So I have a Christmas collection – same design but on a variety of products – cups, cards, linens, etc. What category do I use? This collection is same design/different products which is not available. Seems to me there is no reason to even follow through on this if I put Other on all of these. Most of my collections are same design/different products because I’m doing more home goods than paper goods.
Am I the only one that is having a problem with these categories?
I create mostly home goods, too. I also put the same designs on a variety of products in one collection. I’m having the same difficulty as you. If we use “other,” our collections won’t get shared, so choosing that category is useless (it should be removed as an option). The new collection changes are geared mostly towards weddings, graduations, bridal, and baby showers. That leaves creators in other niches in a bind. We have received very little feedback from Zazzle on what issues, if any, will be addressed. The only feedback I’ve seen so far from moderators is essentially, “embrace the collection changes.”
I’m using ‘Holiday-Christmas’ and ‘Cross-Sell’ for my collections like this. That does necessitate having a holiday card to complete the collection, but most of mine had that anyway. Can you add a card to your collection? Might be the easiest way to get these out of ‘other’ territory.
Sounds like I work the same way. I create the design, name a category for it and place all the new products with that design in that category. Along the way I will create a Collection for that category and put the products with the same design in that Collection.
At this point I am selecting Home & Living–Similar Style/Theme for all of my collections.
But I suggest not following my lead since I am making no sales.
Thanks for the suggestion
Sound like a good idea. I’ll look at that. I don’t remember seeing the Home/Living – guess 'cause there were so many occasions listed.
I’ve been going with Similar Style/Themes>Home/Living for these non-party collections with matching designs. Same design= Similar Style/Theme as far as I can see.
The Home Living is perfect. Thank you. BTW I decided to use the cross-sale/event suite because it says " . . . a similar theme and style across a complementary set of products. . ."
Seems to me what we are creating is a complementary set of products i.e. towels, shower curtains, mats – right?
Nancy,
That is an option to choose products that fit a niche.
I have a long list of products from many different categories that I group with the design. Perhaps some day I will move similar niche products to their own collection. For now I am just showcasing the design on a wide variety of products. It is too bad it is not working as I had hoped.
Hi all,
Thanks for all the feedback in this thread. I’ll pass this along to our team so we can get a further review on this.
All the best,
Pádraig
That is my same problem, I have put in home?? Right or wrong, I have no answer! Good luck!
Home & Living / Similar is my default category for anything with the same design… I do wish there was a “Paper products” / similar category or Gift Wrap & Party Supplies - I sell a lot of gift wrap, tags, paper plates etc. that aren’t specific to birthday or weddings.
Yes, I am thinking more collections would help? But I am the same I have collections where I have paper products that match gifts? At the moment I see no other option but to separate out into different collections to get out of other…
So far, I’ve placed everything in Home & Living, and the more I’ve thought about how that particular pot is full to overflowing because of all the niche creators and those with single design collections, the more I’ve been thinking Zazzle will be expanding the categories. In the meantime, how will it affect us if it isn’t quite the right category? Once the new display pages go public, I doubt Zazzle will refuse to display our “wrong” categories. After that, and assuming they give us more categories, we can slowly but surely recategorize our collections.
Just as long as we don’t use Other, I suspect all is good until things are fixed.
Yes, I really think that’s the way it’s going to go. This gradual rollout lets them tweak things as they happen. I am certain they will add more categories. Many holes have been pointed out in the events category (birthdays for teens, BBQ, family reunion) and Home & Living is getting rather overstuffed since it needs to accommodate not only home goods but often also clothes, accessories and electronics.
