Products & Merchandising

Merchandising is all about making your store - your storefront - easy and fun to shop. Think about some of your favorite stores, both online and in the real world, and use them for inspiration! There are some special tricks to helping people and search engines find you online, and we'll give you some tips here on how to make that work for you.

Quick links to the sections below:

• Product Mix & Design Refresh
  • Regular Product Additions - Keep it fresh!
  • Variety is the spice of life...
• Categorization & Sorting
  • Put your best stuff in the front window
  • Organize your stuff into Product Lines
• Detailed, Relevant Titles & Descriptions
• Additional Resources - SEO
• Multiple Galleries
• Recommend Similar Products

Product Mix & Design Refresh

Regular Product Additions - Keep it fresh!

Regularly adding new products helps keep your store fresh, which is key to attracting new customers & garnering additional sales from previous customers. In addition to new designs, you may want to add or simply feature seasonal products (tank tops for summer, anyone?) around holidays or topical & current event themes that are relevant to your customers. Also, the more products/ product pages you have, the more opportunity you have to attract traffic from search engines.

Quick start tutorial on how to create new products: http://www.zazzle.com/sell/gallery/screenshots

Variety is the spice of life...

When coming up with your product mix, remember to take advantage of the variety of products you can create on Zazzle - light shirts, dark shirts, hats, mugs, stickers, cards, business cards, ties, buttons, stamps, posters, aprons, baby apparel - and adapt your most popular designs for each type of item. You can use the exact same image on every item, but Zazzle makes it easy for you to visualize and design specifically for that product's dimensions, colors & applications, so you really can create infinite inventory for display to your customers and strike their fancy.

Categorization & Sorting

Put your best stuff in the front window

They don't call it window shopping for nothin'! To merchandise your "front window" (a.k.a. your store homepage), we've provided two categories to feature specific products: "Featured" and "Top Picks" (you can rename these if you like - simply click "edit title" on the Featured or Top Picks settings page), as well as automated "Most Popular" and "Recent" categories.

Go to MyZazzle and click "Public Products", then check the boxes next to products you want to show up as Featured or Top Picks and click "And to Featured" or "Add to Top Picks". To delete products from the Featured/ Top Picks categories or edit the titles, clisk on that category name on the left-hand nav bar to manage them.

You can showcase 12 products on your store home page - it's a good idea to display a good mix of designs AND product types (mugs, shirts, hats, stamps, cards) to demonstrate depth as a glance as well as showing off your best work. Also see the "

Organize your stuff into Product Lines

Make it easy for customers to browse your products by grouping them in a way that makes sense. Use "Categories" to cluster similar products together - and be sure to use descriptive names and icons for them to make navigation easier.

From My Zazzle, click on Products and view your Public Products. Click on Add New Category. From this dialog you can enter the category name, description, and upload an icon (square 158 x 158 pixel images work best). A default folder icon will be used if you do not upload one of your own.

On the Edit Product page, click "change" Seller Store Category and select the Product Line on the pop-up (3). Be sure to save your changes. When you create new products, you can categorize them straight away on the Edit Product page in the same way, Your Product Lines will show up on the right-hand navigation in your store.

...or a full grid:

Visit our Store Category Sorting and Browsing help page for more information.

Detailed, Relevant Titles & Descriptions

Make it easy to find your products by implementing great titles & descriptions, which are good for both search engines & humans. Start at the top - your store homepage! The most important text for search engines is the Store Title, followed pretty immediately by the description which shows up as search-engine readable text on your store page, then any tags. On Zazzle, you can edit these fields easily: go to MyZazzle and click the "Manage Store" button (1), then "Edit Title & Description" (2) to ensure they describe the kinds of designs & products you offer (3).

You can also add keyword-rich text on your "About Me" profile page to attract people who have similar interests - do you support a specific political viewpoint, feature a particular dog breed, or have the greatest selection of Celtic knot designs? Name names in your profile to attract like-minded potential customers. From MyZazzle, click "My Profile" to change your Personal Information which shows up in your About Me.

When you post a product for sale, use a descriptive product name (which ends up in the title tag for that product's page as weel as formulating part of the product page's URL), a full bodied description & relevant tags on the "Edit Product" page. The product name/ title tag & URL are the key items search engines look to match up when someone enters a search term, and is the primary text that shows up in the results on search engines. Relevant tags and keyword-rich descriptions are critical for best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) results both on the Zazzle Marketplace and through Google and other search engines in helping customers find and buy your products.

There are absolute volumes written on this subject (a few reference sites are included below if you want to delve deeper), but here are just a few key SEO best practices to bear in mind as you compose your titles & descriptions:

• Be specific: specific keywords and phrases work better than broad ones to target potential buyers. Instead of just "Christmas shirt", try "vintage Christmas cartoon reindeer ringer shirt". Some good places to start thinking about keywords are to come up with a description of the image or design (e.g. "Richard Nixon victory sign photo"), description of the item (e.g. ladies baby doll tee), a specific occasion your product relates to (e.g. Election 2008, Mother's Day, wedding), etc.
• Stay relevant: though instinct may tell you to throw as wide a net as possible, search engines will ding you if they find you are "spamming" keywords that have nothing to do with your product or page (yes, they can tell). Humans who don't find that you've advertised after clicking through won't be too happy with you either.
• Think like a shopper: What words would you put into a search box to find your product? Those are the terms you should include in your product name and description as well as tags.

Additional Resources - SEO

iMedia Connection article: 10 tips for building a search keyword list:
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/18773.asp

Search Engine Watch: Search Engine Marketing 101:
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters

Search Engine Watch: How Search Engines Rank Web Pages:
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167961

The SEO rapper on YouTube:
http://youtube.com/user/m0serious

Multiple Galleries

Do you have multiple galleries on Zazzle that encompass multiple product lines each? Link all your galleries together to make it easier for customers to browse across ALL your designs! You can add html into your gallery description to include text links, or better yet, image links to other galleries - see a great example here: http://www.zazzle.com/occupationtshirts

Recommend Similar Products

Increase your orders by recommending similar products to your customers. Have matching cards & stamps? A hat that matches a bag? Complimentary party invites & shirts? Merchandise them together!

Grab the html code from "link to this" on your "recommended" product page (1), and insert it into the individual product description where you want the recommendation to show up (2) to link to related products in your gallery and potentially "upsell" additional items, increasing your order size. See a great example here: http://www.zazzle.com/photoinspiration/product/137795081923035116?ZCMP=ProductPageRecs2