Opinions On Creating A New Store For Each Niche

[CLC]

Hello....I am still relatively new to Zazzle and the first year was basically a learning experience where after posting about 1,000 products I had to trash them all and start over as they were not templates, so after that I have tried to find top selling stores and learn from what I see. My question is, I have about five niches that sell in my store and have a total of about 2,200 products in the same store, which is not that many products, adding them as fast as I can, but slow go. I have an idea for a very specific line of ties which is completely different from anything in my current store and wondering if I should start another store for just the ties and or break my current 5 niches into their own store. However, in my mind driving all the traffic to the same store is only beneficial for growth, the more visits the higher your store will rank, the more sells you will make, the more your shopping ads will show and yet, when I find a silver, gold, platinum, diamond seller they almost all have multiple stores. Not sure if that is because they have 200,000 products and it's to many products for customers to search through or if it is because products sell better when in their own niche. I feel customers come to our stores from google shopping ads or click on individual pinterest, facebook ads and are not shopping by looking through our individual stores, so wondering if multiple stores is necessary. There is so much time involved in setting up a store, adding products and promoting five different ways that I don't want to make another mistake and already spend way more time on this store for what I receive, wondering on your opinions on multiple stores,  for each niche or if that is a waste of time....thank you.

[JulieV]

Hi there, you've asked some really interesting questions. While I don't have enough experience on Zazzle myself to give you any answers I am sure there are other long term sellers here that will be able to shed some light on these for you. 🙂 

[CLC]

thank you Julie....maybe we can all learn something!

[Cat]

Good question! I've only got one store. I mostly do wedding stuff, though that wasn't my plan when I first got here, but all the random other stuff is in the same store. I guess maybe it depends on your marketing strategy? I'm not convinced that many people visit my actual store, but maybe that's because I focus on promoting products vs. promoting my store. I can't say that I'll never branch out and open another store, but I don't see it happening soon. Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe I'm just lazy! I'd love to hear other perspectives on this question!

[CLC]

...thank you cat, very insiteful, that's how I feel that people don't visit my actual store rather come in from individual advertised products that they are interested in, but trying to avoid another major setback! Two of my marketing methods send people directly to my store, the other three individual products......thank you for your reply you are always a very positive influence in the forums.

[Sara_H · Accepted solution]

@CLC 

Personally I would add your ties to an existing store in a seperate category and then in a collection and promote that collection. There is a chance in the future that the product could be discontinued (has happened in the past) so having one store with just one product in it is a bit of a gamble and not worth it imho.

Having multiple stores is quite exhausting as each store has it's own z-rank depending on sales and you'll have to curate 10 collections too etc

If I had my time again - I'd stick to one well organised store with categories/collections and create one brand to cover them all

ymmv and good luck!

[mylittleeden]

I would now as the collections are a pain in the a... now I have so much between my two main stores. What I need is a way to move them NOW... This the problem is the longer you do Zazzle the more things that worked previously don't work now. I agree one store particularly now is the way to go. Unfortunately for many of us there is no going back in time, way too many products for that. My only hope is for Zazzle to allow products to be transferred between stores 🤞. But I think that has been asked for before and nothing has happened, I have many collections stuck in no mans land now it is not funny, but that is life nothing ever goes to plan!

[CreativeLeahG]

I use my Profile as my store and my collections as my 'store front'.

They are easily searchable by the customer and unlike categories which lead to more categories, sub categories etc. the whole customer experience is much easier AND it doesn't matter how many stores you have, every product will be searchable from that one spot.

You can also add a url to direct to the collections page for your profile. 

[CLC]

...wow Sara what a great response, thank you for perspective, makes complete sense and I did not think about each store having it's own Z rank, ugh I don't need more work.

[Windy]

I am opening a new store now, because I started here a long time ago and  my original store is chock full of all the errors I made while learning.  There have been many recent upgrades which I believe can be helpful in search, if I learn how to implement them and make the best use of them. My new store is a "clean start" where I am working hard on a small set of products as I learn best practices. I am spending time cleaning up my old store, too......but don't want to completely revamp that mess,  considering all the things I have done incorrectly over many years. 

[Jadendreamer13]

I took a an intense 1-year Zazzle training course after I created my first shop, so I was able to avoid common mistakes new Zazzler’s often make. I like the course and having fellow Zazzlers to share the same journey with so much that I have renewed my membership in that course three times. I’ve also learned a lot by subscribing to Utube channels that focus on Zazzle and Etsy best practices. There are many more Utube channels focused on Etsy than Zazzle, but there is a lot of good information about Etsy that you can apply to your Zazzle shop. You can find the Zazzle training course via an internet search. There is also a Zazzler on this forum who has created a new course for Zazzlers. I have decided to stick with one store so I only have to focus on keeping that store in order. I have a general shop that focuses on a broad niche that contains many relevant sub-niches. That allows me to easily add sub-niches via collections as new products are introduced or I become interested in expanding my shop.

[CreativeLeahG]

I have many stores and many niche stores

The benefits of a specific niche relate largely to marketing.

A customer with niche interests will have greater trust in a store that is tailored to that specific niche , with niche url, store name, products and variety of products and of course they are likely to become repeat customers.

Good examples of this would be the very popular specific 'pet breed' stores on Zazzle (these are not mine).

Additionally as the titles, tags and descriptions contain that same niche content throughout, I believe in search engines, you'd likely gain greater visibility.

The same applies for niche websites/blogs, niche FB pages/Groups, social media accounts and Pinterest accounts.

The CONS!

