"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! 

[pichick712]

WOW! then either you have very few products for sale OR, you are working in here 24/7. Wanna "optimize" the THOUSDANDS of products that ZAZZLE has decided to hide of mine? I am open to giving anyone who asks the ability to "optiimize" all the products that are currently hidden in MY stores. If you all think this is such a great idea on ZAZZLE's part, then come walk in MY SHOES and deal with the grief they have heaped on me. 

[Lais]

@pichick712, try to think more rationally, I know your frustration, but believe me there is good reason for you not to worry about these products being hidden. I just mentioned an example, the 80-20 rule, you don't have to worry about the majority of your products, focus on those that are generating more sales, you can do so by going to your Earnings >> Royalty by Product. See what's selling and try to figure out why it is selling: what's the type of product? is it related to a specific occasion? are people buying it as a gift? how about the tags? And so on. There are videos on YouTube that can help you with this, a great channel, for example, is AutoPilot Passive Income, which has videos explaining things about Zazzle as well as other POD platforms.
Again, don't worry about thousands of products needing optimization, after you analyze what is really driving your sales, you'll see that just a few of those "needing optimization" are worth taking the time to review and make public again. 

[pichick712]

we will just have to agree to disagree. ZAZZLE is controlling my content and it is MY content and I NEVER gave then control over MY products. THIS HURTS EVERYONE. 

[Echo]

I understand your frustration, but Zazzle is a business. They are doing what they think is best for their business and keep their site running smoothly. If a product hasn't been viewed for more than a year, the chance of it selling is very low because it's most likely the title, tags, and description are not SEO optimized. You alone have thousands of products not getting views, now times that by 900,000+ (source: Zazzle About page) designers, that's a lot of products that aren't getting views clogging up their system. Having all these products up require sever space and cost Zazzle money, so they want people to "optimized" these products to increase their chances of selling. We have to remember that, we are "guests" coming into Zazzle's home. They have rules, and we agreed to their rules when we come into their house. Hiding products when they haven't been viewed for more than a year is very reasonable, and it's not a rule they just made up. It's programed into their system and many designers here know about this. 

[pichick712]

I feel that I want to control MY creations and don't feel zazzle has the right to tell ME, what can be public and what needs to be hidden. I mean I CREATED these products and I SHOULD BE THE ONE TO CONTROL WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS NOT SEEN. 

[Wildart]

I can see where you are coming from, I feel the same when it comes to my creative time being eroded(owing to having to create cover photos etc. For now you cannot change the way zazz works. So, whenever you have spare time, go in and check for hidden items, then once they are cleared, keep ahead of the items that have not been viewed in 15 mths,14mths,etc till you are viewing them as they reach 12 no views. BTW did you know that just opening each item in a new tab (thereby effectively viewing the, will reset the views. I do this with products that have been created the last year or so, so I know the tags are ok. This then unhides them. Then just close each tab. Once you are cuaght up it is much easier since you won't have as many items to update and review.

[Connie]

@WildartActually, just viewing them won't unhide them. You have to either manually go into edit Details and change the view to Public, or do it in batches in the back end after viewing each one.

[Echo]

Yes, it's your creations, but your creations are being hosted on their servers, using their server space and causing them money, so they do have the right to decide what can or cannot be seen on their site. The only thing we own is our designs, not the products. The products belong to Zazzle.

[Msavad]

i can't fathom how this is best for their business. 

if they are basing it on views alone, a person that creates AI can upload it with a bot then view it with a bot so they are always in there. i was making a lot of money every month, a real paycheck. now i make lemonaid stand money if i'm lucky.  i think they think they will trick google into thinking there is a lot of new content because everyone is changing everything at once. but in reality google will stop indexing the site. . and having less choices means buyers have less choices and they won't come back if there are less choices. 

if they don't want stuff clogging up the system, they should have fewer weird products like - poker chips and guitar picks? cookies and cakes? i didn't look at the new stuff. that clogs the search. 

we aren't guests, we are sellers that makes the site money and without our products - there would be no zazzle. i remember them begging others to come into their store. the guests are the buyers looking at the wares.  the rules when i first came here were a lot different. we had to make our own HTML pages, we could use a ton of keywords and in any order, they had a quick create letting you make as many as you wanted in packs of 100. they had a lot more products then. descriptions were keywords. there were affiliates, the list goes on and on. and bit by bit they stripped things out making it harder to sell. then they added this hiding things if you have a 100k for all stores, i have 300k, at one point 400k, they hid a ton. i haven't uploaded in a year because they removed quick create. they are still hiding things.  so no. there is no way they can make money by hiding all the products. i can understand the point in reducing clutter in the search, but why remove it from my store also?  that makes no sense. its the holidays, so did they unhide ornaments or puzzles? no, not only did i unhide it - they re-hid it. that's insane.

