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In episode 17 of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast, we are going to talk about the crucial mistakes to avoid when you are naming your Zazzle store.
If you choose the name of your store incorrectly, you may find that the name does not suit what you are selling in your Zazzle store or worse, that it’s copyrighted, and you might have your store and all your hard work shut down. You definitely want to avoid these things from happening.
We will cover tips and pointers you should consider every time you create a new store on Zazzle.
About Jen and Elke
But before we dive right in, let us introduce ourselves in case this is your first visit. Welcome to The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast. We’re your hosts, Jen and Elke Clarke. We are a mother and daughter team that started Zazzle e-commerce businesses over 10 years ago and has sold over 15 million dollars-worth and counting of products on Zazzle.
The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast is for you, the creative. We share actionable steps that you can take to make money in your e-commerce business. In each episode, we will take you one step closer to achieving freedom with your time, location, and finances.
We believe that a profitable e-commerce business is what opens the doors for you to start living your dream life if you work smarter, not harder, use the right tools and follow the proven roadmap. We’re here to give you the tools you need to make your dream life happen. Let’s get started!
Check out the highlights below from podcast episode 17 for our insight and tips that you can implement today to get you closer to making your dream life of using your creativity to generate income a reality. For all the details, listen to the ENTIRE episode of The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast on your preferred streaming platform!
Let’s start with naming your Zazzle store. Think about what you are going to be selling and what direction you want to take your store in. This is crucial when you name your store because of course, you want to name your store something similar to the vision you have. For example, a name like Fuzzy Paw Creations for a store that will sell dog-related items would be a great choice.
If your Zazzle store name is not aligned with your brand and products you are selling , you will not build that customer trust factor that is so important for a customer to feel comfortable to purchase from your store.
If you decide to change the name of your store later on, your Zazzle store URL will always stay the same. So if you put all this hard work in and post products, but decide to change the store name, you’re stuck with the same URL that you originally chose. Customers will still be directed to this previous URL, which can cause problems with brand recognition and customer trust. You always want your store to look professional as if you are a big brand.
Play around with names that will resonate with your intended customer so that the name you choose aligns with the intention or purpose of your Zazzle store.You want to ensure that your name is also relatable, and clear. The customer needs to know exactly what to expect from your store.
Before deciding on the name of your Zazzle store, you need to check whether someone else has used the same store name. Not just on the Zazzle marketplace, but also if it is copyrighted by someone else on the internet or a physical store as well.
Since Zazzle focuses on the US market, you can at least start there. Every country has trademarks, the most important thing is to make sure that your name isn’t trademarked within the US-based market.
Check and see if your name for the store does not already exist. A great way to do this is to go to the US Trademark website, you can do this by searching for “US Government Trademarks” or “TESS”.
TESS is a search engine where you will be able to search for every trademarked item that has been registered in the United States . You can choose the word search option and quickly search whatever you want to use as your Zazzle store name.
You will see if anything has been registered as a trademark with the word or part of your phrase. Go through the entire list and see on the left-hand side all the name variations, more information in the middle and right-hand side whether it’s active, and what it is trademarked for. Click on each of those entries and get more information on what the trademark is about.
Then, it’s up to you whether you need a lawyer to move on or if it’s clear that nothing is being used with the words you want for your Zazzle store. If you find yourself unsure, double-check with a lawyer, it’s way better than finding out a year later that your store is being taken down because you’re using a copyrighted name.
Set your goal to have your Zazzle store name become your brand and that you have your store for a long time. Be sure to go the extra mile here before you decide on the name.
If you do find there’s a copyright infringement issue, you may need to talk to a lawyer to see if you can continue to use the name and not be at risk of receiving a cease and desist letter. Avoid competition. Why would you want the same store or brand name as someone else? You want to stand out and be unique.
We’ve been on Zazzle for over 10 years. If you had asked us back then if we would still have our same Zazzle store 10 years later, we would’ve thought, “No way!”.
We both didn’t realize what we were building back then when we started, and what it would become today. We want you to, first of all, to have a store name that feels good to you and is aligned with your vision but is one that will allow you to grow your business over many years,
We’ve made our mistakes, we thought at the beginning we could open a Zazzle store up for fun, mix some products in, and didn’t see the importance of the store name. When Jen opened her first store, she thought of the store name as if it was a username. She went on to make her Zazzle store name “Jenclarke78”. As she began selling things and wanted to be more professional, she realized she couldn’t change her store name. Of course, she didn’t want to build up a store into a 6-figure brand known as “Jenclarke78”! The store still exists today but, it’s not making any money. It was a learning experience and we would recommend to not go this route.
