Showing posts with label sheep themed gifts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sheep themed gifts. Show all posts

Tuesday, 5 November 2024

Cruel Zazzle Is A Fickle Mistress

Back in 2022 I created a third Zazzle Store, PixelPatterns, an offshoot of my older PatternPie store and a new home for my blocky 'pixel art' style patterns. They stood apart from the other designs in their style, and they performed better, so it seemed logical to give those designs their own focus.

I added more products to the range for Christmas, Halloween and Valentine's Day. It was like starting from scratch but with some of the discipline I'd lacked in the scramble to get started.

It all made sense at the time. Two years on, I have an underperforming store which recently slumped back down to zRank 4, and needs some love.

There are a host of possible reasons, here are a few in no particular order, just a brain dump:

Not Enough Products

My earlier stores had more products, and if you throw enough stuff at the wall (trying hard not to compare my designs to mud here), some of it will stick. I'm certainly not recommending some of the shameless spamming I've seen on Zazzle (page after page of the same greeting card but with 'To My Uncle', 'To My Sister', 'To My Second Cousin Twice Removed'). Nor am I saying that you *must* have thousands of products, I just think it helps.

Small Repeat Patterns

The stock product images don't make the best adverts for small repeat patterns like these. As an example,check out the pens on this page; you can't see the motif. This can be addressed with a front cover showing a close up.

All Change at Zazzle

Zazzle introduces new features to try and stay ahead of the search engine trends, and boosts the products which follow their advice up the rankings. Video promotion was a recent addition. I'm still lagging behind making the odd static front cover.

All Change Beyond Zazzle

Sales are suffering beyond this one store (see the regular 'no sales' complaints on the Zazzle forum). Luxury spending might be getting squuezed out by economic worries. There's also an inevitable flood of AI designs hitting the marketplace. Leeches making quick designs (and money) from other people's art using AI.

 

Once through to the Zazzle website, use "Personalize this template" to change the text if desired. Text changes are reflected on both sides where applicable.

Friday, 6 May 2016

Product Pics

I have a friend staying out in the USA, so I sent them a birthday mug from the American version of my store and they kindly took some great pictures, shown here to give an idea of the quality.

This honey bear bottle design is one of a few pixel art style designs I've uploaded to Zazzle, coincidentally mostly based on sugary treats, although there is one random sheep design. I'm hoping to add some more variety in this style, if only to stop me looking like a cake fiend.

A shop link to the above mug follows, plus a couple of other products from my wider range in a pixel art style (sheep flip flops, you know you want them). Text on the mug is set up to be personalised. Get creative and add your own honey based message, or if you don't want a message, versions without labels are also available on the PatternPie store.

Wednesday, 27 January 2016

Wednesday, 13 January 2016

Bezazzled

A few varied products from my two fledgling stores on Zazzle: PatternPie and NoodleWings. Zazzle usually has a promotional offer running, the current code is WINTERSALE16 which gives you 20% off everything.

A buyer can transfer the t-shirt designs onto other clothing on the site: hoodies, other t-shirt styles, mens, womens, kids and baby clothes.

Products with 'Personalised' in the title can have their text changed via a simple form on the product page (I wanted to say 'personalisable', but that's not a word); everything shown here is customisable (that is a word) to a degree - background colours, image size and so on - that's if you're willing to click 'Customise it' and get familiar with Zazzle's simple editing tools. Go on, be brave.

This is my first post on this blog, and first post anywhere this year, so happy new year and all the best for 2016 :)