. It should be up to US, the CREATORS, to decide what products WE want to adjust and what products we want to leave. I cannot believe all the things that ZAZZLE is now doing to make it harder for all of us to sell anything. it's like they WANT to lose creators, business, and their website. THEY ARE SABOTAGING THEMSELVES and hurting us in the process. 

We have all spent thousands of hours creating products that we are proud of. What right does ZAZZLE have to decide they are not good enough to be public? Am I the only one here who is outraged???????? Do YOU like someone else hiding YOUR products? Are YOU OK with this? I am barely making sales at all and to have them do this is OUTRAGEOUS! 

[tnestico]

Wow, thank you for this explanation, I never knew that.  I love learning just by taking the time to read the answers to other designer's problems or questions 🙂

[waterart]

I tried that once and the products went back to being hidden the next day. I think you have to do some actual tweaking in order for the product to remain public

[ColsCreations]

For a product to get hidden for Optimization, it's gone at least 15 months with no sales and not even a single view. If you have thousands of products hidden for optimization, then they weren't attracting any attention to begin with so getting auto-hidden isn't costing you sales. Instead, it's a polite way of saying one may need to re-think their designs or tags or whatever because they are not meeting with any success. It's not like they are deleting your designs - they're just giving a helpful heads-up that hey, you need to take another look at these products you've published that aren't doing well.

[pichick712]

It IS costing sales. I have been doing this for 10 years and only made 3,000.00 so I am certainly not setting the world on fire despite my hardest and best efforts. I NEED EVERY PRODUCT PUBLIC because it MIGHT get sold. I post everywhere and it seems that unless u r doing invitations, and cards, u are not making much $$$ at all. Many times the feedback I get is that the products are just too expensive. I am currently living on social security ONLY and I need every product visible because every sale means A LOT to me. Maybe this is not what u r trying to live on but it is for me. I am in my zazzle for hours every single day trying to create products and make sales. I post everywhere but nothing so I cannot afford to have things hidden for ANY reason unless I CHOOSE TO DO IT. 

[Connie]

But if the product hasn't even been VIEWED in 15 months, it's EXTREMELY unlikely that you'll ever get a sale on it! I agree with ColsCreations. This can be a positive thing, because it's alerting you to the fact that you have to revisit your designs, titles, and tags, and keep them up to date with what is actually selling.

What I do is periodically check my Optimization Needed, and make hard decisions if it should be kept or deleted. If I have other products with the same design that ARE selling, I know the design is good, so I try to improve the tags, and add a cover photo, then set it back to public. I make sure to actually click on the item to give it a view and reset the 15-month clock. If the design has flaws, I fix them and publish a new product. Some things are out of stock permanently, so I leave those, just in case Zazzle brings them back some time. And others are irrelevant now, like masks. So I only work on things that have a good chance of selling.

[pichick712]

I spent time creating those products. it should be UP TO ME to decide what I want to do with them. How would you feel i f thousands of your products disappeared? 

[Lais]

I see it like this: if a product needs optimization it's because the chance someone sees it in the marketplace and buys it is very small(*), so they are telling you "Hey, take a look at this and maybe change the title or tags", they could just still let your product public and tell you nothing, and you would have to figure it out by yourself. 

(*) and how do they know that this chance is small? it is related to how the algorithm works to rank your products in the search. Possibly every product has a score, let's say, that is updated from time to time and this score depends on the number of views it gets, the number of sales, and other factors; the higher the score the better chance your product will be found in the marketplace, the lower the score the least the chance... I'm just saying this because I study Math and, you know, there's a lot of math, particularly graph theory, involved in these things, it's not something that has no base.

[pichick712]

so ZAZZLE knows what every customer is looking for ALL THE TIME? WRONG WRONG AND WRONG. IT SHOULD BE UP TO US DO MAKE THAT DECISION! Stop the Kool-aid! 

[Connie]

@pichick712I try to keep on top of things so that I don't end up with thousands of products that need optimization! 15 months is a long window that they give us. And frankly, if the products aren't selling or even getting views, it's no big loss to me if they are hidden.

Unlike most other sites, Zazzle doesn't charge us for our listings, and their limit of 100k is very high. Meanwhile, they are spending massive amounts of money to host all our listings indefinitely! Naturally, they want only the products that have the best chance of selling, to make it worth their while to host all of our products, so it's not unreasonable for them to hide the ones that are dead in the water anyway.

