Zazzle Designers! As you get ready for the holidays, what else can you do to showcase your products in your Zazzle store? Here are 5 Business tips to improve the look of your store and increase the visibility of your products. This will help customers identify with your brand and provide opportunities for product sales.
5 Tips to Get Ready for the Holidays on Zazzle
By November, you should already have your holiday products posted in your store and be eagerly awaiting for the sales to skyrocket, especially as we come into US Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. But you can do so much more to get ready for the holidays on Zazzle, than just product creation. This article provides you with 5 business tips you can implement to help your customers fall in love with your brand and then find and buy your products.
Tip#1: Update Your Zazzle Store Banner
The banner is the first thing your customer sees when they come to your store. It should look professional and convey to the customer what your store is about. It is also valuable visual real estate for marketing your brand, store, and products.
I update my Zazzle store banner frequently throughout the year. I use it to promote my latest new designs for the upcoming shopping season, like the wedding season, graduations, and at this time of year, the Christmas holidays.
Once you have a template in Photoshop or any other graphic design program, you can easily switch out the products for each season to create a new banner.
Store banner file dimensions and specs
1140 x 315 pixels at 72 dpi.
In Photoshop, I use “save for web”, select “as a jpeg” with settings of “very high” “optimized”, a quality of “80” and blur of “0”, and convert to sRGB.
I take screenshots of my products and edit them in Photoshop, giving them a shadow and placing them on a “mock-up” background. You can purchase holiday product mock-ups on Creative Market, and Etsy, as well as find free mock-up templates by doing a Google search. You can also use the great free mock-up tool from a fellow Zazzle. Check it out here.
Below is the banner, which is presently up on my Zazzle store.
Tip #2: Make Holiday Collections with Your Zazzle Products
Zazzle collections are a great way to showcase your products in your store, provide cross-promotion opportunities on Zazzle and promote your products on social media like Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook.
Below I will cover the basics you need to know to create your collections to get ready for the holidays on Zazzle. For more details about Zazzle collections, you can read my article “How to Make Money Using Zazzle Collections.
The Zazzle Collection Banner Dimensions
Collection Banner = 1140 x 315 pixels at 72 dpi
Dimensions of Collection Cover Image = 324 x 324 pixels at 72 dpi
You can save these images as jpeg files and use the “save for the web” option.
You can make collections on Zazzle using:
- groupings of similar products (like holiday photo cards)
- matching sets (like coordinating products to match a holiday photo card such as postage stamps, stickers, return address labels, and printed envelopes)
See below for examples of both my “2016 Holiday Photo Cards” Collection and “Believe in the Magic of Christmas” Collection.
Benefits of Making Collections
If you click on my “Believe | Magic of Christmas Holiday Photo Card” and scroll down, you will see that there is a section that states “FOUND IN COLLECTION”. (see image below) If my product was not in a collection, only the “OTHER DESIGNS YOU MIGHT LIKE” section would be there.
You can see that customers could easily be distracted and taken to another product, which is not yours. It is therefore a benefit to you to place your products in collections to give you a chance to showcase your products next to others on Zazzle. You can do this by offering additional options within your store of similar products OR matching sets so that customers do not have to search your store before finding what they need.
Tip #3: Organize Your Store Categories and Media
If you have store categories and media files with products that are more popular during the holidays, then you should move these so that the customer sees these FIRST on your store home page. This allows customers to access their desired products faster and gives you more chances of customers buying your products. I have done this on my store’s home page (see below). If you don’t know how to do this, it is a simple “drag and drop” task for both the store categories and the media files.
Tip #4: Organize Your Zazzle Home Page
You can use your Zazzle home page to help customers narrow in on their product search. You can do this by how you choose to set the homepage layout. Go into your “store settings” and then into “advanced settings”. There you will find the option to rearrange what is shown on your store home page.
If you have many of your matching holiday card sets in collections, you may want to have “collections” as the first section a customer sees. With categories geared towards the holidays, choose your “categories” as your first section shown. When the key products you want to feature are in a “Featured Category” or a “Specific Collection”, then choose those options.
I have set my store up with my store categories first, then my collections, followed by a featured category. (See image below).
You have to remember that if a customer comes to your store. You want to keep them “in your store” to find a product. The time you have to do that before they leave is SECONDS! You have to make sure you make it effortless for your customer to continue clicking to find what they want.
