![Image](e32aee70-a97c-4a14-bc07-c5e1b6c0976d)

SHD HAS HIT A MILESTONE! In less than a month since launching on April 8, 2024, we now have 100 stores on our humble little site, featuring an eclectic array of designs for weddings, graduations, humor, nature, artistic expression, and so much more. 

BIG THANKS and shoutouts go to Lisa Hilton, creator of the [Happy Zazzling Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/364847206245351) and content creator for many SHD videos; Suzy LeeLo, creator of the [Hey Zazzlers Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/heyzazzlers) and [Julie Villani](https://www.facebook.com/julie.villani.3) for encouraging many of their followers and fellow Zazzle designers to sign up with SHD!

Want to see how SHD can help you improve your store visibility and help you advance on your Zazzle journey (with many cool store management tools and features like Design Grouping Suggestions, Niche Explorer, and Social Media Image Templates)? 
Join us on the [SHD Discord page](https://discord.gg/4A3yYkJFwe) for the latest announcements and answers to your questions, like the [SHD Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/SnuggleHamster/) to be in the know, and sign up on the [SHD site](https://snugglehamster.com/) today!

100 Zazzle Stores Have Found a Home on SHD!

We've Hit a Milestone! 100 Zazzle Stores Have Found a Home on SHD

I've deployed another significant back-end improvement that I've been working all day on. I'm now starting to properly import and store product type definitions from Zazzle. Until now, you've seen product types reflected as "Zazzle blank product" in the editor:

![Image](7656f74c-592f-4f43-8ed8-f11d3c81e832)

Of course, you can click the button on the right to see that page on Zazzle:

![Image](fdeee049-2d2a-4baa-986b-428d8c6889fe)

The improvement is the construction of a master list of all the product types I'll encounter: preview image, singular and plural names, description, etc.

This will soon get used in a variety of ways. Improved displays of your products, better searches, sales reports groupings, etc. 

*Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli*

Constructing a Master List of Zazzle Product Type Definitions

Deployment of Proper Import and Storage of Product Type Definitions from Zazzle

04/17/2024:

I've deployed a new feature that lets you search for and edit all your private notes:

![Image](44ffd582-6748-4138-a50c-a0ce4f84d5a4)

I'll refer to this generally as the My account > My notes page
Here's a great example of how I could have used this new feature this morning:

![Image](43a9e947-d3b2-45b3-bccf-cb41935b12aa)

I had taken that note previously:

![Image](b788046d-4476-4520-b7a3-8c2f65e45409)

*Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli*

Search and Edit All Your Private Notes Easily

Deployment of New Feature That Lets You Search for and Edit All Your Private Notes

04/17/2024:

Those of you who still have Basic (as opposed to Premium) agencies can now use a simplified preview version of the Niche Explorer. Here's what it looks like:

![Image](50fbc94a-92b0-4f4f-8c06-f725298e13a7)

*Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli*

Looking for New Niches? Even Basic Agencies Can Now Use a Simplified Version of the Niche Explorer

Deployment of Significant Update: Basic Agencies Can Now Use Simplified Preview Version of Niche Explorer

04/18/2024:

I've spent some time over the past couple days, focusing again on SEO. I'm proud of what I've built and the progress we've made along the way. But I discovered some minor speed bumps that have gotten in the way. I'm deploying yet another fix related to that now. Here are some of the fixes I've made recently that should significantly improve SHD's SEO:

1.) Our master site index had some technically invalid XML that 
was throwing Google off.

2.) Our 301 funnel redirects from not quite right URLs (eg http://www.snugglehamster.com/ to https://snugglehamster.com/ ) were a little flaky in a way Google doesn't like.

3.) Search page was returning some results with "null" in the URLs that were throwing Google off.

Just these three minor changes should make Google a lot happier.

*Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli*

Dramatically Improving Search Engine Optimization for SHD

Deployment of Fixes to Dramatically Improve SHD SEO

04/20/2024:

The new personalization feature is live now. Here's what it looks like:

![Image](74cbb92e-b35d-4e9b-8397-bf3c8d04a255)

Note that when you expand the personalization panel the custom images go away and only the RLV in-situ images show in the preview and carousel. Minimize if you don't want to deal with personaliation but want to see all the images.

![Image](918b1079-0ee2-4937-8cf1-2e0a7c200d0f)

As part of this I got rid of the old "Zazzle" tab on the product editor page:

![Image](9daac8c1-c2c3-47e6-b0fe-bb954c732b52)

If you were wondering, that was a prototype that I made early on to learn how to properly apply Zazzle's Create-A-Product API.
On that note, the URL for the "Shop at Zazzle" button is technically different when you do personalization. Has to be for that API.

![Image](f2cc1c40-c60d-42ad-ba5c-07e15c69df40)

*Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli*


Deployment of New Personalization Feature

04/19/2024:

I've deployed an improvement to take advantage of Zazzle's own product (blank) types. Here's an example: the "More from this store" section of a product view page now favors the top 7 items of the same exact type. The rest will just be from the same store of any time. If there aren't 7 same-type products from that store, then the rest will be from that second list (up to a total of 14). In this example, the product is a button. So the top 7 are all buttons from that same store. 

