It has been confirmed, the discrepancies in totals do not appear to reflect 0% referrals. Re the bug ( specific to me?) I believe I noted the difference in totals before the change took place, so back to the drawing board on that one?
The question is do other P2 affiliates note large variations in total numbers re these two reporting features.
Note: In my case the discrepancy is in the thousands.
Either way I still have not heard anything re how many 0% referrals I have had.
You said yourself that you noticed the difference in totals (Ref History vs Ref Total pages) before you opted-out of the PP2 program. So you know that
"We can confirm that this is a reporting bug that we discovered due to you being switched from the Promoter program back to the Affiliate program."
is not correct. In addition to your own first-hand knowledge, you can search the forums and find all the mentions over time by numerous other Creators re these "$0 dollar referrals". And as recently as Nov 3, I used a promoter link to purchase one of my own postcards and that Promoter was watching their stats in real-time when I did it and was able to confirm that their Ref Total went up by 1 (and stayed that way) even though nothing ever showed in their History. Do you think it's a coincidence that as we were doing that the system glitched and their Total just randomly increased by 1 at the same time? I can also say that my numbers (never in the Promoter program so no 'ghost referrals') have no discrepancy. My "All Referrals" vrs total shown in my Referral History are off by exactly the amount of cancelled referrals I've had.
The people on the other end of inquiries to support are just human employees of Zazzle and sometimes they don't understand the question as it was posed and sometimes even when they do they don't know what's the right answer as they only know what they've been told by whoever they in turn consulted with. You've been participating in the forums long enough to have seen countless examples of this disconnect by now. This is not a rag on Z's CS, it's just the way it is with most companies; CS / tech support knows how things are supposed to be but they can' know all the ins & outs and specific weirdnesses a particular user might be experiencing or why. In your specific situation, because you do/have done a high volume of referrals and because you recently switched from Promoter to regular affiliate, is is possible that your numbers got skewed, but I think you are contributing to the spread of misinformation by saying all-encompassing things like "it has been confirmed, the discrepancies in totals do not appear to reflect 0% referrals" when real-world evidence points to the contrary.
Your suggestion they can't even understand the question is offensive.
I'm sorry that's all you chose to boil my comments down to. A recent example of the "disconnect" I was talking about would be the poster who said they emailed support re optimizing products and were told they have to do it one by one. But we know that's not the case, that one can use bulk select to do it, and the OP learned that by reading the responses of other Creators. Another example would be being told by support that short PID style links won't work as "clean" links for Promoters, they have to be the full URL. But real-world testing proved that not to be the case. Anyone who's ever worked a customer-facing job knows it can sometimes be like pulling teeth to figure out what exactly the person is trying to report/get help with, and on the other end, anyone who's ever contacted support (not just Zazzle) can understand the frustration of hitting a brick wall with scripted responses or a cs/tech who quite understandably doesn't/can't have all the answers. In a case like yours where someone has multiple issues and is in constant "comms" with support, it's no surprise to me that things might get a little garbled and that's not offensive, it's just how it is.
As a very high-level Creator (you're not shy about saying how successful you've been) you know your words carry a lot of weight with people. So I just think you should be a little more careful with them. You see my posts as arguing with you but from the beginning of your very public campaign against Zazzle you've been short on supplying actual data to back up your claims and I've just been trying to coax some actual numbers out of you. Since you're threatening legal action that includes request for compensation for lost income, you should be able to provide hard uncontestable data as to what that lost income is. I asked you to compare your linkovers to $0 referrals, to see how problematic they are. You said you don't have an iPhone so can't do that. I showed you you don't need the iPhone app to come up with a %, and your response was, I'm too upset about all this to continue this discussion. It's clear you have a bone to pick with Zazzle but facts trump emotions and I've been pushing you to provide some. It doesn't matter what is being communicated between you and Zazzle behind the scenes, what matters is the cherry-picked tidbits you choose to post here for public consumption to sway people to your negative way of thinking. I have tried other PODs and Zazzle is by far the best IMO. That it's also a free platform, no fees unless/until you actually sell something, that's amazing! So yeah, I am opposed to you publicly dragging their reputation through the mud while being unable/unwilling to provide factual data. You recently mentioned you're disappointed with the lack of support from other designers, but we are all entitled to our own opinions and without factual data to go on, that's all we all have - opinions.
