Spring cleaning is something you need to do every year. This means also for my Zazzle shops. One of the shops does not perform at all, so it is selected for an experiment.
Until now I mainly used the “quick create” tool of Zazzle. With mixed results. This is a handy tool to apply a design to a whole batch of products. That way I’m able to create a lot of products, but most of them won’t get any views from visitors at all and make me think of a good Spring Cleaning.
Over a year in my shop, never had a view. Pathetic!
Zazzle started a new regime where product that didn’t get view or a sale in the last six month will not be visible anymore in their marketplace. Which sucks since most customers do their searching in the marketplace.
The advice Zazzle gives is to refine every product on title, tags, and descriptions. In that way each product is more individual and better for SEO. But that defeats the purpose of the quick create tool.
About more than 80% of my products in my Freshpatterns shop never had a view in the last six months, so I decided the following spring cleaning actions.
- Remove all individual products that didn’t get a view and were in my shop already about a year.
- Remove a complete set of product’s that both never sold or got views. I will only concentrate on product classes that either sell or get views.
- Update the remaining products and make them individual in title, tags, and description.
One result of this experiment will be that I’ll focus on quality in stead of quantity. And not using the quick create anymore. This also means adding one product at the time and making sure the design is optimal placed.
Don’t forget to clean the physical world! And not just the digital universe like a basement computer nerd. You’ll love the scent of this hand sanitizer.
So how am I going to measure success? One way I’m thinking of is watching the 180 days views. If more pages have products viewed in the last 6 months then I’m on the right track.
As I write this I have 7.1 pages with 96 products each which had at least one view in the last 6 months. Ten pages would a good goal, about 40% of my total amount of products.
UPDATE: the period is enlarged to 15 months. Six months really isn’t much time.