![Image](c42d3180-38fe-4b53-8de3-21059121a6e2)

This may not seem like a big deal, but odds are good the customer poking around is looking for more designs of the same product type.

Here's another subtle example. The search engine now includes the singular and plural names for product types as searchable text for products. In this example, "tank tops" will still match products that only have "tank top" (singular) in their names, tags, etc.

![Image](0f53ddc1-0658-43cd-851a-c7659a755164)

*Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli*

Leveraging the Power of Zazzle Product (Blank) Types

Deployment of Improvement to Take Advantage of Zazzle Product (Blank) Types

04/21/2024:

I've deployed an exciting new feature. On the Store > Products page, you'll now see a new section that helps you create new design groups quickly and easily with automatic suggestions:

![Image](6643aca4-b2d9-4c8c-8a16-0e401752ade1)

I'll need to add some help documentation soon. But it works pretty well. The tool searches your store's product list  to find groups of mostly the same-name products. It does not examine the images to detect similarity of design. But in my testing, I've found that most of us tend to use the same names for our various products with same designs and just let Zazzle add the product type indicators to the end for us. This tool taps into that.

This won't be a perfect solution for everyone, of course. You may have some stragglers with different names. But you can always add those products one by one to the appropriate designs afterwards.

One feature high on my to-do list is a tool to merge two designs into one. That will be a good way to deal with cases where you accidentally create two or more design groups for the same actual design.

This should vastly accelerate your early setup process, once you complete your initial import of products for each store.

*Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli*

New Design Grouping Suggestions Feature is Live!

Deployment of Exciting New Design Grouping Suggestions Feature

04/22/2024:

I realized there is already a way to merge designs together. The "To design" button already does merging, in essence.
You can select a mix of designs and loose products and use "To design" to merge them all into one new or existing design:

![Image](991409c8-2331-4ae2-adfe-8ad047b080b3)

In this sloppy example I just copy the name of one of the designs and paste it into the "Name" text box:

![Image](555b57ef-5420-40b2-b166-4f34e83619f7)

When I click "Add all", this will just add the first design's members to the second one's and delete the first design record.
I was testing this out in a local developer's copy of the data with one of our larger stores. It was very cool how quickly I was able to create a bunch of new designs. Some of them were chopped into two or more designs, because names were not consistent. But it was easy to use the "To design" button to merge those designs together.

This is so much faster than trying to craft collections on Zazzle.

I will admit that I took one shortcut in my testing though. I did not bother adding custom cover images for the designs I hastily constructed in my dev database.
This is an example of where this feature recommended two different designs because the products' names differed:

![Image](373bf08f-a93c-459a-bacd-8ec2c8d06cec)

These are typical examples of suggested designs:

![Image](bfce9f07-aae3-4b5b-9a29-5e08b2c2b3d6)

*Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli*


Deployment of Fix to Merge Designs Together Quickly and Easily

04/24/2024:

I just deployed a minor improvement to the Royalty History report, which was showing the mnemonic codes for product types (under product names). I've modified that to show the friendly names, and also added the original product types in cases of design transfers like these:

![Image](8e2e5f8d-b051-4422-8832-b7ee63167316)

*Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli*

Friendly Names Will Now Appear on Royalty History Reports

Deployment of Friendly Names to Royalty History Report

04/24/2024:

I'm deploying a change that relates to product dating. I made a mistake early on when I started importing products: I back-dated the product table's creation dates to not be when the record was created (which is conventional practice with databases), but instead, the Zazzle product creation date. It was a bad idea to take that shortcut, instead of adding another table column so I could store both dates. Well, I'm remedying that now.

Going forward, product imports will still grab Zazzle's create date. But I'll also retain the true SHD record creation date too. For general display purposes, I'll still be showing Zazzle's product original date. But there are some special cases that matter to all of us here. Like seeing the products you most recently imported in order of import. It gets confusing when you just imported a product you created years ago and it jumps right to the back of the product list.

I'll ask you all to let me know if you notice any odd behaviors that you think may arise from this change. This is the sort of change that often causes bugs. One unfortunate reality I'll have to face is that I have lost the actual record creation dates for all past products. So I'm probably going to just set those to some artificial start date (like 1/1/2000).

*Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli*

SHD Product Creation Date and Zazzle Creation Dates Will Now Be Added to Each New Product Profile

Deployment of Change to Product Dating

04/24/2024:

I 've deployed a minor improvement to the Royalty History uploader. The "Download from Zazzle" button is still the same hyperlink, but I think some users assumed that they needed to perform an extra step. 

I wanted to clarify that this is a slightly more convenient way to get straight to the place on Zazzle where you download the CSV file. Otherwise, there's no change to the functionality.

![Image](984f8762-759a-4404-b295-08deb7de2bbd)

*Posted on behalf of Jim Carnicelli*

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