Issues changing a store name.

[1WhoConquers]

Here’s my dilemma… My store started out as BibleBasics411, an adjunct to a WordPress blog that’s long since gone. 

Since then, sticking with the Bible theme, specifically scriptures quoted on greeting cards, plaques, posters, etc, I switched the name to “Victorious Verses”. Sadly, that apparently doesn’t change the URL from store/biblebasics411 (understandably, don’t want to break links and mess with SEO). 

However, I’ve since changed the store name again, as my theme is more motivational, inspirational, meditative. So “Victorious Verses” became “Shine Shift”.

Great. Snagged the matching blog at WordPress, and I’m off and running. Just one thing (or two)…

1. The URL is still biblebasics411 {sigh}
2. RSS feeds I’m pulling from the store to auto-post on Twitter and Pinterest still say “Victorious Verses”. Argh! Not good! Confusing potential customers is never a good idea.

Thoughts? Possible solutions? 

Thanks
-K

[geo_barr]

It would be very nice if Zazzle would let us change store names, but it doesn’t look like that’s something that they want to do

[ColsCreations]

1. You can’t ever change the actual URL of a store. Inconvenient but understandable. It would be a sea of dead links if the URL changed, you’d have to re-print any advertising material you’ve printed the address on, repeat//returning customers wouldn’t know how to find you again, and it would create chaos with search engine indexing/ranking and site analytics.

2. Not familiar with RSS feeds but if it changed to Victorious Verses I’m sure the change to Shine Shift will eventually also take.

My thoughts are probably not what you want to hear but I have always felt its important to have consistent branding across all channels, on and off the internet and that includes URLs (and email addies) that match your business/brand. With Zazzle stores, you can either stick with the existing URL name you have or open a new store with the new name and re-build, losing all your stats in the process. OR, third option , you can change the name but not the URL resulting in a mismatch.

Here’s some things to consider about that mismatch on Zazzle.

If I search for biblebasics411  (your store’s URL name) I get 271 results that appear to all be yours.
If I search for “shine shift” (your store’s pseudo name) I get almost 13K results for [shift] because no results found for “shine shift”.

 If I search for shine shift (no quotes) I inexplicably only get nine results, none of which are you.

ETA: forgot to include that if I search for [shineshift] (no space) I gt ZERO results.

This is a problem as anyone who knows you as Shine Shift,  be it friends, family or potential customer, they wont be able to find you on Zazzle searching for that name. Also, if I add one of your Shine Shift products to my cart, in the cart it shows as ‘Artwork designed by BibleBasics411’ (so that’s probably what is printed on the order receipt, too, that they get with their shipment). As a customer, I would be like Huh? On the product page, all you see is Shine Shift, there is no way to see/know of the connection to biblebasics411 unless they happened to click the link to view your store and then if observant, they’d see the URL is biblebasics411. 

I know there are countless stores on Zazzle where the pseudo name no longer matches the URL so take this all with a grain of salt. I’m not trying to be a downer just wanting to point out things one probably wants to consider when renaming a store.

[ColsCreations]

Sorry, I thought this was a General Discussion post asking for thoughts, didn’t realize it was the Tech forum when I commented.

[1WhoConquers]

Thanks for doing those searches. That is some really useful information. Seriously contemplating just going back to BibleBasics411. Maybe God’s trying to tell me something.

Don’t know RSS? Oh, now you’ve opened a can of worms! I really need to write this up for the tricks and tips board, but I’m a teacher at heart, so here we go…

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a tool used to conglomerate various sources of information and “push” them. As a person, you would use an RSS reader app, tell it all the websites you want to read regularly, and have it just pull all the new info regularly so you don’t have to remember to go back to all those spots manually. Handy for news websites and blogs. And Zazzle has been kind enough to give us RSS versions of all our stores’ URLS. Not only that, you can add an affiliate id to the RSS URL and it will automatically get translated into affiliate commissions.

BUT that’s not the real gem…

When you use a SCHEDULER that supports pulling in data from RSS, you can set things up so all you have to do is post new product to your store, and the scheduler automatically pics those up via the RSS feed and cranks them out, by a schedule that you set.

Here’s the URL for my Father’s Day collection…
https://www.zazzle.com/collections/guiding_lights_of_fatherhood-119871648986788334?rf=238934623323789224

And here’s what it looks like, rewritten to work as a feed…
https://feed.zazzle.com/collections/119871648986788334/rss?at=238934623323789224

Real-life example: I created a collection where I was going to post a bunch of Father’s Day related items. I then gave my scheduler the RSS above for that collection, and told it to (1) post no more than three items a day, (2) automatically retweet, and (3) stop everything 10 days before Father’s Day. 

Because, with just RSS and no scheduling, I would end up with three dozen products getting dumped on Pinterest and X/Twitter and LinkedIn all at once. NOT GOOD! By setting up a pipeline specific to Father’s Day and an hourly schedule specific to Zazzle posts, I can still schedule other topics (some of which I have set up months in advance) without having them interfere with each other. 

The ONLY scheduler I know that handles all of that powerfully and seemlessly is Fedica. I used to be a Buffer fan, but sorry dudes, Fedica rocks!

Screenshots (RSS reader, and my Fedica pipeline settings)…

[ErnestoCool]

Can we ‘clone’ the existing store (under the old name) into a newly named store?  Then delete the old store (I don’t mind if all my stats are wiped out).  In my case I mistakenly mistyped my store name and want to correct the URL.