I just stopped by to check because the same is happening with me. I had a drop of almost 50% in sales. I do believe the economy is playing a big part on it. Which is very frustrating because we also depend on Zazzle money to complement my income. I've done it all, invested in covers, increased social media presence but nothing is working. 😞 Good luck to all, stay strong!
There are probably multiple reasons for sales being down, but the godawful search tool isn't helping one little bit.
I believe there are number of factors contributing to the decline in sales many are experiencing, but I think this is one of the big ones. Given the overwhelming over-saturation of products in any niche, a user-friendly & efficient search is absolutely essential. I couldn't pretend to understand the expertise required to develop & maintain a smart search engine but Zazzle's is really suffering and I think the level of complexity on Z is a major contributing factor to that.
First, there are the specific product types as determined by Zazzle per the blanks you use to create a product, and then the categories you as the Creator can assign something to. So for example you can design playing cards but instead of having them at the default of
Sports, Toys & Games --> Toys & Games --> Card Games --> Playing Cards
you can choose to instead put them in
Weddings --> Invitations & Stationery --> Wedding Invitations
So if someone is searching for keyword + product type, assuming no product type is used in the tags, would search see this item as playing cards (actual product type as defined by Z) or wedding invitation (product type defined by Creator). Then there's the tags we as Creators choose to influence search results. And there's the product type Z usually automatically appends to the title which invisibly factors into search in unknown ways. And all these things can conflict with each other.
Second, we have product types that can also be keyword descriptors, further snarling search. Like say a pillow (product type) with a design featuring a steaming cup of coffee. Coffee cup is also a product type but could rightfully be used in the tags to describe the pillow design so now we have people searching for a coffee mug getting pillows in their results.
Describing a design is subjective so in addition to these technical complications, we have Creators, intentionally or not, using inappropriate tags. Did you all know that temp placeholder template text is factored into search? So if you are searching for, say, 1st bday invitations, you might also get 2nd bday invitations - because '2nd Street' was used in the template text as part of the sample address. In this vein of inappropriate tags, we have the influx of spam accounts purposefully tag-spamming/stuffing so that, say, their tshirt featuring an apple for Best Teacher comes up in searches for 'german shepherd lover'. This is something I think Zazzle could do something about, but as is it's on us to report the egregious examples of such we encounter so they are hopefully removed.
On top of all these programming hurdles, sometimes search is just inexplicably borked. You can see my posts in the Tech forum for two prime examples re 'police american flag' and 'tie-dye leggings'. Another one I found today after publishing my second-ever wedding invite is that a search for multiple keywords including 'doves' + wedding invitation yielded 880 results. Scrolling through the first 5 pages of results (300 products at 60 per page), there were only four products scattered among the results that actually had doves as part of the design. Three had doves in the design and used 'doves' somewhere in the tags and/or title. The fourth had birds that were only described as 'love birds' in the tags. The other 876 results were irrelevant to my search as the designs included no birds at all, doves or not.
And then there are people saying that despite their product having tags that match every single specific keyword used in a search, they aren't included in results at all.
I've been running on in detail here but bottom line is, yes, I believe the problems with search is indeed a major factor in declining sales.
Brava! I could not have said it better! I have a store with solid z rank 9 for years now - I sell a lot in that store, still sell today but my sales dropped to 25% of what it was before the collection change, for no good reason.
Worse, I did spend money in subscriptions for images to make covers, spend a lot of time making product cover, specially for those that are really hard because they need to match Zazzle product format, such as paper plates and cups. I spend hours and hours updating the store, I am aware that there is still a lot of things to be updated but I feel like the more work I put on the covers, the less I sell. I have very limited time so I only focused on my Zrank9 store.
I have just stopped now and decided to branch out to other Print on Demand websites to see how it goes. If I had used the energy I used on creating covers on putting designs in other sites, I would have been much better off right now. To be frank, that is what happened before with Cafepress and I moved to Zazzle. It is very frustrating.
Sorry for the rant!
That's terrific, I know the golf ball situation was dogging you for a long time, I'd even tried searching for them before.
Is this the first time you've edited the listings since the problem began? I'm wondering if it wasn't removing Joe from the tags but just editing them in some way that pulled them back out of the void?