If you’re just starting on Zazzle, we recommend that you not choose a username type name option. For example, if we wanted to change the store name from “Jenclarke78” to “Fluffy Paw Prints”, we could do it in the store settings and it would show up on the store home page BUT the URL will still be zazzle.com/store/JenClarke78. This will create confusion and is unprofessional.
Another huge tip from us in terms of naming your Zazzle store is to not use dashes, commas, and punctuations. You want something that is easy for the customer to type in the search option.
Avoid double letters together, for example, JenNeutralDesigns, those two N’s can be easily mistyped or confused.
Another thing to be mindful of is the spelling. Whether you use American spelling or British spelling, a popular mix-up would be the word favor. “Favor” can also be spelled as “favour”. The main thing is to think about what the customer could mess up and see it from their point of view as you decide on your store name.
When we both started on Zazzle, we thought we had to make multiple stores for different types of products or niches, we had a business store, stationery store, birthday store, you name it, we had it!
Zazzle offers over 1,000 products for you to customize and sell. When you create a store name like “Birthday Card Designs” it looks a bit odd to your customer if you want to branch out and add something else to your store other than birthday cards. This creates a disconnect between the store name and what you provide for your customers and limits your potential to sell other products Zazzle offers
We recommend only 1 or 2 stores when you first start out. We’ve started with multiple stores, and it just doesn’t work as well. There are too many things to do to maintain a professional appearance in all these separate stores.
There used to be a time when this was logical, but now with all the things Zazzle asks you to do to make your storefront look nice, alongside the social media marketing required per store, it just makes sense to stick to 1 or 2 at most.
Instead, you can use your one store more effectively by setting up the store categories to serve as sub-stores rather than creating separate stores. If you decide to do more than one product, you’d just add another category rather than creating an entirely new store.
What we want you to focus on is to keep your options open and create a store that will have the ability to be flexible.
A more generalized store name is always best, so you can make sure you’re able to tap into other niches if you want to expand. If you do things like the example of “Fluffy Paws” as a store name, that’s a good name as it means you’re very focused on dogs or anything else fur and paw related. That’s a great choice for a name and store, it’s not too limiting. Whereas the “Birthday Card Designs” example, is much more specific and there will be less opportunity to expand.
The key takeaways on this podcast are:
1- Pick a name for your Zazzle store that aligns with your brand and vision.
2- Ensure that the name you choose is professional and does not infringe copyright or trademarks.
3- Every single product showcased on the Zazzle Marketplace and on Google searches will have your store name and logo beside it. That makes it super important for you to take care when making this crucial decision right at the start, when you open up a new Zazzle store.
4- Believe it’s possible for your Zazzle store to be as successful as a big brand name store.
Use these tips to help you name your Zazzle store for success! If you want help with choosing your store name as well as help with everything else you need to do to set up your Zazzle store for success, The Profit by Design Academy™ is your next step.
Thank you so much for checking out The Creative and Ambitious Entrepreneur Podcast! We hope this episode has given you actionable steps to start and scale your Zazzle business so your passive online income can give you the location and time freedom to live your dream life.
If you enjoyed this episode please take a minute to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Each review helps us reach more creative entrepreneurs like you working to create a profitable e-commerce business.
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@msjenclarke and @elkeclarke
We’d love to hear your biggest takeaways from the episode. See you back here next week!
Jen and Elke Clarke are a mother-daughter duo that empowers women entrepreneurs to make money online. Through courses and coaching, Jen and Elke help women (and men) become successful creative entrepreneurs on Zazzle and e-commerce. Combined Jen and Elke have sold over 15 million dollars-worth of products, and earned over $1.5 million combined through their businesses on Zazzle. Jen and Elke have influenced and transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide with their free content, paid and private coaching.
They are international, award-winning authors. Click the links to purchase their books through Amazon: Earn Around The World and Create Online and Grow Rich.
Jen and Elke Clarke have been featured in Yahoo Finance as TOP 5 e-commerce coaches.
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