Delete or leave hidden products flagged for optimization?

[terryjstudio]

Although I try to do an optimization sweep once a month, I must have been uber creative 15 months ago. Suddenly Zazzle has kindly tagged 7 pages of products for optimization! Three days in to this tedious process, I am losing my mind. Not to mention it's really time to be getting holiday product ready to promote. 

A large number of the flagged products are seasonal, summer or summer zodiac signs. It doesn't make a lot of sense to spend all this effort now when they aren't likely to be seen/shopped until a year from now anyway. If I just leave them tagged does this drop my Z rank? I've been advised NOT to delete product (in a zazzle class I took) so I don't know best course of action at this point. Advise? suggestions on more bulk type actions on products with same design? Any help??

[Connie]

Personally, I would leave them alone, especially the summer items. If you wait until next year, after optimization they'll have a better chance of getting viewed again, so you won't have to go through the same thing again with the same products. I haven't even checked my Optimization Needed products in a long time, and I haven't noticed a difference in Zrank. I heard that hidden products don't affect Zrank, but take that with a grain of salt until Zazzle confirms it.

What you could do, is make sure all your Christmas products are optimized, and then slowly work on a few when you have some spare time, or are in the mood.Some things you can look at to determine if it is worth optimizing the products, are if you have other products with the same design that are selling, if the season is relevant at this time, if there are any obvious design flaws that you'd have to fix, and if they are still viable as far as trends.

As far as deleting, you probably took the same class I took, and yes, the advise is not to delete them. But with some of my old products that were done using QC, as long as I still have some products with that design, I do delete the really dumb ones, or ones with glaring errors if they haven't gotten any views or sales. I have a hidden folder for all my hidden products, so they don't clutter up my store.

[Barbara]

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@Connie wrote:

Personally, I would leave them alone, especially the summer items.

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Rereading this thread, I spotted your mention of not bothering with summer items, and two friends popped into my head who took a winter trip to Australia and New Zealand where it was summer. There are always travelers to South America too. And there are those warmer climes in the Northern Hemisphere. I doubt we see many sales in such instances, but just in case...

Designers have also experienced sales of Christmas items at the oddest times of year.

Conclusion: Perhaps updating such products might be left for last to do, but maybe they ought to be updated nevertheless.

Colorwash's Home

[Barbara]

Having been out of the game for most of the spring (remodeling kitchen and a bout with covid), I ended up with many pages of hidden products. I worked first on those for the upcoming season, then on those in popular collections that deserved to have their full allotment. After that, I went after designs I personally liked, finishing up with more ho-hum designs. I sure as heck didn't do this all in one shot. It took a number of days.

Now that I'm done with this, I've noticed that, as soon as a product slips into the hidden realm, we're warned by the new notifications we see at the top of the page, which means we can keep up with things a bit at a time rather then suddenly remembering we ought to check our hidden section.

Colorwash's Home

[CrazyMermaid]

I don't do anything with them - ever. My z-rank has been a 9 forever. I don't know if it matters or not. 

[Barbara]

I don't think it matters as per zRank, but sometimes it matters that a design is good but its title and tags are not so good. I've had a few designs sell after sprucing up the verbiage, though not necessarily often enough to make it worth fussing over. There are designs that simply don't attract customers.

Colorwash's Home

[terryjstudio]

5 and a half months later I am revisiting all your helpful remarks. I did get through the mass optimization but I deleted a lot of products sort of Marie Kondo style, if I just didn't love them anymore. I also noticed I get a few optimization notifications weekly which are easier to keep up with. However, I did not think about what the deleted products would do creating empty links to Pinterest. My pinterest biz account was suspended without warning last week. I don't KNOW why as I didn't violated any of their hate speech or spam rules. SO now I wonder if if a number of dead links could have been the cause. Just a cautionary tale. 

[LisaMG]

I was thinking about the Pinterest thing as well if products are deleted. I think after reading a few threads about this, I'll just unhide things and not mess too much with going in and changing things especially if they've already been changed a number of times already and still getting no views. Just took a Zazzle Skillshare class so I'm working again on my shop. If nothing picks up by year's end I think I'll just let Zazzle keep the couple of bucks I've made over the last few years and say bye-bye. 😬