Back in December, I checked my stores in preparation for my website launch, and noticed that a
LOT of my Zazzle item listings are missing!! 😨
Were the materials out of stock? Where they no longer offering these items?
I searched my e-mail for all the newsletters Zazzle sent me and couldn't find anything about site changes that could have caused this. I also looked for notifications from Zazzle but only found the ones telling me my products had been posted for sale back in 2023.
I then went digging around on the web to see what could have caused this strange occurrence to happen and if anyone else came across the same issue. This lead me to Zazzle's community forums where someone posted a topic about their items missing during the year I stopped uploading designs. They noted that there were changes to the collection rules...could this possibly have something to do with my situation? I checked out the page on how this feature works but couldn't find anything that I may have exceeded with the rules; I didn't have that many items in my collections...even if there were, how would that have effected my item listings? Wouldn't the excess just...be removed from the collection instead of completely removed from my stores?
I read further into the forum topic, and the community manager responded by stating that items may be hidden due to needing optimization. I went over to that page, and saw that the products we list have to meet one of three criteria:
• Has been sold at least once
• Has been published, edited or viewed within the last 15 months
• Is a product type which was added to the Zazzle site within the past 2 years
My listings should have fallen under the last one. I may have timed out of the 15 months, but I took somewhere around a year off; the last thing I added was in 2023...or is this rule referring to a type of customizable item they added to the site within that timeframe?
I checked my account and it's telling me that I don't have any hidden items...there's nothing under review, I only see old listing drafts...My profile completion was at 75% as I was investigating my issue and now it somehow sank to 50%?! Is this lowering percentage hindering the features of my account in any way? Like, is it limiting the amount of items I can display publicly?
I just recently received notification about optimization:
Why is it only three products when they aren't the only ones I'm having issues with?
These listings aren't hidden at all, they're a few of the remaining visible items in my shop!
And when I selected one of them, I'm not even told what's wrong with the item!
I looked at other sections of my account and discovered that all of the items I had assigned to my collections weren't deleted from the site. They're all still listed as active:
But customers see this:
And clicking on one of them leads to no results:
I did s'more digging around on Zazzle's community forums to find
other sellers who were dealing with a case of missing items and it came down to a glitch on the website's end. Ok, so, if I'm experiencing the same glitch, will my items
randomly come back? I don't know exactly when my items disappeared from public view, but surely it's been months...would a massive glitch cause items to missing for THIS long? Why would my stuff from two years ago still need to be indexed?
One day, I got curious and decided to click a
link to a missing item on my Pinterest account to see what would happen...
I was soon met with this page:
My "Always Thankful for Pie" design is extremely inoffensive. It didn't need a mature rating and it was something I originally came up with. I searched the phrase on Zazzle and on Google to see if it was falsely flagged as infringing someone else's design and didn't find any images using the exact phrase, nor a design that looked exactly like mine.
I always put accurate and generic tags in my listings. Was I too spammy somehow? It can't be through the number of tags, they don't allow you to exceed ten. And I'm not going to type the same tag more than once...I used emojis in my descriptions instead of words, but it was always somewhere around one to five of them. Would Zazzle really have an issue with me using a small amount of these for each description under the appropriate design? Sounds a bit overkill...
It also doesn't make sense...I did this with items that are still publicly visible.
My whole pie design didn't go missing, it's still being
sold on aprons:
And it's hard to label this as an item stock issue, because they're STILL selling round pillows!
How did only
one of my pillow designs get to stay visible?!
If it was a stock or supplier issue, I would be alerted about it...or at least I should be.
Because of this, I'm not fully convinced it's a design problem.
It definitely has more to do with item listings...could there be multiple reasons?
UGH! I'M SO CONFUSED RIGHT NOW! 😵
This has to be the biggest downside to print-on-demand...you're relying on another company to manage your items, who can take them down from their website for any reason whatsoever, without notifying you about what you did wrong, and leave you having to figure it out yourself...I did all this running around in digital circles with more questions than answers...
I'm disappointed over this, but I'm not gonna get too mad...I'm slowly building things back up anyway. I had no idea I'd have to watch out for that...If it is just a glitch, I wonder if I just have to edit the listings to get things working again. I might have to contact Zazzle directly and share an update on my response later....
Or maybe not do anything at all.
I'm...honestly thinking of deleting, privatizing or further downsizing my presence on that site. I love the variety that the site his in comparison to others, but Zazzle is so pricy...their best keychains cost over $12. I'm not confident about the amount effort I'm putting into my stores over there, paying off. Well...
Time to think this over!
~*K-Tee ✍🏾👩🏾🐹
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