Where/how you advertise your store/merchandise?

[womaninlove1980]

Hello, I am fairly new here,

I have 133 items in my store and I have had maybe 2-3 sales total over the last few months. Am I doing something wrong? Where do you advertise your store to attract traffic and to attract buyers?

Any tips are greatly appreciated

[WHS_Designs]

@womaninlove1980 

Pinterest and the Zazzle Show Me boards are what I use. Others use Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs like Blogger and WordPress to promote their products. 3rd party affiliates will also pick up on and promote your offerings.

There isn't a magic number to get more sales (I had under 500 products when I had my first sale 2 months after opening my first Zazzle store), but you'll need far FAR more than 133 items in your store (there are millions of products on Zazzle).

Plus (and even more important): your titles, tags, and product descriptions need to be far more descriptive. See this article: Title, Description & Tagging Best Practices – Zazzle Help Center

As an example:
Cute throw toss accent pillow floral | Zazzle.com

For your throw pillow, you don't need to add the product type ("throw" and "pillow" aren't necessary) to the title -- Zazzle does this for you automatically.

For the title, I might describe this as Elegant Vintage Birds Floral Teal Yellow Blossoms

You need to write a proper product description as well. Chances are good that some customers will use Google or Bing or another search engine (instead of going to the Zazzle marketplace) to find the product they're looking for, so the better written (and more detailed) your product descriptions are, the better the chances will be that they'll pull up (and rank higher) in external search engine results. 

For tags, I would use floral, elegant, songbirds, vintage, powder blue flowers, yellow flowers, blossoms, birds, painting, nature ("home" and "decor" are not necessary).

You also need to specify the marketplace department a customer can find your product. Right now, there isn't any.
Your pillow should be under Home & Living > Home Decor > Pillows & Poufs > Throw Pillows

Hope this helps,
W.H.

[PAZP]

@WHS_Designs None of our products are currently showing the Marketplace Departments above the product. I just checked four different browsers (Safari, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi) and none show that information anymore. Not sure why. Are you seeing them? 

[WHS_Designs]

Patricia,

You're right! The Marketplace Department links have disappeared from the individual product pages. Not just for pillows, or blankets, but as you've noted, for everything.

They now only show up in the backend. Wonder when that happened? 😥

W.H.

[PAZP]

I noticed it more than a week or so ago and thought it was simply another glitch (which it may be) but after testing on several browsers I'm not so sure. 

[Saints_Aplenty]

@PAZP , @WHS_Designs --

Don't ask me why but Zazzle moved the Marketplace links on our product pages.  They are now BELOW the tags.  IMHO, the placement is horrible! 

[PAZP]

Oh my gosh! THANK YOU SO MUCH.

I look at tags daily to update on old products with few views and didn't even notice that. BUT I will say the font is quite small and light so for me easy to miss. 

[WHS_Designs]

@Saints_Aplenty thanks for sharing that info with us!

my two cents, the important info should always be at the top of the page (above the fold). at least, that was what I learned about good website design. the product writeup on the left is often ignored; can we expect customers to be diligent and scroll down to the bottom of the page? 

W.H.

[womaninlove1980]

This is pretty weird. Is there some sort of delay on Zazzle? I can see all my products when I’m in store managing mode but as a customer not all of them are showing up. I don’t know why:(

[WHS_Designs]

yes there has definitely been delays since the beginning of this year. newly created products (and changes to existing products edited in the backend) are taking 24-48 hours (sometimes even far longer) to show in the Z marketplace.

W.H.

[womaninlove1980]

Thank you so much, it helps a lot!!!

When I created the pillow I did put it under the department you mentioned. Is it not showing there? How can I check to be sure?

seems like Zazzle has been having some delays and technical issues. 
thanks so much for all your help!

[WHS_Designs]

you're welcome!

as @Saints_Aplenty has discovered and shared with us, it looks like the department links have been moved to the bottom of the product page, after the tags. yikes. not sure customers will scroll down all the way to discover that. 😥

[Saints_Aplenty]

I'd like to take credit for 'discovering' this 😉  , but I actually read about it somewhere in a post--perhaps one of Scott's.  BUT, I will be darned if I can find the reference on this forum!!!

I will repeat here:  I think the new placement of the Marketplace links is horrible!  Personally, I sometimes used to see at a glance that in transferring a product design I forgot to change the category (since Zazzle doesn't).  I'm certainly not going to scroll all the way down every listing page just to double-check.  And, I surely don't think the new placement helps customers at all in navigating the site.  Just another irritating, unnecessary change to something that wasn't broke and so didn't need fixing...

