Monday 21 May 2018

Zazzlers! Learn which Nifty Tool is right for you

Entire page replaced. Please see it in the tab above instead


Our Nifty stable of tools are hugely capable in helping you to promote your or others' products and earn referral income from any arising sales (Zazzle's terms and conditions apply when determining if a referral fee is due).

Which ones are right for you depends on what type of storekeeper you are...

What type of storekeeper are you?



So you've been on Zazzle a while, beavering away with your designs. You've been sharing / pinning from the share buttons on product pages for some time. You now feel you need to reach more people but haven't got the time to do it all via this route. You might or might not have a website.
You need to clone yourself or find another way to become more efficient at promoting...

Or maybe you've got to that stage in your Zazzle evolution where you're more serious about promoting other people's products as well?  You're branching out, you've even bought a small-time affiliate hat to wear ;).

Perhaps you've reached the stage where you're really serious about affiliating. You've likely got your own website but aren't so serious that you've got a team behind you.

Whichever you are, there's at least one Nifty tool for you! Look at the tables below and figure out which ones will help you the most wherever you are in your journey as a Zazzle designer / storekeeper.


Available via the Nifty Promo Control Panel, Step 2



Tool Would suit Notes
nIFTTTy Share Scheduler Storekeeper serious about affiliating Automatic sharing / pinning.
Gives you a url to use in IFTTT's rss feed-based applets.
Free (50/50 revenue share) and subscription options
Share a slideshow page Storekeeper without a website Uses a template page on our site that gets filled with your data. Can be pinned / shared by visitors. Ask friends / family to share and multiply your reach!
Free - always uses your referral id
Share individual products Storekeeper also branching out into affiliating for extra income Gives you a slideshow of products for you to flick through, pinning / sharing as you go. All main social media channels supported.
Free - always uses your referral id
Share a product grid page Storekeeper without a website Uses a template page on our site that gets filled with your data. Can be pinned / shared by visitors. Ask friends / family to share and multiply your reach!
Free - always uses your referral id
Widgets (slideshows, product grids, sliders, scrollers) Storekeeper / small-time affiliate with a website Only for sites where you can paste html and styles and, for some widgets, javascript as well. See them in action here
Free - always uses your referral id


Other Nifty tools


Tool Would suit Notes
nIFTTTy Pid Scheduler Storekeeper with a small-time affiliate hat on Automatic sharing / pinning.
Gives you a url to use in IFTTT's rss feed-based applets. The NiftyZPids helper bookmarklet exports a list of product ids from any Zazzle search results page on the main site. Use it with the scheduler or compile your own list and use that.
Free (50/50 revenue share) and subscription options
NiftyGridZPro Storekeeper / affiliate with self-hosted WordPress site Paid-for professional-level plugin that is so far beyond the capability of free plugins. Try it for free using our referral id.
NiftyZSort bookmarklet Storekeeper The only bookmarklet to help you browse your product stats and guide you in where you need to improve or where your successes are in comparison to others.
Free

Saturday 19 May 2018

nIFTTTy Zazzle Pid Scheduler - new free Zazzle promotional tool

Now you can schedule your automatic shares from a list of Zazzle product ids
(Post updated October 21st 2018)

Why would I want...

...to do that when I can already use the other nIFTTTy scheduler to share from collections?

Well, creating collections takes time, and cluttering things up with collections used just for affiliate promoting may not be what you want, so this is an amazing alternative. And if you use the NiftyZPids bookmarklet to compile your pids, it's one that takes only seconds.

There's a handy comparison table at the end, so you can quickly see what's what.

Here's a screenshot of the new nIFTTTy Pid Scheduler




So what's this NiftyZPids bookmarklet all about?

It makes collecting Zazzle product ids for your schedule as easy as click and copy. You:
  • visit any search results page on Zazzle
  • click the NiftyZPids bookmarklet - behind the scenes it grabs the pid from each product in the search results and opens a new tab/window to present the list of pids
  • in the new tab/window that opens, select and copy the list of pid
  • zoom round to the nIFTTTy Pid Scheduler and paste them in!


How do I get it?

Simple. Visit the nIFTTTy Pid Scheduler page and, towards the bottom, drag the NiftyZPids link you see to your bookmarks toolbar (Firefox) / bookmarks bar (Chrome) and that's it done!

You only need to do it once, unless a new version is released.

