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*

Adding Clarity to the Royalty History Uploader

Deployment of Minor Improvement to Royalty History Uploader

![Image](ef169ec6-cdf1-4e5d-8049-1321510da897)

Joining the ranks of notable trademarked terms like "Baby on Board", "Bananas", "Very Peri", "Smiley Face", "Save the Earth" and "May the Fourth Be With You" (to name a few) is "Shabby Chic."

That means that you can't use "Shabby Chic" as a tag on your products (I think I just heard a collective groan of disappointment). If your products haven't already been deleted by the Zazzle Content Management Team, change all instances of "Shabby Chic" in products that use the term as a tag, title, or part of the description. Or batch hide them all first and then update them at a less frenetic pace.

It's always a good idea to check with the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office. Hopefully, this will save you a lot of pre-design grief (post-design grief is a different matter). https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-information

One would think the USTPO is the final authority on such matters. But I'm pretty sure that there are plenty of gray areas. I don't think Pantone has trademarked every one of its color names (I'm still ticked off at them for "Mediterranean Blue" and "Ocean Blue". You'll excuse the pun if I say that those color names don't hold a lot of water with me. I think that travel agencies would agree with me, too). 

zPro Silver (and higher) Designers can follow the conversation in the Zazzle Community forum here: https://community.zazzle.com/t5/pro-silver-private/so-anyone-with-the-term-shabby-chic-in-title-description-or-tags/td-p/146340

Everyone can check out this helpful link, which talks about the difference between copyright and trademark:
https://community.zazzle.com/t5/general-zazzle-discussion/copyright-versus-trademark/m-p/59080#M7747

I'd Like to Say It Isn't So, But Shabby Chic Has Joined the Ranks of (Trademarked) Tags That You Can't Use Anymore

Shabby Chic is Now a Trademarked Term!

![Image](80be23cf-78b2-40b6-809f-23bf346c5717)

The newest products to join Zazzle's evergrowing portfolio are here: laser-etched bamboo cutting boards are now available at Zazzle in 3 sizes. Watch the video on the first link below and get more details on their design and care:

https://community.zazzle.com/t5/creator-news/new-product-launch-etched-bamboo-wooden-cutting-boards/ba-p/146853#M198

Sound off on these new additions here (psst -- the feedback list is long and getting longer!! As quasi-alternatives to Zazzle's glass cutting boards, Zazzlers have plenty of constructive comments on these newest wooden, er, grass-based ones):

https://community.zazzle.com/t5/general-zazzle-discussion/creator-feedback-for-our-new-product-etched-bamboo-chopping/td-p/146854 

Commemorate a Milestone with Bamboo Cutting Boards -- Now Available in 3 Sizes on Zazzle.

Laser-Etched Bamboo Cutting Boards Now Available on Zazzle!

![Image](e2d97182-0652-4002-b185-65c3580612be)

For those of you who create invitations for weddings and signage for events (among other applications) and use the fancy leading and ending character flourishes to spruce up your designs, here is the link to a collection of special characters contact sheets (for the fonts used on Zazzle that have them enabled). 

Detailed instructions for using these special characters in the text fields of the Zazzle design tool are listed in the collection description.

https://community.zazzle.com/t5/share-your-tips-tricks/latest-special-character-charts-for-script-fonts/td-p/57166

Get Fancy With Glyphs (and More) for Your Invitations, Signage, and More!

Special Character Contact Sheets for Script Fonts

![Image](55900e55-f290-4dbc-8bd3-207e429241c5)

Platinum Pro Zazzle designer LeahG has put together very helpful resources for willing your Zazzle shop(s) onto your next of kin and loved ones. Learn how to secure your Zazzle legacy and pass the torch quickly and easily with her free digital asset will template, plus take advantage of invaluable tips and tricks referenced in the links below.

