You might want to check this out. Has anyone else seen this?

I discovered some while back that some products I had created long ago were no longer in any public category - the edit panel just showed 'none selected' for public categories #1 and #2. Yesterday I discovered that I had not fixed them all (or some new instances had arisen).

The problem is that if they are not assigned to any category they do not show up in marketplace searches, although they do still show up if navigated to via your store. So the affected products are invisible to visitors unless they enter your store.

It's easy enough to fix, though tedious if you have many, but detecting the affected products is not so easy. The number of products shown in your store or in any given category will still include the affected products so you'd not see a difference there. I'm fortunate that in my main store generally all the products in a given category have a unique product tag in common plus I know how many products should be in each category. So I can go to the marketplace and type my storename and one of those unique tags into the search box and crosscheck the number of products that come up. For stores organized differently, ferreting out the affected products might be a lot trickier.

Squizzler
Zazzle with Pizazz - tips for zazzlers

Yes that's strange isn't it. It affected perhaps less than 1% of my products, all of which I hope have now been detected and properly categorized. All those affected were created in early 2009 so I don't think it's an ongoing issue. Perhaps I carried on creating products during a technical glitch when it might have been wiser to hold off and go do some marketing instead.

I'd be surprised if anyone will figure out an explanation for it but I wanted to alert other SKs because it's very easy to miss, although I have since thought of a quicker test that should highlight the issue.

As long as you have not recently created any products you can compare the number of products indicated when you select 'View all Products' in your store (adjusting for any private products you may have) and the number shown when you search the marketplace using your username as the keyword. If the MP number is less you may have this issue. (If the MP number is more then someone else may be using your username as a tag and you might want to report that to Zazzle).

Squizzler