A typical affiliating promotion session

Goal: pin 60 items per day on various themed Pinterest boards you have (they must be yours)
Method: Make 5 IFTTT applets, each with 12 scheduled pins per day

Any Zazzle search results page
⬇︎
click / tap the NiftyZPids bookmarklet
 ⬇︎
copy the list of product ids
⬇︎
paste into the scheduler and set your schedule
⬇︎
make a new RSS Feed-based applet in IFTTT
⬇︎


  1. Decide on the theme and / or product type that what you want to promote
  2. Do a search on Zazzle to get them displayed
  3. Click the NiftyZPids bookmarklet and copy the comma separated list of pids from the new tab/window that opens
  4. Switch to the nIFTTTy Pid Scheduler window and paste them in
  5. Set up your schedule, use all 12 time slots and every day
  6. Click the "make feed url for IFTTT" button and copy the text that appears
  7. Make a new IFTTT applet, using "RSS Feed" as the IF This part
  8. Choose your social media channel for the Then That part and finish off your applet
Time taken - 4(?) minutes, less as you get familiar and into the swing of things.

Repeat so you end up with a total of 5 IFTTT applets. Goal achieved, total time 20 minutes to set up 12*5 pins per day.

As Zazzle search results pages give a default of 60 products, your applets will run out after 5 days.

Here's a tip: If you want 7 day's worth so you can get into a weekly routine, instead of scheduling 12 per day, do 8 and make 7 applets in total (7 X 8 = 56 per day).

Advanced tip: If you want a total of 120 pids (the maximum), look in the address bar when you're on the Zazzle search results page. If it includes a "?" in it, add &ps=120 to the end. If it hasn't already got a "?", add ?ps=120 to the end. Doing this will cause Zazzle to display 120 products, so you'll end up with 120 pids. If you schedule 9 per day, you can get into a fortnightly routine instead.

...and another tip: At the top of the export page, you'll see the web address of the search page you used on Zazzle to get your pids. Copy and paste that as part of the name you give your applet. That way, when this one runs out, you can easily return to the same search and move to the second page of results:


When you do, edit the name to show the search results page number you used so you can keep track of where you got to.

Note. We're only letting you have a total of 10 active (i.e. switched on) applets using the nIFTTTy schedulers at any one time. This is whether you use the feed-based one, the pid-based one or both. This limit is to keep the strain on our servers to something manageable so we hope you understand.

Watch a video tutorial of all the above steps - summary complete by 1m 30s for the impatient!



Comparison of Pid-based & feed-based Zazzle nIFTTTy schedulers



Pid-based Feed-based
Maximum number of products 120 product pids are ok but no more - the limit is the character length of the feed url that IFTTT accepts
I've had to use compression to allow for 120 but that's very close to the limit.
240 if pulling from a collection, 1000 otherwise
Flexibility Compile product id lists by hand or use NiftyZPids bookmarklet on ANY Zazzle search results page for automatic compilation Point, click, type using the Nifty Promo control panel - search term, department, category, search term, page size, page number, sort order, sort direction
Ability to exclude certain products Yes, so you can say goodbye to those "Your name here" products, if that's what you want Yes, when you use the filters
Free version Uses your referral id half the time, ours for the other half Uses your referral id half the time, ours for the other half
Subscription (covers both schedulers) Always uses your referral id Always uses your referral id
Promo code support Future upgrade Yes
Deleted products handling If a product is deleted between you compiling the pid list and it coming up for promotion, you'll end up with nothing for that time slot, so iFTTT will have nothing to share / post / pin.
Once shared / posted / pinned, though, there's not much can be done. At least Zazzle are handling deleted products better now.
Whenever the applet runs, it pulls afresh and so prevents sharing of deleted products.
Once shared / posted / pinned, though, there's not much can be done. At least Zazzle are handling deleted products better now.
Starting Go directly to Nifty Pid Scheduler Setup and launch done in Nifty Promo Control Panel
Save settings Yes Yes

Which one will you use most often?



Comments/questions welcome - either here, on the NiftyToolz, Tips and Support Facebook group or the announcement in the Zazzle forum.

Wednesday 16 May 2018

Promote automatically from a list of product ids - New Nifty tool coming up

This new tool will give you another way of sourcing the Zazzle products you want to promote (your own or others'), without resorting to using collections. 

One advantage is you can easily edit out any products from the list you don't want to promote (your name here, anyone?)
 
It's a variation on the nIFTTTy scheduler where, instead of using a feed to get products to share, it uses a list of product ids*. I'm testing and tidying up right now but will keep you posted on this blog.