[1WhoConquers]

Thanks! I'm having a similar question/issue to the OP. A couple of follow-up questions?

1) How does one gain traction on Pinterest? I've watched more than a few YouTube videos on the topic and the advice seems to be all over the place. Specifically...

1a) Zazzle's own "Share on Pinterest" button for each product seems to be convenient, especially for filling out product details. But is it the best choice for SEO targeting keywords in a niche? Are we better off manually crafting Pins for this? Should they be "product" pins, or generic? One seeming advangate of the Zazzle-provided pins is that the product pricing and current coupon discounts seem to be "live"?

1b) What's the best strategy as to WHERE to place the product pins? Boards devoted to a specific category of product? On creator-owned boards, or public boards? Intermixed with other topics, other types of pins, or product-only? What's the best leverage of our time as Zazzle sellers so we're not barking up the wrong tree?

1c) What's an appropriate number of products (or ANY pins really) to put into one board? Should pins at any point be deleted or refreshed as they get buried in the timeline? I know Pinterest's not as bad as Twitter when it comes to things getting lost (months not days or hours?) Should separate boards be created for each product or theme "niche" or is more pins in one board a better strategy?

1d) Just to throw out a case study for comments, here's one of my own boards, ALMOST exclusively product pins, a few "video" pins which are simple animations of the product artwork, and all products on one theme... https://www.pinterest.com/1whoconquers/funny-animals-shirts-and-gear/ Any obervations and advice most welcome! As of right now, all this effort has resulted not only in ZERO sales, but also ZERO external clicks to even visit the actual product page.

2) The SHOW ME boards are interesting. Wasn't aware of them before. What's the accepted standard practice for posting product images with links here. SInce this is a discussion forum and Zazzle does auto-generate BBCODE to share products, I thought that would be the way to go, but that apparently isn't supported. Are people doing raw HTML, or downloading and re-uploading product images?

-Klaus
1WhoConqquers aka SquirrelCrazy

[WHS_Designs]

@1WhoConquers 

Here's my experience and thoughts from using Pinterest.

Build up your follower base with Rich Pins, Idea Pins, and manually crafted Pins on a regular basis (which can and probably should be a mix of product and non-product ideas).

Boards devoted to a specific niche ("Science Fiction Coffee Mugs") as opposed to a more generic one ("Mugs") can help you stand out (so long as there aren't too many contributors to them, and too many pins in them). If you want to increase the visibility of your brand, the more exposure you get across on creator-designed or public boards or even both, the better.

You can join Pinterest boards and participate in promotion exchanges by visiting Affiliate Requests - Zazzle to see what affiliates are looking for on their boards.

There is no magic number of pins to put to a board ... but having said that, too many of course is overwhelming to a prospective customer, who may not be willing to commit time to wade through them. Curate pins to a manageable number on the boards you create. I find that if the number of pins is really getting unmanageable for a specific theme, I will create Sections (sub boards) within that board for easier organization. You also have the option of Pinning Zazzle collections to boards, and that reduces the number of pins you have to create.

Your Chihuahua peek-a-boo video clip is cute. However, when I click on your collection, I find the title "Animal Humor" to be just a wee bit broad. Something perhaps more descriptive like "Funny Animal Shirts" (or are you planning to add more totes, or put these designs on other product types?) Did you enter 5 tags to describe your collection? Think of at least a couple of sentences to describe your collection. (Is this your original artwork? Mention this if it is).

You can drop all references to "Children's TShirt -" and "TShirt -" from the front of all your descriptions -- Zazzle does this for you automatically, and deleting them frees up more characters for titling your designs.

Abbreviate Tyranosaurus Rex to "T-Rex."

I'd change "Cat & Coffee T-Shirt - Purrrfect Blend" to "Cute Cartoon Cat & Coffee Purrrfect Blend"

I'd change "T-shirt, Sloth in Zippered Pocket T-Shirt" to "Cute Funny Sloth Waving from Zippered Pocket"

Here's a little video that Zazzle put out that talks about promoting your brand and designs on social media platforms:
https://help.zazzle.com/hc/en-us/articles/223899768-Let-s-Get-Social-5-16-

And finally:
BBCODE isn't supported in this new Zazzle Community forum (it was on the old one, which was retired in early 2022). You'll have to grab the HTML code (which begins with <div style=" ..."> and ends with "</div>" to share your products in the Show Me Forums.

Hope this helps!

[1WhoConquers]

Thanks so much for taking the time for that detailed response. Much appreciated!

[WHS_Designs]

you're welcome!

I'm going to add that when you're crafting great titles, tags, and product descriptions, try to think like a customer: what search terms and keywords would they be using to discover your designs and products?