That's my feeling. It does still go to the product, just a different presentation of it and there's nothing in the terms that says Zazzle needs our permission to change their site design.
I keep reading that people now have to jump through hoops and do all this extra clicking to get to the product page so it's a sales deterrent, but it's just one huge and very obvious button to click.
And they don't even have to click that. If they click any of the images to view it larger they are switched to the detailed page. The landing page shows a couple different views of the product, the price, the sale price, and a link to the Creator's store. If people like what they see (and they liked it enough to click your random promo link wherever they encountered it) then I can't see this one extra click on an obvious button stopping them from viewing the full details if they're interested. If people want to order the product they have to register for a Zazzle account and go through the order process just to see how much standard shipping will cost. That IMO is a way bigger deterrent to sales. From both a Creator and e-shopper viewpoint, I don't see this one extra click to view all the details as a big deal.
People have been reporting for months that sales are unusually low for them, even some high-level designers, and if sales are down then of course referrals would be down too. There have been many threads about this with people theorizing it might be the economy or Covid or world events ... Noone can actually know for sure so I feel like the landing page has become the scapegoat for everything as it's a tangible thing people can blame.
I don't believe the 60 "other designs from this category" are any threat to sales of your product as they are rarely related in any way to yours unless yours is of the same generic photo collage type design as always on the category landing pages. I don't mean that to be disrespectful to the designers making that type of design as they're obviously getting sales (or at least I assume they are as they are always the type on the front pages), it's more of a frustration with why it's always this type of design in the forefront. To me personally, from a e-shopper viewpoint not just that of a Creator, it's boring. How many versions of merry-xmas-add-your-photo(s) here does one have to look at before they all start looking the same? Zazzle has SOOO much more to offer yet if you're navigating product main pages (and the "other designs you might like" on the landing page are just a re-showing of these) it's just a whole bunch of same. Yawn. So going back to the title subject of this thread, for me it's not that it's often the same designers, it's the lack of interesting style variations that would attract different markets. Some people would like to buy things for themselves, not everyone comes to Zazzle just for a personalized "grandma pillow" to give as a gift.
I'm sure Zazzle has their stats/reasons for why they are showing these as the "other designs from this category" but I truly don't understand it. If they are hoping to improve sales across the board, I would think that those 60 other designs shown should be an expansion of the "other designs you might like" where they are actually related to the main design and therefore much more likely to be looked at and bought which benefits everyone. As is, I don't see what showing these non-related designs is accomplishing other than irritating affiliates.
I don't know if that is the mobile view or not but I clicked one of my recent pins and it didn't even show my product until I scrolled down. Someone said they noticed this change with mugs but I'm sure it will be all products soon. As an associate I would hope that should still grant a referral (I have emailed a couple of times with no answer there.) But it basically shows the homepage unless you scroll down, then you see the view product details and one main photo with loads of other peoples. That includes designs similar to the one I clicked on. So my guess is your viewing from desktop or a different browser than I am. Just giving a little perspective. At this point I will be deleting my referral links as Pinterest doesn't let me edit them and I've not gotten a response to my email.
Huh. Are you using the Pinterest app or going to PInterest via your phone's browser? I rarely use my phone for these kinds of things so going to check it out now to see what I can see.
OK, I just tried it on my new Samsung phone running Android, using both the Pinterest app and going to it via browser instead (I use Firefox on my phone) and results looked the same both ways.
I tried manual pins I made that linked direct to a product page, plus ones I pinned using Zazzle's share button. Also tried some random pins from others of Zazzle products. The pages always looked like the above. Do you have a link to one of these pins giving you the odd results you are describing?
Looks like you may have stumbled on a beta test for a new "landing page" layout as I can see what you mean now on both my phone and computer, but only with mugs and only with links out from Pinterest and Facebook. I get the regular "landing page" any other way. The only difference is they added the 6 categories to top of page (which I don't like as again, it's unrelated to the main product type/design) and on the small mobile screen, that breaks into two lines pushing the main product down. 😞
