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I know it's naive to think that my post will change anything, but things have come to a point where I have too much to lose to leave it without a word. (And I've just read that some criticism here won't lead to punishment in the marketplace.)
Like many other designers, I'm experiencing a decline in sales. It would be comfortable for me too to blame it on the economy, but all my other POD accounts are acting normally (October = 3x August). Despite spending 100% of my POD time here since the mockup misery and the collections update.
Unlike others, I believe the main factor in decreasing sales is the heavy manual intervention in the marketplace placements. Definitely not the collections, maybe not the mockups or any changes announced, but things happening under the hood. It seems that Zazzle's new approach is not showing customers what they want but showing them what they want them to want. But, as results show, it doesn't work like that. Apparently, the crowd can better decide what's popular (with their money) than some Editors (with their picks).
A year ago, when I was browsing in some random product category, I was thinking if I had more money, I would buy this and that, and those too. Everything looked so nice and professional. Now I scroll through the first page of literally any category and don't like what I see enough to go to the second page. Yes, some awful mockups definitely don't help (and I say this knowing that I suck at mockups too), but prioritizing pages of designs that one employee liked at some point will drive away customers who are used to seeing beautiful and trendy things here.
I like to believe that the intent was good, but the implementation went astray. I understand that Zazzle wants to reward certain designers and influence buyers, but it could be done wiser in my opinion.
So just a suggestion: why don't you put one Editor's pick in every other row and let customers see the organically popular items too (bought with real money), as it used to be. If you placed a few EPs on the first pages, they would have the opportunity to catch up, but they would be put back into their normal places a few days later (I mean like some rotation system). This way, the category pages would have the popular and best-selling products but always show something new to keep visitors coming back.
Sorry for the length and the poor English.