[pichick712]

THANK YOU! 

[Angelandspot]

I'm really feeling like they shadowban stores as well.  I have a few niche stores with a small amount of products that are all supposedly public but when I go view them in a private window they only show a few of the designs.  One store has 53 niche products but I can only see 30 when in a private window on view 60 products 😞  Designs that were ever green and sold all the time for years have vanished from the marketplace even though they say they are public in the back end store view.

[Msavad]

when i was unhiding things, i found the list changed sizes. sometimes it was more or less. it like everything is random. i just don't get that why would they remove a product, if the image itself was proven a seller? and why keep the other hidden?  they claim its to make the marketplace fresh which somehow includes my store too... but i sell vintage items, so nothing would be fresh.  none of this makes sense.

[pichick712]

THANK YOU!!!! THIS IS WHY THIS WHOLE THING IS WRONG! I have been pleading with them to stop this for YEARS!!!!!!! It helps NO ONE! 

[pichick712]

THEY ARE HURTING EVERYONE INCLUDING THEMSELVES.  

[heartlocked]

Then REMOVE your content from Zazzle's platform and build your own website where you have 100% control of your products. It is that simple. 

[Polenth]

I told you how I speed things up so that things don't get to that point. You can wallow in the belief that none of the rest of us have Zazzle stores, money issues, or have to deal with this... or start listening to people when they're trying to help you. It's your choice, but if you're not going to listen, don't take it out on other artists here.

[InsideOut]

Well it's their platform and they can, and do, run it as they wish. That being said though, I always try to keep my older, unsold, unseen and unloved designs alive and just recently sold one that'd been sitting for almost 14 years lol. It's not a bad design but it was very niche and so it took this long to sell, but it did.

Since only the most popular products show up on page 1 of their marketplace and shoppers rarely venture further on in search results, designs that haven't sold or been viewed in ages won't be seen, so why hide them in the first place? It's not like these are actual products taking up shelf space, right? So why not just mark them as needing optimization but keep them public?

[Lais]

This is me speculating, okay? I believe that when products are hidden they won't be sorted anymore to appear in the search results, this means that the software that is always running to organize them in the marketplace will no longer have to consider them, and therefore not spend that much time.
To illustrate that, imagine an array where each entry has a number and you have to organize these entries from the highest number to the least number. There are different ways to do so, let's say you already programmed your software to do it the most efficient way (the least time-consuming), still, there is a big difference between having 1,000 entries and having 1,000,000 entries to organize, right? Now imagine your program doesn't have to run just once in a while, but all the time because these entries' values keep changing. It costs a lot.

[InsideOut]

It's their platform and they can, and do, run it as they wish. That being said though, I always try to
keep my older, unsold, unseen and unloved designs alive and just recently sold one that'd been sitting for almost 14 years lol. It's not a bad design but it was very niche and so it took this long to sell, but it did.

Since only the most popular products show up on page 1 of their marketplace and shoppers rarely venture further on in search results, designs that haven't sold or been viewed in ages won't be seen, so why hide them in the first place? It's not like these are actual products taking up shelf space, right? So why not just mark them as needing optimization but keep them active?

Note: this is the second time I'm posting this since the first one vanished. If it disappears again I'll take the hint.

[pichick712]

and that DOES NOT MAKE IT RIGHT, or in the best interest of the CREATORS. When they make all these products hidden they GUARANTEE 100000% that it will not sell. We lose money and THEY lose money too. Just because you CAN, does not mean you SHOULD. 

[pichick712]

and I don't have the control to make your messages disappear. zazzle is the only one who makes things disappear. 

[WBartworks]

Did the thousands of hidden products got hidden all at once, or did you not look at your stores for a long time, and therefore, just notice it now?  Personally, I like to look at my stores on a regular basis because I like to see what sells and what never even gets looked at.  Sometimes when I look at a product I designed a while back I think, "what the heck was I thinking. No wonder it didn't sell."  At the beginning I also thought the more the merrier and put my designs on as many products as possible which also doesn't always work. Therefore, I often check the "most viewed to least viewed" and either click on the least viewed, so that they don't get hidden or delete the ones I decided I no longer like.  Zazzle is in the business to make money and since we don't pay to have our product on their site, they have the right to run their business as they like. There's nothing else to it.