I just got an email from Spoonflower that they will start hiding designs that don't have SALES in 2 years. Because they are trying to keep the marketplace fresh and clean for their customers. At least Zazzle doesn't hide products that have at least one sale in it's whole history, even if it hasn't been viewed since for 10 years.

[pichick712]

Why are people defending them? they are making off of us. it's in their best interest to keep our products that WE created public in case something does sell. pretty soon they may just make that decision. THIS HURTS US ALL. what is wrong with people that don't see this? SMH

[Cat]

@Connie Just curious... do you happen to know what happens if you just make it public without viewing it? Like if it doesn't "reset the clock" so to speak, does it just make it public for a shorter amount of time?

I generally try to view each hidden item and review the tags etc, but being swamped with all of the recent changes (covers, videos, collections, etc.) I just didn't have time, so I resorted to just making some public without viewing them or anything. Just wondering if you (or anybody else) know what the consequences of that are!

[pichick712]

do YOU want to look at and "optimize" the thousands of products that zazzle has decided to make hidden? I am desperate for every single sale I can make that by hiding the majority of my products, that means it has ZERO chance of selling. THIS HURTS EVERYONE. 

[Connie]

@CatIt USED to go right back to hidden in most cases. Sometimes a few of the products would stay public. I haven't tried it in a long time, so I don't know if they changed that or not. I thought there was some discussion about it in the forums, where people were wondering why they set it to public and it went right back to hidden, but that might have been the old forums.

[pichick712]

DON'T U THINK U SHOULD HAVE CONTROL OVER YOUR PRODUCTS? Why are u ok with someone else controlling YOUR content? 

[Msavad]

because they hide the image before 15 months. i had 4 views after  i unhid it and they hid it again anyway. i've had products hidden after a few days of making something. that 15m rule isn't followed. i've been selling on pod's for a long time, i know for a fact that it can take up to a year before people see you have the work, that google picks up on it, that you rank high enough to be seen. and for people to think about getting it. they may have viewed a different item, just not the thing that you are looking at. because they count the views on the product not the image.  i don't erase my items. that's a waste of time and customers do want these things. i made silver seller in 4 years before they started messing with the systems. now i get 2 figures if i'm lucky.  if you have a tiny store, its easy to fix this. this is just a huge waste of time now. i thought i would get sales for this holiday and they keep hiding puzzles and ornaments and its really frustrating. 

[Lais]

Look, I'm not a specialist on this subject. After I get my Math graduate degree I will maybe have more time to learn about it and apply it at my own store and increase the sales. But I see you're spending too much time and having little return, so know this may be good: there's a principle called "the 80-20 rule" or "Pareto's Principle", it basically states that 80% of your income comes from 20% of your products. You can read about it on the internet, study it, and try to apply it to your business. So you don't have to worry about all of these products being hidden, focus on the 20% of your products that are actually generating your sales.
Again, I'm not a specialist but I intend to study it in the future and apply it to my Zazzle stores. 

[pichick712]

Since we have no idea what a customer is looking for how can zazzle be sure that someone won't want it? I have had products that I created more than a year ago SELL just recently. zazzle seems to think in algorithms and NOT about what appeals to a customer. SUPPOSE you were looking for something and u didn't find it because someone made an arbitrary decision to take that option away from you. I have recently made sales in my bathroom decor store and I have not touched that store in well over a year. zazzle thinks they know what a customer is looking for and so I assume they are in EVERY CUSTOMER'S HEAD, KNOWING WHAT THEY ARE THINKING AND KNOWING WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR. This "optimization" bull is WRONG. It should be up to US, the CREATORS of the products to choose what we do with OUR products. It's the principle of the matter!!!!! I wonder how many sales I DIDN'T make because ZAZZLE made that product hidden and YOU SHOULD TOO. 

[KeegansCreation]

What Zazzle is doing here (which I think is a good idea) is forcing people to review unviewed products every 15 months. Cat brought up an important point downthread; sometimes a product is unviewed because the product option we chose is out of stock or discontinued. The only way to find out about that is reviewing products individually. The fix is as easy as changing to a different product option.

[pichick712]

don't YOU want control over YOUR products? I could not disagree with you more. why is zazzle CONTROLLING what we have created? why not let THEM create the products? why are we even here? why is BIG BROTHER controlling YOUR stores? YOUR products? YOUR collections? IF they want that much control, then let THEM create the products. we are unnecessary. 