I’ve only taken a couple quick looks at my Collections since this change to the back-end operations rolled out to us and I noped right out of there. Some are marked as “Active” with an Occasion and/or Type already selected, some are Active - Other, most are just flagged as “Ready to Migrate”. I have been quietly reading all the posts and am entirely overwhelmed and lost. Categories, Events, Occasions, Sections, Preferred, Channels, Slots, Bonus Items, Compulsory items … what in the everlivingheck??? I salute all of you who are working through this blindly without any roadmap provided by Zazzle but my plan is to not do a dang thing until there’s a clear understanding of where all this is going and how changing X on my end will effect Y …
As is (as of today anyway) as a visitor, I can still see all my Collections, the tab for Collections is still on my store’s home page, I can still see the whole grid of them, displayed same way they always were, the “other products from this collection” is still on the product pages, I can still share a URL to a Collection … I can’t yet see the new Collection pod in beta on the product pages, but, what I can see is that all my Collections - even the ones flagged “Ready to Migrate” which scarily implies they are invisible since they aren’t “Active” - are all viewable and accessible to customers shopping. They’re not going to get any extra love from Z until I conform I guess, but they weren’t getting that anyway so I’m just going to sit tight and wait as this all gets ironed out.
That said, I gott’a vent now. I’m in the same boat with so many others who used Collections to house the same design on all kinds of unrelated products. We already have Categories that group things by product type, both Zazzle’s and the ones we can name ourselves, so why waste the power of Collections on product types again? When I look at other stores (usually because someone asked for feedback) there’s one frustration I often encounter as a “customer”: I might see a design I really like, say on a snow globe. But I have no use for a snow globe, so I scroll down to “other products in this Collection” to see what else I could buy this awesome design on, only to find it’s a collection of all more snow globes. Not helpful. If I wanted specifically a snow globe I could just navigate the MP (or that store) to that product type. If I want that design on something more useful to me, I have to find my way to the Creator’s storefront and then guess at keywords to search for that might bring up more products with that design on them. Yes, there is “transfer this design” but we all know that can have disastrous results requiring a lot of fixing by the customer. IMO, Collections of design themes on various unrelated products have immense value. It’s a case of not knowing what you want until you see it. The design that caught your eye happened to be on a snow globe but now you can see, hey, wow, I could get this on a pillow or a phone case or a pair of socks or even just as little print to hang on my wall … I’m just dumbfounded that Z has not provided for this type Collection in the new system.
Second rant is all this I’m reading on there not being enough specific categories. There could never be enough categories. I could come up with hundreds of specific “events” from family reunion to summer BBQ to divorce party to congrats on passing the bar exam or getting your first tattoo… There is such a thing as over-categorizing. This to me is what tags are for. You have broad categories one can navigate to, such as Christmas or Tote Bags or Retirement Party. But all of the infinite different “events” and “occasions” should be a function of tagging because there will always be something where the designer is “wait, there is NO appropriate official category for me to assign this to”. Forcing designers to pick from a set list of categories when none are really appropriate just means things are going to end up mis-categorized. I get that Z wants to be able to market Collections as “modern wedding suite” or “rustic decor” you might be interested in … but why not get that via tags instead of pigeonholing Collections into a category system that can’t possibly accomodate them all?
And funny thing, I just Googled “pigeonholing” to spellcheck it (I always tend to misuse hyphens) and found this, which pretty much exactly sums up the Collection situation:
Anyways, that my two bewildered cents. I’m going back to silently waiting and reading to see where all this goes.
Thank you for taking the time to create a well-stated rant. This post is my way of giving you a second kudo to match the first.
Yes – thank you. This pretty much says it all. Next is the Media – stuff! I see no viable use for it. I did a few with branding frames and even with the right size frame, it’s screwed up – two sides of the frame are missing? And in addition – I also added more than one media image – but where do you actually see them? They don’t scroll over and they are not on the product page. Also – the caption doesn’t show up.
I’ve wasted so much time trying to figure this out!
“IMO, Collections of design themes on various unrelated products have immense value.”
“I’m just dumbfounded that Z has not provided for this type Collection in the new system.”
I understand that you feel strongly about this one particular use-case for Collections, but there’s a LOT of different ways that Customers and Creators use Collections. I wouldn’t get too down about this. The feature is still very young, and we’re continuing to build it out as I type this. We decided to roll out the new backend changes now so that you Creators could start to familiarize yourselves with them and have time to tidy things up for the Holiday season.
As always, we’ll be providing updates when new features are added.
Hi Nancy! We suggest creating a Christmas Cross-sell for this type of collection. We adjusted our language for cross-sell to make it more clear to Creators about this type. We hope this helps. Thanks!