These are must-read articles for every Zazzler!

https://community.zazzle.com/t5/share-your-tips-tricks/free-zazzle-will-template-and-guide-passing-the-torch/td-p/140128

https://community.zazzle.com/t5/share-your-tips-tricks/zazzle-guide-how-to-transfer-your-zazzle-store-to-heirs-upon/td-p/134601 


Ensure that Your Zazzle Shop(s) Continue to Generate a Lasting Legacy for Your Heirs Long After You Have "Left the Building."

Willing Your Zazzle Shop(s) Onto Your Next of Kin

![Image](1f221438-be4e-4402-b7f9-ea8ba9260409)

Sounds like the Zazzle LIVE design service has been (very quietly) discontinued. Alas, poor Yorick, we knew ye well ...

An unfortunate nixing for those Zazzlers who often referred customers there for custom design work that they were not able to do themselves (because cloning of humans ex vitro hasn't been invented, patented, and argued from an ethical standpoint). 

See the discussion thread on the Zazzle Community forums here:
https://community.zazzle.com/t5/ask-a-question/is-zazzle-live-discontinued/td-p/144255 


Pinch Yourself. Yes, It's True. Zazzle LIVE Design Service Has Been Terminated. :(

Zazzle LIVE Design Service Discontinued :(

![Image](6d8692a7-3d4c-4144-a1d3-e9c8bf4faf41)

This is a concerning development for those of us Zazzlers who sell digital downloads. At first blush, by removing the mockup that shows a hand holding up a phone with an e-vite on the phone screen, superimposed over the invitation design, customers may be left wondering if digital downloads are now no longer available.

Actually, digital downloads are still available and accessible; on the "Choose Your Format" drop-down list of choices (located on the right of the image in the individual product pages), select the option "Instant Download" or "Prints + Instant Download". 

Visit the Zazzle Community Forum thread below. Some Zazzlers have provided helpful workarounds for this change.

https://community.zazzle.com/t5/technical-issues/customers-no-longer-see-the-digital-downloads/td-p/144257 

Zazzle Mockup for Digital Download-Enabled Invitations and Paper Products Removed.

Customers No Longer See Digital Downloads? Not Exactly.

![Image](7f79b9b2-75ce-456f-b2f7-a8203188fd27)

FLEX YOUR CREATIVE MUSCLE AND YOU COULD WIN YOU COULD WIN $500, $1000, OR $2000 FOR YOUR DESIGNS AND COLLECTIONS!

Zazzle is running a MEGA Moments Contest with a total of $25K in prizes to be awarded! Deadline is May 4th and all products must be publicly available and promoted on social media. See full contest details here: https://www.zazzle.com/megamomentscontest

Questions regarding the contest can be found on the Zazzle Community forum link here:
https://community.zazzle.com/t5/ask-a-question/mega-moments-contest-2024-questions/td-p/144793 

Your Creativity Could Earn You a Nice Pile of Cash with the Zazzle MEGA Moments Contest -- But It Ends Soon! (May 4th)

Zazzle MEGA Moments Contest with $25K in Prizes to Be Awarded (HURRY -- ENDING SOON!)

- [What is it?](#what)
- [Where is it?](#where)
- [What's the big idea?](#big-idea)
- [How is the alignment score calculated?](#alignment-score)
- [Using the departments grid](#departments-grid)


# What is it? [#what]

This is one of the various [sales reports](/article/about-sales-reports) for your agency. It looks at your full inventory and at your sales to see how well your products align with your sales.

This is a [Premium agency feature](/article/subscribing-for-premium-agency-features). It is not available for Basic agencies.

Here's what the report typically looks like:

![Image](4d9faee5-0045-40bd-b50a-8b648a021bc1)

# Where is it? [#where]

You can find this by [managing your agency](/article/how-to-create-and-manage-your-agency#returning-here), clicking the "Sales reports" tab, and then clicking the "Alignment" sub-tab.

![Image](c66c88c0-ca03-4700-81ac-d48daa44ec95)


# What's the big idea? [#big-idea]

Your products are consided well-aligned if the things people buy are all in the same neighborhood as the things you made. By "neighborhood" I mean Zazzle's own "departments" (aka "categories").

