Collections or Stores?

[Deweycat]

Back in the day, I opened multiple stores to host different kinds of stuff. - that was the case, even up to a couple of months ago. Now that we have collections, the need for multiple stores seems kind of redundant to me. Do customers actually shop in the stores, or even in the collections, or do they find individual items and purchase them that way? 

I've contemplated moving all of my stuff to my main store, and just using Collections to organize it, but I'm not sure if that is a good idea or not...

I'm not a newbie, by any means, but I've never spent a huge amount of time curating each store... I have been pretty lackadaisical at times (so much so, that I missed the window to have Zazzle merge my first two stores back in the day - so I have two completely different accounts, with sub stores under each).

I decided to spend more time on them this past spring, and I've been rewarded with more sales. But before I spend inordinate amount of time on my separate stores, or on dozens of collections, I would like some feedback on where is the best use of my time and energy.

Any suggestions, concerns, etc, would, by me, be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[KeegansCreation · Accepted solution]

I recommend focusing on collections, now more than ever. Collections have always been easier for customers to see than that single store link and now Zazzle is giving them even more prominence. I absolutely know that customers browse collections because sometimes they buy multiple things from one collection and when I sort by new, I often have many things from one collection showing up near each other. This means a customer has clicked through the collection. 

Unfortunately, once a product is in a store, it can't be moved to a different store. 

[mylittleeden]

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@KeegansCreation wrote:

Unfortunately, once a product is in a store, it can't be moved to a different store.

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Gosh it is so frustrating now more than ever... I have many collections with items from both my stores... What do I do moving forward both have items with good stats so I don't want to delete them! but I also want to add those collections moving forward... however I can't redo the collection to the right store as I will lose items from the other store. Instead I have no choice but to do it to the wrong store that was set for me... It is super frustrating...

[Deweycat]

I had a feeling that the Collections were more important than the stores, for most customers, but that was based only on gut instinct. On other venues, I not infrequently, have customers message me, asking if I could post variations (usually color, but sometimes asking if there are additional designs that I haven't posted yet), and these are all in one storefront, so I figured they must browse the store... I guess I won't worry about which store anything is in, but be sure to try and curate the collections to catch the browser.