[KeegansCreation]

I do have control unless I give up the control by not reviewing hidden products. To stay in control you have to stay engaged with your products. This is the same as anything else. To control a car you have to hold the steering wheel. To control a horse you have to hold the reins. To control your Zazzle products you have to review them from time to time.

[pichick712]

no, you really don't. you have to REACT to zazzle's "optimization/hiding" your products. instead of being in charge of your own stores, u have to react to THEM which means u do not have control unless you know ahead of time, what products they are going to hide on you. 

[Badeesie]

You can know ahead of time. We've been told that products get hidden if they go a certain length of time without being viewed. You can sort the products in your stores in order of last viewed date, then go to the last page. These are the products that have been the longest without a view, so are the ones that will be hidden next - unless somebody views them.

[pichick712]

My point is that WE should be able to control the narrative on OUR stores. WE ARE THE CREATORS and  it boggles my mind that everyone is OK with SOMEONE ELSE dictating what is visible and what is not. WHY SHOULD WE HAVE TO REACT TO THEIR ACTIONS WHEN WE ARE THE CREATORS OF THESE PRODUCTS! What is wrong with everyone? 

[Msavad]

statistically that might be true. but you don't know what product will do well. i had one single magnet, sell to one person, and i made $1500 on that one single item. its hidden now. i don't know why. you don't know what what will sell and when. i have many popular images, they sell on all sorts of stuff, yet they are hidden here. no other pod does this.  you won't know if suddenly mousepads are popular. and should i really heavily promote - postcards and tissue paper just because those no money items are the more popular?  no. 

statistically it would be IMPOSSIBLE to have all images looked at due the volume of people and returns in the search. and the fact it seems to remove 80% of products per image, despite it being able to sell on other products - it makes no sense for the site to arbitrarily remove items for servicing. no other sites does that. 

[Cat]

@ColsCreations Agreed. And it's totally worth it to give them another look. I've found products that had typos in the title or in critical keywords in the tags, and some that were made before I really understood how Zazzle tags worked, and some that were just done when I was really tired or something and I clearly didn't put much effort into the keywords. Or where I'd accidentally stuck them in the wrong collection or forgot to promote them on Pinterest, or where the chosen color or style had been discontinued or was no longer relevant (like designs on phone cases that nobody uses anymore.) I've had numerous cases where I'll update those sorts of things and a product that had been sitting there unviewed for years suddenly starts selling. 

I haven't had time to be that thorough on all of my hidden products recently, but it's totally worth the effort. In general I figure it takes much less time to freshen up an underperforming product than it does to make something new! 

[pichick712]

when u have THOUSANDS of them, it takes way more time than it is worth. I feel this policy need to STOP. let US do this on our own IF WE CHOOSE TO. ZAZZLE is denying me possible sales and that is how i will always see it. 

[Connie]

Zazzle is not denying you possible sales, when nobody is even viewing your products to buy them! They are actually helping you by showing you which products are not being viewed, so that you can optimize them and hopefully get sales! Even if Zazzle didn't hide them, they basically wouldn't show up in the marketplace anyway because they'd be on page 100 or something, due to not getting any views. Customers aren't going to scroll through that many pages!

Don't look at the total number all at once. Take a few each day- evaluate if they are really worth the effort, and if they are, fix up the titles and tags, and change to public. Just work on it a few minutes each day, and pretty soon you'll have them all done, and hopefully get a lot more sales!

[tnestico]

I totally agree, that happened to me too that some products had typos or other things that I did not know better when I first started with Zazzle, but I also noticed that I am keeping in learning, so I find mistakes even in some of my more recent designs. So, it's good that Zazzle shows us those products that are not been viewing for one reason or another. I also fixed some and then I was able to sell them.

If somebody is so bitter and angry at Zazzle, and don't want to listen or be reasonable at all, I believe, they should just leave the platform and try to find a "better" one. To me, I find that Zazzle is the best, it keeps my design forever and I don't even have to pay to post them, I think I will quit the day that I will have to pay to post them, unless I make a lot, of course.

[pichick712]

how would you like to have t optimize 20,000 products? 