[pichick712]

Oh, I get the darling little messages from them and ignore them because to have to address it infuriates me so much. Those hidden products will never sell unless I UNDO what zazzle has done. we have no idea what a customer is looking for or what it is they like. HOW DOES ZAZZLE magically know? their analytics? Well unless they are inside the heads of EVERY customer looking at OUR products, they should leave them alone and let US, THE CREATORS decide what we want to do with them. 

[ulla_hennig]

When I get those "optimization needed" messages I quickly decide whether I think the design is okay and then I do a bit of marketing. We have to realize that we have to do the marketing - write blogposts, tweet items, create mockups or such. I focus on the designs I really like and then I promote those. I've got a lot of designs I am not very proud of, so I simply let them be hidden. But I also got some I am proud of, and so I try to market them as best as I can. Our shops are not our shops in the real sense of the word - we have space on Zazzle for our listings without having to pay for it. So Zazzle is interested to keep the content fresh. Just my 2 cents.

[pichick712]

why do you need zazzle to point them out to you? why can't you manage your stores on your own? you see this as a "gift" and I see it as a way for someone else to control what I created. MY PRODUCTS. MY CREATIONS. I should decide what I want to keep or what I want to delete, or modify. 

[tnestico]

I am very grateful to Zazzle showing me the products that are not working and telling me that it would be good to change it a bit or make better tags and titles. Because of this I made better products and deleted some old and very bad ones. I never get a lot of hidden ones as I check my store daily and take care of the hidden ones needing optimization right away.

[pichick712]

why not let THEM create the products for you while you are at it? 

[ulla_hennig]

Let me say one final thing:

1. we are the creators, but Zazzle is the company which owns our stores. Zazzle pays for server capacity. They as owners have an interest in getting a profit out of our creations, and we get provisions. 
2. we do not have to pay for listings - in difference to redbubble and society6 which have both now put up a system where creators have to pay; having an etsy shop means having to pay for the listings.
3. you are free to ignore the messages; it took a while till I understood that "optimizing" not only means fixing titles, tags and such, but also promotion. I go through my products in a regular way and whenever I think that a good design is hidden I do a bit of promotion - writing a blogpost, or promoting it on X or - creating a mockup. With some hidden designs I care and with some of them I do not - that's my decision as creator.
4. We are responsible for promoting our products. I promote those I think are interesting, appealing and well done. 

Just my 2 cents.

[pichick712]

I respect what you say but I disagree vehemently. NO ONE is making any money off of products that ZAZZLE chooses to hide. 

[tnestico]

That, that you just said makes no sense. So many people are trying to help you in many ways but you won't listen. Just stop now, give you hidden products a new view and make them public one by one. Do it every day, just open them in a new tab and then close the tabs, it's pretty fast to do; but do it or they will go to be hidden again if you just do it in bulk without viewing them one by one. Keep on top of it and you will never have so many products hidden again. Also be honest with the products that you think you should keep, and delete some... and yes, there is only so much optimization that you can do, so what I do I unhide them and give them a new view if they don't need any optimization. I don't know how you have so many products, I don't think I even have close to 3000, maybe only 2500, I don't know where to go to see how many products I have, I found it once and then I forgot how to find it again; I'm trying to make more products, but I want to make good ones, not just to make products that won't even get seen and so not sell... start anew and release your anger and bitterness... you'll feel better, you'll see. And no, I don't make top dollars on Zazzle... also I will give a look at that other site you said you also sell on and see if it's better than Zazzle. Thanks.

[Barbara]

---

@tnestico wrote:

I don't know where to go to see how many products I have, I found it once and then I forgot how to find it again;

---

In the back end of your store, look at the top right where you'll see a number next to "results." That will be the number of products in the store. If you have more than one store, you'll have to look for that number in each store and add up the numbers.

Colorwash's Home

[tnestico]

Thank you Barbara, I'll do that!

