Are all your products in collections? What does the customer look for?

[andyodell]

Are ALL of your products in their own collections. I am trying to tidy up my store. I am getting confused again with categories and collections... so many products and matching styles or themes might make a long page of collections where things are missed out when looking at the store. What does the customer usually look for. What do they see first.  I think most my products are sold from customers searching on Zazzle, but if tidying things up helps that thats great.

[KeegansCreation]

• Not all my products are in collections. I have collections that are all one design on several products and I have some that are thematic (for a retirement party, Maine memorabilia) but also many products not in a collection.
• What do customers look for? Did they find you from searching on Zazzle? Aha! This is where the new View Insights feature comes in. Select a product that has at least 15 views (this is not official, I've just found it works best on products that have at least 15 views, the more views, the better). Then on the product page or from the dropdown menu in the back end choose View Insights. Then set the counter from 7 days to 365 days. Then scroll down. You will see a breakdown of how many customers found that product in a Zazzle search vs. how many found it outside Zazzle (a google search or your own promotion). The results may surprise you. Then at the bottom is a selection of search terms customers used when they found you. There is also a chart that compares views vs. orders. You may find some unexpected data in all this. The more views the chosen product has, the better the data.

[Connie]

Not all my products are in collections, especially the older ones. As I come across odd products that aren't, I've been trying to either put them in a relevant collection, or write them down on a list so I can keep track of the orphans.

[ColsCreations]

"Orphans". 🙂
All my products go in one Category (broad product types) and one Collection (design theme). I do though have a handful of one-off designs that thus don't have a Collection to go to so I made one for them named "Orphans".

[BKMuir]

Not all products fit into a collection, some fit many collections. What I find a deciding factor of putting something into a collection, is that the collection/s will show on the product page and sales of another product (from a linked collection) might follow.

[andyodell]

So can categories be shown on the front page?

[TAngelone]

Thank you for posing this question. I too am having some issues in terms of store set up with regard to category structure in particular. I feel all would benefit from seeing a few detailed examples of what a good category tree should look like and how it should be named and structured.

And yes I too have viewed Zazzle's Site Map however I too am still a bit confused. 

• STORE CATEGORY TREE
• MAIN CATEGORY NAME
• SUBCATEGORIES NAMES 
  
  For navigation purposes I would like to know how many categories and subcategories any shop owner should have visible for store and site visitors to browse. How many clicks should it take to get a product? I have heard three or four. 
  
  Any thoughts suggestions and input would be greatly appreciated and would help others who run into this as well. Thanks in advance. 

[chefcateringbiz]

I have a lot of stickers. There are cooking vs. baking stickers. Personal cooking & baking vs. business cooking & baking stickers. Within cooking there are utensils, or appliances, or vegetables or fruit. Chefs/people vs. Pastry chefs people. Baking can be utensils, or fruit, or appliances as well. And I have a LOT of stickers, so the collection has to go to Part 1, 2, 3, etc. Oh lordy, I gave up a long time ago! I still don't get a lot of store traffic after all these years, so I doubt anyone actually views my collections. I've never seen it show up on a stats report, that is, when I actually looked at stats.