Sunday 31 December 2017

Why greetings cards with handwriting are loved by all

It doesn't matter if your handwriting is a scrawl or a calligraphic masterpiece, people still love to get cards with handwriting in them.

Why? 

Because it shows you value them! Even a simple phrase like "I saw this card and thought you'd like it :)" or "I saw the greeting and thought it was just right for you" or "The picture reminded me of you", these all work well but feel free to work out your own personal touch greeting.

Think about what phrase you'd use for the person you have in mind as you look at my most popular greetings card designs. And if you want to see more of what you like, try a search to find the perfect card for them. So here's my popular ones:



Fetching ...won't be a tick!

search (new window)

Stay in the same department when you search to make sure you keep getting cards.

==========================

Watch the video tutorial on how to make slideshows like the above for YOUR Zazzle store to put on YOUR blog.



Get started making your own

Saturday 30 December 2017

2-step How To: share a hot-linked slideshow of your Zazzle products

Do you want to share a hot-linked slideshow of your collection or best products on Facebook and other social media?

See an example of one I shared earlier

Here's an example: https://www.facebook.com/mark.ridley/posts/10215545559458540
Of course, yours will have your referral id and tracking code, so you earn the referral commission from any resulting sales.

Make your own slideshow

If you want to follow along, you can make yours with Nifty

a) Start by filling in the choices in Step 1 to get the products you want for your slideshow. You can see the products selected at the bottom of the browser window.

Note whenever you make a change and hit "enter" or tap/click away, the products shown will update based on what you changed.

Also, you can get help on any item by clicking its button with a "?" on it.


b) in Step 2 ...
Click the show/hide button next to where it says "Step 2: Choose your type of promoting" and then the show/hide button next to "Share a slideshow":



Give a title for your slideshow and a unique tracking code that you'll recognise later. It appears in your Referral History report when someone follows one of your slideshow links to Zazzle and buys something.

The final reveal

You see your slideshow when you tap/click either the "open original slideshow sharer" button or the "elastic bounce" one.

From the slideshow page that opens, you can then share on social media using the buttons provided.

Tweaking Nifty - embed-code slideshow search updated

In line with the changes made to the slideshow sharing page to improve the search, we've now made those same changes to the embed-code version.

Here's the embed code version as generated by Nifty, set up to use our Zazzle store, the "motivational" category we've got set up and the "cards and postage" department. Here it is:

Fetching ...won't be a tick!

search (new window)



Friday 29 December 2017

Tweaks to Nifty's Zazzle Product Slideshow sharer

We've had some feedback that the way the search worked on the Nifty Slideshow Sharer wasn't intuitive / useful enough.

http://www.kdl.to/all-page-sharer.php?qs=&rf=238582202591969585&storeid=hightonridley&dp=252055618931521092&cg=196007871454443931&bg=ffffff&st=popularity&sd=desc&ps=15&pg=2&pm=&timg=https%3A%2F%2Frlv.zcache.com%2Fstellar_nursery_r136_in_the_tarantula_nebula_business_card-raaa73688d09c4dcf9737e1f5e5ef2531_kenrk_8byvr_550.jpg&shrr=curated-collection.html&uprn=1&tc=nnslsh&title=Business+Cards+with+a+Space+theme
Tap/click the image to see the slideshow in action and to try out the search


What used to happen depended on where the original products were being pulled from. If a store name and / or department id was used, the new search was restricted in the same way.

👎 The feedback we got was that searches by customers were often turning up no results; the department and store restrictions were often too limiting.

So, on the one hand, yes we all want to keep people in our stores to increase the chance of a sale of one of our designs, but on the other we don't want to lose a potential referral sale because we didn't cater for what they were after in their search.

👍 So we've added checkboxes that appear under the right circumstances:
  • If you used a store name in the slideshow, the "Search in same store" checkbox appears
  • If you used a department id, yes, you guessed, the "Search in same department" checkbox appears

Finally, when a search is performed, the page size parameter resets itself to 120 (the max) and the page number gets reset to 1.

🤥 Oh, and we've also removed the lie (an oversight!) that said the search opened in a new window; it doesn't.

💰Kerching! Let's hope it does the job and leads to more sales 😀

Edited to add:
We've added another nice little tweak that was easy to do. Now, when a department is used, the department name appears as part of the title for new searches:

http://www.kdl.to/curated-collection.html?qs=galaxy&rf=238582202591969585&storeid=hightonridley&dp=252055618931521092&cg=&bg=ffffff&st=popularity&sd=desc&ps=120&pg=1&pm=&timg=https%3A%2F%2Frlv.zcache.com%2Fstellar_nursery_r136_in_the_tarantula_nebula_business_card-raaa73688d09c4dcf9737e1f5e5ef2531_kenrk_8byvr_550.jpg&shrr=curated-collection.html&uprn=1&tc=nnslsh&title=
Tap/click the image to see the slideshow in action and to try out the search

You can see in this screenshot of one arising from a new search:
  1. A department must have been used (because the checkbox for it is there)
  2. The name of that department is now included in the title at the top of the slideshow.

Tap/click the image to see the slideshow in action.

Wednesday 27 December 2017

Tweak to Nifty's live product grid widget

Yesterday I was changing my sidebar product display to show only our business card tempate designs. That led me to want to remove the product names that Zazzle adds to the titles. After all, every single one will be a business card template - no need to take up vertical space repeating that fact for each one.

Nifty allows for that with an option (Step 1->More options->Advanced options):

There's the option, at the bottom of the section

The option is on by default so I just needed to uncheck it and then get the live product grid code:


Oops!

I added it to my blogger side bar but the Zazzle-added product names were still there. After some digging, I saw that the live product grid widget wasn't even checking to see if they should be added or not and was just going with the default of keeping them in place.

So I put that right, banning the gremlin to the coding netherworld and tried again. Great! The product names were gone - as you can see in the sidebar now.

Another day, another improvement. One day....




Tuesday 26 December 2017

Tweaking Nifty's individual product sharing tools

The individual product sharers weren't dealing very well with certain special characters when they appeared in Zazzle product titles and descriptions. I spent a couple of hours sorting it out today and, fingers crossed, all should be well.


http://www.kdl.to/nifty-slideshows.html?mcslsh=indvprod


Try out Nifty if you like - don't forget to fill in your details at the top (Step 1) first before trying the individual product sharing in Step 2.

It was good to hear from some of you that you've started to get referral sales because of the Nifty tools. Keep sharing the joy and help our fellow Zazzlers!

Ask to join the Facebook NiftyToolz Tips & Support group and get prompt answers to questions you might have - they're a friendly bunch there :)

Sunday 24 December 2017

Saturday 23 December 2017

Test of Nifty widgets after styles update

I've been working on the styles in the various widgets to make sure images don't use any "extras" that your theme styles might add.


For example, the blogger theme I'm using adds some padding, a border and a drop shadow to all images and this messed up the widgets' prettiness a little.

This post then is to test that the style changes have worked out ok and I haven't broken anything! A list of the widgets is:
  • Static Product Grid
  • Live Product Grid
  • Live Slideshow
  • Horizontal Scroller
  • Vertical Scroller
  • Slider
  • Linkify
The two live widgets pull afresh from Zazzle whenever someone views the page. The rest use the products pulled at the time you made the widget. The advantage of using live is that you'll never get broken links; the disadvantage is you must be able to paste javascript on the platform you use.
As you'll see, that's ok here on Blogger.

Static product grid


Live product grid. As time goes on this will show different products to those in the static product grid, above.




Fetching ...won't be a tick!

search (new window)










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