Organize Your Shop

Written by Kayecee on February 20, 2008 – 11:08 pm

In the print-on-demand industry, one of the mistakes that I see new shopkeepers make time and time again is to take 40 designs, slap them onto several products, and pile them all onto the front page. What does that do?

First of all, if a user lands on a page with hundreds of items, the browser will be slower than a turtle with a broken leg and will finally keel over dead of a heart attack trying to load everything.

What will a customer do? They’ll quickly decide that they would like to purchase that bib BEFORE junior graduates college. Adios, customer.

Now, let’s say that a user has the patience of Job and allows the browser time to load several products. He scrolls down, down, down…. tees with the same design…. stickers with the same design….. coffee mugs with the same design….. greeting cards with th…. aw, crap….. that design ain’t THAT cute….. *exit… stage left*

OR, a user sees the first design…. it happens to be a maternity design on several rows of products…. wait…. they’re looking for school mascots…… *backs up…. looks for next site*

Gee…. Too bad they didn’t scroll down and find all of those great school designs you had….. bummer…. but not to worry….. they just purchased something from MY shop because I have mine all neatly organized. *sticks out tongue*

ORGANIZE YOUR SHOP PEOPLE!!!! See….. there are these little things called sections…. use the bloody things….

But don’t just go and slap sections up here and there willy-nilly.

*ahem* Sit your rear-end on the couch for a while with a cup of coffee, a notepad, and a pen. Think about the types of designs your shop is going to offer. How do you want to organize those designs? Sketch it all out on paper before you even look at your shop.

As you learn more, experiment with the organization a bit. If you realize that your print-on-demand shop is selling a lot of chihuahua designs through the marketplace, scoot that section up a tad on your front page to see if it helps capture the attention of customers who wander in through search engines, links, or advertising.

If it needs to be categorized into subsections, do it. My holiday section is a prime example of that. When I started, I didn’t have many designs, so I threw all of my holiday designs into a holiday section.

As my shop grew, I realized that the holiday section was becoming unruly. So I began creating subsections….. Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc. This really helped organize things a bit more and helped improve conversions.

HEY! *taps foot* Why the heck are you still sittin’ there readin’ this gibberish? Get your butt into your shop and start tidyin’ up the joint!