To make a product Direct-Only (DO): on the publishing page (or later, via Edit Product Details - Additional Information - Product Visibility) simply check the Direct-Only option. You have to choose a store so that if/when it sells credit for the sale can be assigned, but it won't show in the store. DO products don't show in your store and are not findable via search. One can only get to them via a direct link. Note that putting a DO product in a public collection is making a link to it available, so it will be visible in the collection to anyone viewing it.
Now, you may have cause to make numerous custom products for a customer that you don't want to be public but you also don't want to have to send them individual DO links, so wouldn't it be nice if you could put them all in one collection and give that customer one link? Well, you can do that.
1) set your products as DO.
2) create a Collection and set its Privacy to Public, then at the bottom of the Edit panel for "Visibility in Stores" simply don't check any of your stores.
That's all there is to it. You now have a Collection full of DO products and the Collection is not visible in any of your stores or findable via searching. But it IS viewable to anyone with the URL.
To test that a DO collection is not accidentally findable via searching, I used this ink
https://www.zazzle.com/collections
to search for one of my existing public collections set to show in my store. With my collection showing on the first page of results, I opened another tab and edited the collection to not show in any store, then went back to the search results tab, refreshed the page, and poof! - my collection was immediately gone from the listings. I checked both as me signed in and as a anon guest from another browser.
Note: going the other way, setting it to show in my store again, that took about an hour for it to be "re-indexed" or whatever and be visible again.
Yeah, I just noticed it by accident one day and at first thought, yikes, this is no good. But then I thought, duh, DO just means you need a link to find it and by putting it in a Collection you are providing a link...
I was confused by "Creator Collection Page" and I don't know what you mean by
Collection 1 existed in the store and I removed it as suggested by @ColsCreations but it still has a label associated with it in the top left corner to the store.
But I do see the important loop-hole here you have pointed out - Collections appear on Member Profiles. That had never occurred to me because I have my settings set to not show Collections on my Member Home page. But after reading your posts I went and looked and although my Collections don't appear there, there is a Collections tab on the menu bar. Uh-Oh. Using that portal, my test DO Collection is there. 😞
I only have 34 collections so they span just 2 pages. My test ("Orphans") is near the bottom of page 2 where I assigned it when last organizing my Collections. I don't have enough Collections to push it back farther to a point where visitors can't or aren't likely to page that far.
I think the odds of a random shopper clicking to see your Member Profile, then clicking to view your Collections, then clicking through pages of them until accidentally happening on the DO ones you purposefully put at the end are pretty slim to none. But you are absolutely right in that it COULD happen. This is an access portal I failed to see since I don't have them set to show on my Profile.
Free-wheeling here but thinking ... You could set the "DO" collection back to Private after a certain amount of time. Tell the potential buyer that for their privacy (people are big on that these days) , the link will only be active for 3 days, 7 days .. whatever you're comfortable with and fits the situation. From a marketing psychology standpoint this might actually help incentivize them to go ahead and order. "Limited time only!" and "While supplies last!" etc are commonly used for a reason. If they need more time to decide they'll need to ask you to re-activate the link where you'd just set it back to Public temporarily. (If it's something they order regularly, like I don't know, business cards, they can always access it again via their Order History.) You wouldn't go in to any detail about why really on your end you need/want to do this - you'd just play it up as something you're doing to ensure their privacy/security peace of mind. 😉