Tip #5: Update Your Store Category Icons
If your store icon images have products with dates showing, make sure that they read 2016. You don’t want to have a customer see an image on a store category with last year’s date. They may assume you don’t have items for 2016.
One never knows exactly what a customer will do while in your store. Never give them a reason to leave without buying. Make sure a misleading store category icon is not a reason they left.
5 Business Tips to Get Ready for the Holidays on your Zazzle Store:
- Update your store banner with a holiday theme to entice customers to explore your store
- Make collections with your holiday products for both promotion and exposure on Zazzle and social media
- Organize your store categories and media to provide easy access to your holiday products
- Set your store homepage to showcase your holiday products first
- Update outdated store category icon images
6 replies to "5 Tips to Get Ready for the Holidays on Zazzle"
You always offer great advise, however, I haven’t had 1 sale or show of interest since I set up my store, so I don’t feel motivated to spend time implementing your new tips. Competition is huge.
Christine
Hi Elke,
Me and my husband recently started a Zazzle store and we have found your advice and insight to be extremely helpful. Although we have not made any sales yet (we’ve only been up about 3 months), we have had views. As, we just finished posting our Christmas items, this particular blog is incredibly helpful. Thank you so much for sharing your secrets!
All the best,
Jody
Dear Elke, You offer extremely good advice for making progress on Zazzle – and discovering you was a fantastic stroke of luck ! There is just one thing I would like you to consider please :
I notice your blog post pages are locked – meaning it is not possible to download the page and keep it for future reference – which is a pity because your posts contain quite a few technical details which are not easy to remember – then one has to go digging through piles of emails to get back to them to check everything. Would you consider making your pages more accessible by “unlocking” them ? It would be much appreciated, thanks. Other than that, you really are leading the way in showing how to use social media to get noticed. One thing I’ve realized is that you simply cannot rely on Zazzle to do your promotion for you. Your own spectacular achievements are surely a result of having a highly methodical, scientific approach to social media promotion. It was not lost on me that your are also a scientist ! A big thank you for everything you are doing !
Hello Elke,
Thank you for the great advice. Your the inspiration that got me started on Zazzle.
My store is StyleEnvee, and I have about 600 products, I started the store in August and so far I have had 8 sales with a grand total of $13.47.
I find that many of my designs that are high quality don’t even show up in the product searches, even though I have added the proper tags. There is just so much saturation, that it makes it difficult to have your product found. But having said that I realize that there is a formula used to get products to the top, so I just must be patient and carry on creating.
I do have another website and I can say that getting traffic is incredibly difficult, with the big online stores making it difficult to get noticed. And of course there is the SEO challenge. That is the good thing about Zazzle they have the built in traffic. But I feel that Zazzle must do more to get recognized, I mention the site to friends and they haven’t heard of it. Why doesn’t Zazzle do television ads like Amazon? Just a thought.
This week I’m trying a 5 day pin promotion on Pinterest, on a small budget. Hopefully this will help.
Thank you again.
Dwight
Hello Elke,
Thank you so much for your assessment. Your advice is really appreciated.
I started my external website a little over a year ago. When I created my Zazzle shop (August 2016) I didn’t think I could use my external site name because of their rules. So I’m stuck with the 2 different names but I will make a connection banner in my sidebar of my external website to try to clear up the confusion and better join the two. I used the same header to try to show a link between the two shops but your right.
When I first started my Zazzle shop I thought it was cool to be able to use one design on multiple products, but now I realize that like you say it degrades the overall quality of the shopping experience. So I will delete many of these products to make my customer experience a better one.
I’m starting to see a definite increase in sales starting at the start of Nov/16 one product sale a week. Then starting last Thursday it started one sale a day, now today it is two so far. Heck maybe by the middle of January 2017 I will get my first royalty check.
I will keep plugging away creating on both shops. On my external site I have to post regularly to keep the bots coming. Many of my older products on my Wild Burro website are not up to standard so I must delete and refresh my products.
Thanks again,
Dwight
HI Elke,
Yes all of the deleted designs had zero views. I duplicate designs on apparel still as customers seem reluctant to do the customizing themselves. Four sales yesterday, zero today. What is helping with my sales is that the Leggings maker is doing a third party referral on my Balmoral Taran design. That has sold 4 times in November.
take care, thanks,
Dwight
ps, you will see that on my external shop, that I have tried to connect my Zazzle shop better, thx, :^ )