What does that mean? Consider a simple hypothetical store with exactly 1 product. Some customers have bought that product in the past. This store would be 100% aligned. Now let's say that store had 2 different products that were from different departments. But only 1 of those products ever sold. The store would be 50% aligned.

The alignment score is calculated based on this principle. We divvy up your products into the various Zazzle departments and look at the proportion of sales in each department and the proportion of products in each as well. If you have many products in a department in which there are few or no sales, this will drag the alignment score down.

Zazzle's over 700 departments are organized into a vast tree. You can see it reflected in [Zazzle's create-your-own page](https://www.zazzle.com/custom). Level 1 of the tree is the single "Personalized Gifts" root node. Level 2 has 9 departments, including "Baby & Kids", "Home & Living", etc. Level 3 is more finely diced departments like "Women's  Fashion", "Party Supplies", and "Bedding". And so on down to level 7, containing only "Boys' T-Shirts" and "Girls' T-Shirts". This page only delves down to level 6. Within each level you'll find various product types like keychains, notepads, tee shirts, etc. Each of your products is of those various product types and is nestled into exactly one of those departments.


# How is the alignment score calculated? [#alignment-score]

This is a measure of how well aligned your inventory is with your sales. The overall score ("across levels") is a weighted average of the scores at each level of the department tree (hierarchy). The first (top) level ignored because all products and all sales are within the "everything" department.

To understand the score at a specific department level, consider the following figure:

![Image](48011c4c-14c3-4f3d-9c11-e788c78ebea7)

The level 5 products we have across all our stores in the "Men's Tops" department represent about 30% of all our inventory at level 5. But about 86% of our sales of level 5 products are of men's tops. The other 14% of our sales at level 5 are of "Girl's Clothing", while that's only 7% of our level 5 products. Meanwhile 35% of our level 5 products are in "Women's Tops". But none of our level 5 sales are in that department.

Regardless of whether we will ever sell products from the Women's Tops department, we have not to date. We can hold out hope that someday we will. Or we can take this as a sign that we might be wasting time designing women's tops. In any case, the pie wedges from the "By product count" pie that are not found also in the "By order count" pie roughly reflect the low score seen for level 5 in this example.


# Using the departments grid [#departments-grid]

The pie charts are a good visualization. The grid below it gives you very actionable data about what you might want to focus on going forward:

![Image](a5123ecd-3dc1-4b66-80ce-d97a975cc7c3)

These are the departments in which we have products at level 5 across all our stores. You can sort by product count or by order count. The default is sorting by products. In this example you can see "Women's Tops" has the most products. And zero orders (sales).

The footer shows totals. In this case, a total of 7 orders of products at level 5 of Zazzle's departments. Not very many to consider. So we should be a little wary of drawing a strong conclusion about this. part of the analysis. In fact, the low number of sales in level 5 means that the alignment score at this level has a low impact on the main score across levels.


# What actions should I take? [#taking-action]

First thing to note is that your stores are your own. You decide what matters to you as a creative designer. This report is only here to give you some guidance oriented toward maximizing sales. It's up to you to decide whether and how to use that guidance. The following will assume for argument's sake sales maximization is your top goal.

I'll also say that the more sales you have, the more useful this report becomes. It focuses on the number of orders, not on the total dollar value. On the assumption that 2 orders totaling $10 is better than 1 order totaling $10 for telling you how many people want something.

The most basic advice should be obvious. You should make more products in the departments that there are more orders in. And avoid making more products in departments that there are few or no orders in.

You should also consider whether you can salvage existing products in low-sales departments by improving how you describe and market them.

Should you shoot for 100%? Not necessarily. One question you need to examine is whether to get rid of old inventory that doesn't sell or keep everything. I'll leave that question to you. But deleting old inventory could increase your alignment score without changing your sales at all. On the other hand, if your sales go up because you added more products in fruitful departments, that would be a win and would raise your alignment score over time.


A deep dive into how the "Alignment analysis" report shows how your inventory compares with your sales

How to use the Alignment analysis report

Have you ever seen this error when you visit some page?

