Reviving collections

[Anne]

After the big collection downgrade, I lost half of my income. So I would really like to see some improvements on the collections. 

▪ First of all restoring the option to be indexed by search engines
▪ I would like to see the option to add sections in the collections, similar to how Pinterest for instance is organized
▪ The collection should come up FIRST under the product image, before about a ton of images of other designers
▪ Re-arranging of products should be easy, without having to refresh the page all the time as products are jumping around

I think the collections offer great selling opportunities and it just a shame they got ditched.

[BevStuff]

I agree.

[Cat]

Wow. My experience with collections is the complete opposite of yours. Maybe it's because I'm mostly in the weddings niche and so many of the changes were designed for wedding/event collections. Anyhow, my sales went way up after they introduced cross sell collections because it was so much easier for people to find matching stuff. I think the cross-sell model is very similar to what you're requesting with sections, so maybe they could apply something similar only with custom-created sections rather than fixed stuff like there is in the cross-sell variety?

[LJ]

At first I also had some success with cross sell collections, but then they started to bury under more and more unnecessary stuff. To the point where I get messages asking for matching items quite frequently. Now customers can’t find that section, because most of them don’t scroll that far down.

[Jadendreamer13]

Large collections can overwhelm buyers. If they’re given too many choices, it can make decision-making too hard. I’ve been working on splitting up some of my larger collections into smaller collections that contain 30 items or less. Collections haven’t increased sales for me, either, but I’m not in the wedding or general invitation niches.

[Cat]

That is a good point. The collection should be directly under the product without all of the "other designs you might like" stuff in the way. 

[Connie]

So THAT'S why I get customers asking for products that are already in the collection! And I've gotten several orders where they transferred a design to another product that is in the collection. 

[Andrea]

Yes that has happened - I saw a transferred design when I had something very similar that they didn't find in the collection.

[Anne]

@Cat Ironically, I also was in the wedding niche. However, I only sold invitations. The other products never sold, so I didn't bother creating them until the demand from Zazzle came to add all these products to the cross sell. I was selling wedding invitations daily, and after that they completely stopped. Newly created products in that store since, don't even get views. Glad to hear it turned out so well for you though!
Yes, I think there is a lot of room for improvement in how collections are categorized and also have the freedom to choose custom-created sections.

[Andrea]

Love it, can I add that:
I'd like to be able to sort collections using grid view like we used to sort products in collections before. The list is just such a waste of screen space and makes sorting tedious. At least having a grid to sort, it would give some sort of idea as to how the collections look next to each other.

Also keeps Pinging to the top, gurrrr, when you have 100 collections this is really annoying come Halloween and Christmas, when you want to start prioritising seasonal collections.

Also, as a gothic designer, I disagree that a Wedding collection should have invitations as mandatory. Some people just want one or two gothic items like favor boxes. Sometimes the designs don't lend themselves well to invitations - for some designs it's sort of bad-taste. Example: They may want black and red roses invitations with a skeleton favor box. They may not want to dish out skeleton invitations to everyone - Granny may not agree - Just sayin'.

[Anne]

"be able to sort collections using grid view" - excellent idea! Thanks, @Andrea

[Amanda23]

Question regarding this: Are collections not being indexed by search engines?! I did not know this.