204 at a time? and no results in real time.  YES, I AM VERY ANGRY about this because having been with zazzle for over 10 years, I have seen this site become LESS user friendly and more complicated making it more difficult for ANYONE to sell their products. YOU MAY BE MAKING A FORTUNE therefore why should you care? I have only made 4,000.00 in that over 10 years and I have put in hours every single day on this. There are so many glitches that I could be emailing them 2-3 times a day. MAYBE YOU ARE OK WITH THAT but I think they should spend more time making things better and NOT more complicated. The ONLY way things will change is if people stand up and demand they change. If you are happy to sit and say nothing, well that is you. I lived that way for too long and now I am done staying quiet about anything. You can bash me all you want. My self worth is not based on what YOU think of me. I am just one person trying as hard as she can to eek out a small side income from this but with over 20,000 products HIDDEN because they need "OPTIMIZATION", how can I or anyone sell anything? I wonder if everyone on zazzle actually pays attention to that "optimization" BS. there are only so many keywords a person can use. there are only so many times they can be shared on social media. there are only so many ways you can change the description. Zazzle may be using analytics/computers to perform the task of hiding our products but we are human and how can we compete with computers when it comes to changing EVERY single product on a regular basis to they don't need "optimization". How many products have YOU had to alter for them? 20,000? How many of those MIGHT have sold if zazzle had not made them hidden? you can feel how you wish to feel, but zazzle is making mistakes that hurt everyone and if they are not hurting you now, they will in the future. I would send u the screenshot showing the # that need optimization but the "insert photo" feature does not work properly. it cuts the photo into a square, not a landscape which is what I want. SMH. And have u checked out FINE ART AMERICA? they are a great site!!!! More products!!!! easier!!! and they do not control you like zazzle does. So there IS better out there. I only stay with zazzle because I have sooooooooooooooooo much invested in my zazzle store. I do have a fine art america account too and sell there too. 

[waterart]

I have a bunch of products that need optimization too. I don't pay much attention to it (if I did I probably wouldn't have so many hidden), but every now and then I go through some of them and try to teak the tags/title  You are right in saying there is only so much retagging and redoing titles that can be done, most of the time when I look at my hidden products, I don't know what else I can do with the titles and tags.

For what it's worth, when Zazzle first implemented optimization many didn't like it just like you but I guess folks just got used to it.

[pichick712]

there is NO REASON we should have to "get used" to something that hurts our sales! Zazzle needs to STOP this stupid process. I will not livelong enough to "optimize" over 20,000 products. Who would? and the fact that I can't seem to even do 204 at a time and see results in REAL TIME, make it extra frustrating. ZAZZLE IS WRONG ON THIS! 

[waterart]

You don't have to optimize all of them, just work on the ones you like. Look at it this way, the reason they got hidden in the first place is that they didn't get any sales so it's not like you are losing globs of money because of it. Sure a couple of dollars here and there wouldn't hurt but it is what it is, Zazzle is going to do what it feels is best for its business.

And by the way I don't like that they are hiding our products, a fairer approach to this I think would be if hidden products would remain visible in stores and only hidden in the marketplace

[Msavad]

exactly right. i see my store as a brick and mortar store where i have a business partner that keeps changing the location of the store, moving the doors around, removing all the products and dumping into a hole in the floor. and no matter what i try to fix the store, he goes and undoes it all again.  i have even more products than you. before they removed quick create (why did they remove the most useful thing here?)  i was making 400 products per image. 

all last week i removed all the discontinued stuff (why can't zazzle remove this? when they can add the label). and unhid everything.  today - labels - 15,202 are hidden again. 75 pages of 204 each (i asked for a 1000 each at least that makes sense here). why do i have to waste my time like this? and this is just for labels. all the mens shirts 37 pages. it was zero yesterday. as i'm unhiding things - i'm making sales. yet they hid everything again. on christmas. 

all these people cheering for it, must have really small stores. i never liked seeing stores that had 3 products in each section then complained they didn't make sales. i made a ton of sales when they were visible. its super hard making money here now. i was hoping i could get a little extra cash if i spent the time unhiding things, but, nope. and what happens if i did some how optimize all 200,000 things? 4 months down the road it will just say it again.

zazzle clearly isn't making money on this. i don't get why they remove things and never return them. i stopped uploading ever since they removed quick create. and the thought that a customer would know how to transfer a design - doesn't ever happen. 

[pichick712]

THANK YOU!!!! I have deleted THOUSANDS of great products and trust me, I am NEVER creating tape measures. So many great products gone and in their place are stupid items AND we have to UNHIDE our creations ON A DAILY BASIS. 