![Image](29dec097-8165-4f6e-980b-a8646c066699)

We frequently deploy updates to this website. That causes the above error. All you need to do is refresh your web browser and you'll see the page you expected.


What it means when you see a plain white page with "Application error" and how to recover from it

About the blank "application error" page

- [Introduction](#introduction)
- [Create your user account](#user-account)
- [Create your agency](#agency)
- [Create your first store](#store)
- [Import products](#products)
- [Group products into designs](#designs)
- [Group stuff into collections](#collections)
- [Add a showcase to your store](#showcase)
- [Import your sales data](#import-sales)
- [Create social media posts](#social-media)
- [Upgrade your agency to Premium](#premium)
- [Learn more and join the discussion](#discussion)


# Introduction [#introduction]

Welcome to Snuggle Hamster Designs (SHD)! There's a lot of features here. So it can be a little intimidating to figure out where to start. There are many knowledge base (KB) articles here covering many setup topics. Here's a brief summary of the process with links to each article.


# Create your user account [#user-account]

You'll want to start by [creating your user account](/user/sign-up). This is for you as a person. You don't have to use your design agency's name. But your user profile will be visible to the public. User accounts are for Zazzlers, shoppers, and anyone else.


# Create your agency [#agency]

[Your agency](/article/what-is-an-agency) is what sets you apart from other SHD users. Unlike with Zazzle, you can [invite people](/article/how-to-add-agents-to-your-agency) to help you manage your stores. Here's [how to create your agency](/article/how-to-create-and-manage-your-agency).


# Create your first store [#store]

Once you have your agency set up you're ready to [add a store](/article/how-to-create-a-new-store) to SHD. Then you'll need to [verify ownership of your store](/article/how-to-verify-your-ownership-of-a-zazzle-store).


# Import products [#products]

Once you have created your store you are ready to [bulk import products from Zazzle](/article/how-to-import-your-stores-products-from-zazzle).


# Group products into designs [#designs]

[Designs (aka design groups)](/article/what-is-a-design-group) are like your same-design collections in Zazzle. Once you have your products imported you should go through a process of [grouping same-design products](/article/how-to-group-products-with-the-same-design-together) together.


# Group stuff into collections [#collections]

Some of your Zazzle collections are likely to be for grouping same-blank-product items like tee shirts and coffee mugs that have different designs together. Some collections will be ensembles like for weddings with similar themes. You can [create SHD collections](/article/how-to-create-a-new-collection) for these same purposes and others.

Like with Zazzle categories, [SHD collections](/article/what-is-a-collection) can be assembled into hierarchies. One collection can contain other collections for example. And designs of course. Once you have mirrored your Zazzle collections in SHD designs and collections, you should consider creating larger collections of collections to better organize your content for customers to browse.


# Add a showcase to your store [#showcase]

Once you've mastered creating collections you should consider creating a special one to use as the [showcase](/article/how-to-add-a-showcase-to-your-store) on your store's home page.


# Import your sales data [#import-sales]

If you want to take advantage of our [sales reports](/article/about-sales-reports) then you'll need to [import your royalty history](/article/about-sales-reports#importing).


# Create social media posts [#social-media]

Once you have your store set up you may want to try [creating social media posts](/article/how-to-create-and-share-social-media-posts) and sharing them to Pinterest and other SM sites.


# Upgrade your agency to Premium [#premium]

Hopefully you like all the free features you've set up and tried so far. But we also have some great features for [Premium agencies](/article/subscribing-for-premium-agency-features). [Here's how to upgrade](/article/how-to-upgrade-or-downgrade-your-agency). This is a great way for you to show your support for our efforts. Thank you.


# Learn more and join the discussion [#discussion]

There's more [articles in our Knowledge Base](/article). It's searchable. Consider also [joining our Discord server](https://discord.gg/4A3yYkJFwe) to chat with us and with other Zazzlers. You can also [use the Contact page](/contact) to email for support.

A high level guide to creating your agency, adding stores, importing products, and so forth

Articles