So how do you get the product ids you want in your share schedule? I've got a new bookmarklet that picks them up from any of Zazzle's search result pages on their main site. Here's the top of the export page
 
... and when you scroll to the bottom of the page, you'll see where you can copy the list of product ids ready for pasting into the scheduler:



IFTTT will work it's way through the list according to the schedule you set, working just like the existing nIFTTTy / IFTTT combination does right now.

*The product id is the 18 digit number at the end of a product's page url, like this https://www.zazzle.com/your_initials_on_balmoral_royal_tartan_golf_towel-256586726899743511?rf=238582202591969585&tc=raza
 
The bookmarklet is called NiftyZPids and the new scheduler, nIFTTTyZPids scheduler.

Tuesday 1 May 2018

Zazzlers, get this free new tool: NiftyZSort bookmarklet

get the bookmarklet here
drag this link: NiftyZSort to your toolbar


This brand new tool adds new sort options for products in your store's back end. It'll also guide you in your promoting by helping you to choose what to promote.
Ok, onwards.. we're going to visit any old page in our store's back end and then sort the entries there. We'll use the bookmarklet to sort by views but you can sort by any of the stats Zazzle lists.

Preparation

Here's my store's back end. To prepare, I've navigated to the Cards & Postage department, chosen to view by Orders (all time), set the page size to 48 and moved to page 5. This is my starting point as you can see in the screenshot.



You could start anywhere you fancy, maybe in a category for a specific department, or without (but it doesn't work for collection pages).

End result

First, here's the end result so you know where we're heading....






To get there...

So this is how I got that. I clicked the NiftyZSort bookmarklet and typed in 20 sviews - see the below...




Here's the results of a different set of choices: 20 salltimeperf reverse


Get your NiftyZSort bookmarklet here

NiftyZSort - just drag that link to your toolbar and you've got it ready to use on your store's back end. Yup, that's all you do to install it! Give it a try, right now!

It's already transforming my understanding of my sales, and I've only been testing it so far! Why not give it a whirl and see how well it guides you on your promoting 😃

Finally I'd love to hear your feedback in the usual places - comments here, in the Zazzle forum or on the NiftyToolZ Facebook group.

--------------------------------------
EDIT: 29th June: Enhancement added. The Product Ids of the top 'n' (as set in the config screen) performing products are included as a comma-separated list. We've done this to make it easy to build a nIFTTTy Scheduler applet in IFTTT to auto-promote them.

EDIT 11th May: Enhancement added: export now contains a column for Product ID. Bug fixed: it wouldn't do an export unless a sort was done at some time in the session. Fixed.

EDIT 8th May: Enhancement added: Modified the Page Summary to make tracking in a spreadsheet easier. It now includes today's date and tabs to separate the numbers from their labels. Now you can just copy and paste, right from the summary page into your spreadsheet. Tested and works with Firefox, Safari, Opera but not Chrome, which prevents copying from alert boxes.



Please delete the old bookmarklet and 
redrag the updated link below to your bookmarks toolbar

EDIT 10th May: Only the zazzle.com domain is supported, so we added an enhancement for locales using the UK date format day-month-year. It's only for the detailed stats export and makes it more useful.
Spreadsheets are bad at understanding dates in a different format to their locale settings, so if your normal date format is day-month-year, this is definitely for you. To use it, instead of using export, use exportukdates in your config screen.

EDIT 9th May #3: final bug fixed in displayed date for Last Viewed Date. When it was "within last 24 hours" it wasn't converting it to a date correctly. Now fixed.
Please delete the old bookmarklet and redrag the updated link below to your bookmarks toolbar

EDIT 9th May #2: bug fixed in displayed date for Last viewed. To see it, include the word "export" (no quotes) on the config screen. It's mentioned in the instructions.

EDIT 9th May: Enhancement added: Now export the stats for all products on a page for analysis in your favourite spreadsheet.



EDIT 7th May #2: Enhancement added: You now get a page summary showing totals and averages of all products' existing number-based stats. It lets you compare performance of, eg, different categories, different departments or designs (pulled up by searching) or any combination that makes sense.

EDIT 5th May #2: Enhancement added: You can now sort by the product's title. This can help when you want to work on your titles, editing them for SEO purposes

EDIT 5th May: Fixed another bug when sorting by Last Viewed.
Fixed bad behaviour when cancelling from the choices dialog.
Enhancement added: the sort order stats line being used is highlighted in dark violet.

EDIT 4th May: Fixed bug when sorting by Last Viewed
EDIT 3rd May: Updated to allow sorting by any of the date stats and also the royalty