[pichick712]

In my lifetime at a possible rate of 204 per click, how can I make over 16,000 products public after zazzle decided to make them hidden? So to the people who think optimizing is a good thing, try and walk in my shoes. I spend over an hour each day UNDOING or TRYING TO UNDO all zazzle has done and funny how my UNDOING is actually increasing my sales. MAYBE THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE DONE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. if you think you are not losing sales by their "optimizing" you are wrong. YOU ARE. I emailed them on more than one occasion to ask for their justification for making over 16,000 of my products hidden and they have yet to provide me with any explanation at all. Spending time UNDOING this is a waste of time because it should have been done in the first place. And to the people who think I should just "get over it", how many products have you had to make public because zazzle CHOSE TO hide them? This is nothing more than LOST SALES for everyone. You are free to disagree with me but I doubt you have had to undo tens of thousands of products. 

[Angelandspot]

I have to unhide products daily and it is so very annoying esp. since sometimes even on the day I hit make public again they are sold.  How many sells are we missing out on when something is hidden?  I even find stuff I have sold being hidden at times and we were told stuff that had sold would never be hidden.

[Connie]

That's a good example of how optimization works! You refresh the listing, and then it has a better chance in the marketplace so that you actually get sales, instead of those 16k products just stagnating with no views!

It's a big job now, but unless you listed all those 16k products at once, they were slowly being added to the optimization needed section over many months or years, so you could have worked on them a few at a time and refreshed them so they would have a chance to sell.

Of course, I don't know your personal situation- perhaps you were very sick or something and had to let your stores go for a few years. If that's the case, I'm sorry, but unfortunately now you are stuck with a big mess to clean up. Not your fault, not Zazzle's fault, just an unfortunate "lemon to lemonade" situation.

That's good to set yourself an hour each day to optimize products. Taking small bites keeps you from getting overwhelmed and burned out. Slowly but surely you'll get caught up, at least with the most important products that have the best chance of selling.

[Barbara]

That's what happened to me, the hidden products building up because I fell back in September and broke my wrist, negating my ability to work on Zazzle. Now I'm able to use the keyboard again--slowly--so I'm doing just a bit of it each day, first choosing products I think have a chance of selling, and deleting products that have been through this several times already. I've also remade a few products that had no text templates. It takes time to do these things, but it's worth it. I recently sold something I'd renewed several times, and the difference was that I'd added a template the last time I renewed it.

Hidden products can be an eye opener even though we hate dealing with them. If there's a subset that seems to have something in common that isn't attracting customers, it's either time to get rid of them or remake them.

And no, these aren't our stores. We don't own them. They're more like file folders that Zazzle maintains, and though the designs may have been created by us, we've entered into an agreement with Zazzle, allowing them to put those designs on their products, to ship them, to deal with customers, to do all the heavy bookkeeping, to maintain the servers where the designs are stored. They and their suppliers have total control over all of it--just as it should be. After all, they're footing the bill.

Colorwash's Home

[pichick712]

WHY DO WE HAVE TO EVEN DO THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE? if Zazzle would just let US manage our stores NO ONE would have to place catch up and UNDO what they have done. 

[pichick712]

I understand that you are sayin but WHY does zazzle have to do this in the first place and require us THE CREATORS to UNDO what they have done just to get our products sold? THEY made all these products hidden and FOR YEARS, I have been begging them to STOP THIS. it does no good to anyone. WE, the creators should have control over our products, NOT zazzle. 

[Martin]

I can't be the only one thinking "Why are you blaming Zazzle for trying to make the site better?"

If I visit a B&M shop and it is full of exciting things that grab my attention and people are buying lots of items, that is a successful store. They get rid of the clutter that doesn't sell to ensure their continued success. More people hear of the exciting range available and even more people come to visit. That is good business.

Zazzle have the same approach, so surely that is good business?

I have items that don't sell. I review them. Is it the artwork, title tags, etc. If all looks good do I need to promote it in someway. Sometimes I just have to accept that other people (ie the buying public) feel the design is not as good as I thought and therefore Zazzle were right to cull it. I need to "pull up my big pants, take it on the chin" and go design something that sells lots. Granted that last bit is not easy.

[pichick712]

and I can't understand why people are so blindly allowing zazzle to dictate what we sell. does zazzle have some crystal ball where they KNOW 10000% what a customer is looking for? can YOU say that u are happy with them deciding what you should be doing with YOUR creations? If so, then fine but I am NOT. what makes them the "be all and know all"? You should also know u are losing sales because of what THEY are doing with YOUR products. Why do u even bother creating anything? let them do it all.