Monday, April 6, 2015

Naming a Zazzle Store

I recently opened a store on Zazzle. I'd read up a little bit on Zazzle and thought I'd done my homework before diving in. Now that I've fumbled around a bit, I thought I'd share some things I've discovered.

My first obstacle was what to name the store. My own name is difficult to remember and harder to spell. I hoped someone browsing through the marketplace might notice my username and be able to find me again by searching. After much brainstorming (and an inexplicable stubbornness about including the word 'plum,' I decided on the short and quirky name 'Some Plum.' For my username, I omitted the space between the words to get SomePlum, which automatically became my store url. The username and url can't be changed after signing up, but I was satisfied my store name, username, and url coordinated perfectly.

Unfortunately, I've since noticed that actual store names aren't always searchable on Zazzle.  Typing 'Some Plum' into the search bar only brought up a bunch of plum colored products. Just by adding a space between the two words, they become too generic. Typing my username 'SomePlum' (no space) successfully brought up my products, but what if the natural tendency is to include the space between words?

I partially solved this problem by including my store name at the end of all my product descriptions. I hoped this would amount to background noise that would be skimmed over, but still give search engines something to pick up. Now searching Some Plum turns up some of my products. If I had it to do over again, I'd choose a unique ONE WORD name that could double as both my username and store name (good examples of this are the stores Stuccoloco and Scruffshop, two stores I referred back to occasionally while setting up my shop - for the simple reason that I remembered the names and easily found them again).

So, I may not have blazed the easiest trail to my store, but it will be interesting to discover other ways to leave breadcrumbs. If you have experience with Zazzle as a buyer or seller, I'd be interested in your thoughts on the significance of store names.

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