Which Wordpress Themes Do You Use For Your Promotional Zazzle Website?

Discussion Forums Promoting
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I returned today to a quest that I have embarked on several times over the years. And I’m still not really any the wiser.

What are your recommendations for a great ‘shop-style’ theme for Wordpress blogs that you use (or would use) for promoting your Zazzle products in a clean and professional way?

Mostly, I end up finding themes that fall into two categories, neither of which quite fit the bill.

1. Full Ecommerce Themes : I mean, these are great and all, with awesome product grids and individual product pages, but they come with shopping cart features and all the stuff I don’t need, as Zazzle will be doing all the fulfilment. And I’m a bit wary of posting prices on my own website, as they change often due to Zazzle’s promotional offers, etc. I can’t really offer a price and then send the customer to Zazzle and the price has gone up. A bit dodgy, and not sure Zazzle allows it in any case. (Amazon, for example, definitely gets tetchy about associates posting their prices!)

2. Affiliate Themes : These are more like product review sites, so great for SEO, as they tend to be bloggy 1000-1500 word articles on each product. A bit over the top for a Zazzle promotional website.

Ideal Themes?

I guess what I would be looking for - and somebody here might have already found such a thing - is a halfway house, with great product shopping grids, that send visitors to individual product pages, where I can add a blurb to warm up customers with a pre-sell and with a Buy from Zazzle button. (Rather than writing thousands of monster-length product reviews!)

I’d want to do more than just a grid that sends directly to Zazzle, as I’m not sure these kinds of site do well on Google, as they might be classed as “doorway” pages - basically just a stepping-stone website to bounce visitors elsewhere without adding any value in between. So I’m trying to figure out a balance (unlike my tomes here on the forum) where I can offer extra little stories about each product, but without having to do epic in-depth reviews for, say, a sticker.

Any ideas for themes gratefully received in the comments below. I’m sure they would also be helpful as a resource to others thinking about building their promotional websites for POD. 👍

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I use the default Wordpress theme and use @HightonRidley 's NiftyGridZ Plugin to import the Zazzle products into my page. niftytoolz.com/the-niftygridz-wordpress-plugin/ 

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It depends on what exactly it is you would like to do and which plugins you would like to use. Any multipurpose theme will work. I use a wordpress theme that integrates well with woocommerce as I use the woocommerce plugin for displaying my products.

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Thanks @J32Design  Your website looks cool; it’s pretty much the kind of solution, design-wise, that I would want. Very clean indeed, with those product grids. I like the personalise option to take people to Zazzle, but also clicking on the product takes them to a unique product page. I’d just zhuzh up the color palette for my site, as mine wouldn’t be for the business/professional market, as yours seems to be. But I’d want mine still to look as clean and modern as yours.

Are you using the Zazzle API to pull live prices into your website? Or is that something the WooCommerce plugin handles for you?

Thanks to you and @rebeccawang  for your ideas so far. I had seen HightonRidley’s tools and product grids (pretty cool too!) - just wanted the ability to go to individual prod pages from grids.

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I’m using a combination of VW themes (although I would not recommend due to some technical issues - next time I will use another theme).
I use the Nifty Gridz plugin as a rough easy setup to add products to the blog.

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I use the woocommerce plugin to have the actual product grid a single product pages. The product in woocommerce is set up as an “external product”, which basically means clicking on the “personalize it” button leads to the actual product here at Zazzle.

My site is not connected to the Zazzle API. I create a CSV file with all the information for the products, like title, price, URL, images, etc. and then use the import feature to upload it into woocommerce.

It would be cool if Zazzle had this feature on the backend to download a csv with all the product details.

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Thanks for the further comments, J32Design and TheFrogFactory!

I realised I’ve still got Newspaper Theme (I think version 11 now as I get the updates when they appear). Haven’t run any websites since GDPR came out, as I didn’t fancy the $20million fines if I accidentally screw up somehow. But it apparently has pre-built stores and Woocommerce built in, etc. I might have a go at that.

Which leads to another question for anybody else (like J32Design) who uses a Woocommerce implementation - I’m not sure I may have run into a giant bunch of people trying to sell affiliate hosting, but everywhere seems to say we need dedicated webhosting for a Woocommerce store. It’s, like, $100 a month. Do you folks running Woo for Zazzle Associate stores agree with this? Or would normal Shared Hosting be fine to start out with?

I’m sure the people recommending dedicated hosting get a lovely chunk of change as affiliates, but I can’t even contemplate that for a new store in case it doesn’t really get any traction/sales (although I’ll probably go with a “design” website and have a bunch of my Zazzle Stores set up as Categories all on one site eventually).

Thanks again to everyone adding insight and experiences to this thread!! 👍

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I went with the cheapest shared hosting I could find at the time, which was hostgator back then and it has been working without problems. So any of the main hosting providers like hostgator or bluehost should be fine.

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I use the Twenty Fourteen theme. When I started out I tried a bunch of different themes. Ended up just using it to post and set up things I like with links for anyone interested in buying. I tried to use plug-ins to make direct sales from the site but it ended up being a lot of extra work and I never made any income that I could see. The thing that is bothering me lately is that even though I don’t sell anything direct or have comments or email from it Google has it so a site has to have SSL to work.  I use a link to the site as a macro so you can check it out if you want.   
— Visit Leatherwood Design  —

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What a cool page you have! So elegant and clean and modern. 😍

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Hi there! Love your website - just what the look and feel I’m after. Do you manually update the product prices then? How do you deal with Zazzle’s flash sales (or don’t you, as they’re usually only 48-72 hours)? Thanks, Jackie

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Perfect in every way. I need 4 sites just like it for various businesses. Just need them to capture email list. Did you do it yourself and could I get you to do mine? I am horrible with foreign languages. Hit me back if it’s quick work for you.

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You would be better checking  the Information Commissioner’s Office own web site about GDPR rather than listening to the marketing hype. In the UK you pay a £40 a year flat rate tax aka registration if you hold personal identifiable information. Then you follow common sense rules which are basically treating others like you would like to be treated. If you are caught by the ICO breaking the rules the first step is they give you advice and support to help you become more compliant. The reality it is it is very rare that any website is 100% compliant and they know that. The big fines are for blatant rule breakers who do not follow advice and are unwilling to improve their business practises. The fines which are comparatively rare are based on multiples of your income. They might fine a big fish like Amazon £20m but a small business it would be much much less. 

The ICO were horrified when they realised when they realised that people were being told that everyone was at risk of paying the maximum fines when that was nothing like the real situation.