[Msavad]

i've been here for years. i have 325,000 products, it was 400k but they don't remove the discontinued stuff for some reason. after spending countless hours in the past uploading as many products as i could  i made a lot of money. but every year they did something to manipulate google adding their own text to my descriptions for a while and now the optimize thing. after they started hiding things because i was past  the 100k mark, those hidden things that could have sold at some point and do in my other stores - is hidden. never to be seen from again. 

and because they were hidden, when you unhide them. they go right to optimization. why? because no one looked at them? well they couldn't because it was hidden. its not a polite way of saying anything. its very rude to find out that after spending hours the day before unhiding all my stickers, that this morning i have 128 pages of stickers (at 204 per page), that i have to unhide again because it needs optimizing. and its not like they make it easy to fix things. because the site isn't laid out that way. i have well over 2000 images, each would have to be adjusted all the time. that's like having a grocery store and just because they put the cereal box on a hard to reach shelf, i now have to go in there weekly and change the logo on the box. 

they are basically erasing the design because its now hidden in the search and worse in my store which makes no sense at all. and google? they stop indexing your store if they have broken links. affiliates, the same thing and i can't advertise the store if the product is missing. customers can't have matching items because there are only 3 things left. and if you do nothing - it doesn't matter if there is a rule for 100,000 designs, i only had 4,000 things left in the search, they just keep chipping away at it. then there is nothing.  they are robbing our time with this nonsense. there is nothing to update. statistically not all your images would ever be viewed due to the sheer volume of people that are here.

[Connie]

I know this won't help with the hidden products, but I took a look at a few of your stores, and you have beautiful designs, but I think you would really benefit from making "Cross-sell" collections, especially for Christmas. What this means is having a bunch of products with the same design in one collection. Zazzle seems to be promoting these the most, and I've noticed a lot more sales on my cross-sell collections than the other ones. They'll tell you what products to add when you make the collections.

Since your designs are good, I think you probably have a title/ tag issue that is causing the lack of views. Unfortunately, I'm not a pro at that myself, so I really can't give you any good hints, beyond looking at the tags that similar designs have. I do a lot of trial and error.

[Wildart]

I wonder if you know that you need to view each product you make to register it (can't remember the correct word here), kind of making it visible to the market...we were told this ages ago. So each of my products has at least 1 view. I put more work into :

....the product type/desing that sells

....Designs I really love and maybe will transfer to another product/option

...Expanding niche products taht sell consistently.

I also take one day/morning/evening every now and them to review products that haven't sold or haven't sold in awhile, or have no recent views, This way I keep on top of hidden products.

I am sorry if you already know of all this, but you'd be surprised to know how much I still dont know after 

16 years here. I sold my first item around 6 months after I started. At that time my biggest sellers were postage stamps(now obsolete here), a small price per item, but often bought in bulk...today's equivalent would be postcards I would think. Often bought in multiples. I am not great wedding designer, but I will still work on these since my taste/art is unique(well all of our art is LOL) but can appeal to someone who wants something different. It  will take me AGES to complete a collection on that, so I try not to hurry, and put more thinking time into it when I am riding in a car, or otherwise not actively doing something else. Hope this helps somewhat...

Gill

....

[pichick712]

Wanna go through the thousands that zazzle has hidden of mine? 

[Wildart]

that is a lot! 🙂  My best store (the oldest one-  the second one only been going a little while) doesn't even have 1,000 products (close to it tho), It sure is tedious I agree, but as suggested further down you can bulk unhide. 🙂 Thank goodness...see I am still learning after all this time.

BTW if you take my store status from beginning of this year, before I added a whole lot more, most items are sellers, so I guess all that tedious effort every month or so is worth it in the long run. I also deleted many products a couple years ago when the tags would have been identical, and those were not viewed or sold. Tags have a lot to do with this.

[Polenth]

I rarely have products hidden because I make sure to view them before it happens. It's a lot faster to go through the list of products that'll be hidden in a month than it is to have to unhide each one. It also means there's no gap where the product drops off sale. If the same product ends up there again, I'll take a closer look at it.

As a warning, adblockers can cause issues with the views registering. So turn them off for the viewing session.

All sites like Zazzle have the same potential issue of the market getting flooded with trash. Some have dealt with that by charging the artists subscription fees. Some strictly limit who is seen in the search. Neither of those are good options if you're a working class artist who can't afford to spend any money on it and needs money to come back quickly. Having to view a product once a year isn't so bad in comparison. (I say this after having to recently delete most of my designs on one site, because they changed to a subscription model, and being in the not worthy for search category on another.)