More stores, greater workload! So I'd try to keep it to 5 max. DO not go OTT like I have done (ADHD is getting the blame for this one!!). For each niche store you can then support it with niche social media accounts/groups/FB pages etc.

Another CON is potentially zrank. I won't go into all the why's and why nots re this but will simply say if you are niche enough and do your own marketing zrank is irrelevant.

As this question comes up often, I'll do a more detailed blog post on it. But the essence is as above.

[CLC]

Thank you Leah, very good insight and will give me some things to research and ponder.

[chefcateringbiz]

There are some niches that should be, and some that don't have to be. I have one store geared to corporate-type businesses that would seem silly to combine with my other stores. I did start out with a combo culinary/craft store, but I didn't like the feeling it was becoming a rummage sale. I just feel more organized with niche stores, with 3 stores that are pretty set in their ways, a 4th coming in for a trial run, and a sprinkling of others that are just there for designs outside of those 3; I plan to combine those into one big store this year. Everybody's gotta find their own thing based on what kind of effort they want to put into it.

[CLC]

@chefcateringbiz,Thank you for your perspective, that may be a good way to start, I'm thinking about adding a few of the new products to my existing store and see if there is any interest in the product, then launch a new store if I think it's worth the effort, although I have had zero interest in any clothing products, so quite skeptical, my idea is more about branding than the actual product itself with this item and that then would be all about marketing.

[CarlaRolfe]

I've been here 18 years next month.  Seems wild really but I kind of love 😍 zazzle despite any bumps along the way.

When I first started really investing into my account here, the predominant advice was that more stores were better, so that's what I did.  One for this kind of event, one for that kind of thing, etc.  I don't recall how many stores I ended up with (somehwere around 10 or more, I think), but it was far too many to keep track of.  From time to time I'd realize it had been months since I'd even logged into one or more of my stores, as I was busy designing for a different store.  I started here long before zrank was a thing, but once implemented, my rank on my niche stores was always terrible and I was never able to bring it up to a level I was happy with.  

I took a step back, went and visited with and spoke with other designers and came away with being convinced less was actually better, for me.  This meant a massive scale down of tens of thousands of products so it took a long time to recreate the bestsellers from all stores, and place them all into my main store.   This was all many years ago now but suffice it say, I'm glad I did that.

I have one main store and just seperate it out the way you'd find in any brick and mortar store. Sports, home decor, stationery, etc. Just one store to pay attention to, to check the zrank on (and it remains high, for years now), and share links to.  Everyone's experience will be a little different so you really just have to do what works best for you.   

I hope this helps. 

[Cat]

The fact that products cannot be moved between stores is a big reason why I've shied away from having more than one. Sorta feels like a "point of no return" sort of decision and once you go that route you're committed to it unless you do the work like you did to re-create everything. Not saying that there aren't valid reasons to have more than one, but reading your story filled my heart with dread at the thought of having to re-create a bunch of designs! I mean, it's always a bit of a mystery why one design floats to the top and does well when other similar ones do not, so even if you do re-create a good seller to put it in a different store, there's no guarantee that it'll do as well as the original did. 

[CarlaRolfe]

I shied away from down-sizing for a long time for that very reason.  I had some incredible sales from one store (a store that was even featured on z for a long time) and when I recreated them for the main store, using exactly the same titles, descriptions and even better tags they basically tanked in sales. 😕  But then, other designs from other stores took off in ways I never expected at all.  So yes, it was a big risk but I'm still really glad I did it. 

[Cat]

Ha! The Zazzle marketplace giveth, and the Zazzle marketplace taketh away! Confirms my belief that there's a fair amount of randomness/luck built into the system!

[CLC]

@CarlaRolfe   amazing input! I am grateful to all of you for taking the time to share your experiences and journey, there is so much doubt for me on Zazzle for time spent to earnings, finding products that will sell and having already made a grievous time wasted error, this has really helped me see that this is just may be part of the process.

[ColsCreations]

I feel like stores and how you organize them within are for your own benefit, that it really doesn't matter at all to shoppers. They are just another layer in the organizational hierarchy.

For me, I did open a second store but only because my main/original store is stuff that is uniquely my own creations so when I eventually decided to branch out and use stuff that stemmed from public domain / licensed images I felt like it would be cheating to include them in my original store. So I started a second store just for stuff I couldn't claim as being 100% my own creations. I don't think it makes a whit of difference to shoppers but that distinction makes me feel better.

You've gotten a lot of great feedback here so I just want to add one more note to consider:
The three reports you can access under Royalty Reports are (or can be) sorted by store. So if you are an analytical sort and have things that are really different between stores, this would be helpful in easily comparing type A products in store 1 to type B products in store 2. Instead of having to manually separate things out you could see at a glance how this cat of products is doing compared to this other cat of products ...

[CLC]

@ColsCreations thank you for your insights, very beneficial and thought provoking, I never thought about using the royalty reports for analytics, I will investigate further. I mainly promote individual products do you feel that promoting collections is the way to go? Would be a lot less work and would get way more products in front of the shopper.

[ColsCreations]

By "collections are best for promoting" I was thinking of primarily within Zazzle since product pages show "other products from this Collection" below the products and that's a big deal. With all the extreme changes to collections what exactly is shown on the product page varies, but the point is that within Zazzle, Collections are heavily promoted by Zazzle themselves.

If doing your own promoting outside of Zazzle, you can "promote" anything you like in any way you like, directing people to stores, collections, categories, sub-cats, individual products, whatever. So If planning/setting up a new store, it's my opinion that it's best to treat categories as mostly an organizational aid for yourself and Collections as a promotional tool since they get more love from Zazzle and thus are more in-front of shoppers.