@CreativeLeahG :
Hey there Leah. It’s an honor to hear from you. You’ve been at this for a long time with enormous success, credibility, and your own Zazzlepreneurs marketing consultancy and freebies. And you’re asking me the right fundamental question: can I prove that what we’re doing helps people who are investing their time and in some cases money in Snuggle Hamster Designs? Well. The simple truth is that we are relative newcomers with only modest success in absolute terms. I’m going to answer your question with radical transparency, which is how I prefer to do everything. Time to overshare. I hope it gives you what you need.
And frankly I hope you will join us. I’d certainly love to help you grow your own sales if we can. And I’d love for you to become another active member of our community sharing your own vast knowledge. We just had our public launch two months ago and have done zero paid advertising. We are relying on limited social media posts like this and word of mouth by our own wonderful users. Yet already we count among our members one other acknowledged Pro Platinum seller, 5 Silvers, and 3 Bronzes. About half our agencies are Pro level. So you’d be in good company.
Gargi and I opened our Zazzle agency in February last year. So we’re still just getting started. In that time we’ve earned $366 and of course gone Pro Basic. Here’s what our count of sales orders from month to month looks like over time:
That dark top line is the total. You can see that over the past year Gargi’s Gigi Greetings store dominates our earnings. Initially my own stores predominated our sales. But in the past year I have been focused almost entirely on building our website to serve other Zazzlers. And frankly she’s a much better artist than I am.
Do I think that our solidly upward trajectory in sales is a direct result of using the tools I’ve made available to other Zazzlers? I am absolutely sure it’s not. Again, we’re just getting started. I’ve been writing the code for this site for over a year. But most of the analytics stuff appeared in the past few months. Just in time for our public launch.
I do think we’re earning more now because we have followed a data-driven method that I’m trying to bring to other Zazzlers. One I know you can appreciate. Many months ago Gargi and I did a straightforward analysis. We went through every single sale we had made and asked what they had in common and what by contrast our products that had not yet sold had in common. We actually came up with quite a list. For example we noticed that none of our designs — mostly my own — that centrally featured a solo woman had sold. We had sold designs that featured couples though. A lot of what we had sold were stylized paintings. Almost none of it was straight photography or realistic in style like that. We took over a dozen strong signals, positive and negative, and used them to guide what we were doing going forward. By then Gargi was doing most of the product creation. She has a particular habit of taking whatever thing sold most recently and creating more things that are similar. In any case we have combined a variety of data-driven strategies with our own artistic tastes and talents to make better products that apparently appeal to a growing clientele.
We also got a lot better at creating product titles and tags. I don’t think you make any sales if you don’t. Nobody is going to find your stuff through search if you don’t make your stuff amenable to search. From the start I have been designing the SHD website for search engine optimization (SEO). I’ve just started importing search performance data from the Google Search Console API into the site for our users to benefit from. And just last night I started building a global statistics page for public consumption. It’s not done and so not available yet. But I’ll give you a sneak peek at some Google-specific numbers:
As you can see we have shown up in many Google searches already, despite being very new. I want to draw your attention to that 92% figure. Pretty much every store has shown up in Google searches at least once. The ones that haven’t are probably stores with no products imported yet. I need to do more work to refine that number further. We have over 70k products collectively in our catalog. Considering that most of those products were one-click imported, the fact that 8% of them have gotten Google search exposure means we are already providing measurable value to users who didn’t have to do much work and didn’t have to pay a dime to get it. SHD collections have to be hand-created presently. It’s nice to see that 10% of them are also showing up in Google searches. I would say that the above numbers show that in this way the SHD site is already an unqualified success for Zazzlers using it.
Gargi and I have a lot of work to do. Our alignment score is pretty bad. You see how about 2/3 of our orders are in the Invitations & Stationery department (orange wedge)? Yet less than 9% (orange wedge again) of our products are in that department. About 1/4 of our products (mostly my designs) are posters in Wall Art & Decor, yet they only represent about 8% of our orders:
Our top products sorted by quantity tells an interesting story. Gargi created a stunning design for International Women’s Day this year and scored a single order for 100 magnets featuring that design. There had been a lot of buzz in our small Discord community leading up to IWD. That inspired Gargi to give it a try. It’s still an underserved niche. She tapped it well:
Consider our top product by quantity, the Hawaii themed postcard. Our Product > Insights page for this postcard product gives us some clues as to why it’s done well. We’ve had a steady string of sales of it this past year. They aren’t really originating from Google or even from our own site. Which means people have mainly been finding it on Zazzle. No surprise there:
The Niche Analysis on that page does give us some deep insights though. There are a lot of searches done on Zazzle that match this product’s title and tags. Some of them are fairly niche, like “hawaii sunset postcards”, which has only 361 matches on Zazzle’s site. So it’s no surprise that her postcard shows up as result number 36 in an actual search:
Looking up a level at the Store > Insights page, our storewide Niche Analysis is encouraging. It shows that 97% of the products in Gargi’s Gigi Greetings store match at least one search done in Zazzle in recent months. And there are nearly 2k Zazzle searches that her products could match:
To be sure, this doesn’t mean her products all actually show up that frequently and for those specific searches. Best I can do is roughly mimic Zazzle’s search engine. They add hidden factors in their search and sorting of results that I won’t try to mimic. But that’s why we provide tools for you to dig deeper into all this data.
I could talk about our newer Trademark Search and Trademark Analysis tools. But arguably they don’t affect sales very directly. They are just a unique feature that is already helping some of our agencies discover where they might be accidentally stepping on the toes of some IP rights holders. I’ll also skip discussion of our mechanism for creating and managing social media posts. But I’ll showcase one SM post Gargi created using one of the new templates she’s shared with everyone:
Will SM posts to Pinterest, Facebook, and other sites really help our sales? I don’t know. We’re trying to make it a little easier for our users to do a more polished job of it for their agencies. We’ll see in a few months if we find any solid evidence in the numbers.
Anyway. This has gotten a bit longwinded. But you asked for some data to support my belief that what we’re doing is helping us in particular and by extension other Zazzlers. I hope this is satisfactory evidence. And this is a good example of the kind of consultation we’re offering to do for other Zazzlers who do sign up for Premium.
What do you think so far? I hope you’ll join us soon and share some of your own experience and wisdom with us. Cheers.
