Saturday 30 June 2018

Automatically identify and pin your Zazzle best with NiftyZSort

How to identify your best performers and then set up automatic pinning for them using just a few clicks and one copy-and-paste. It really is that simple!

Identify and auto pin / share your best-performing Zazzle products


First, you'll need a few things:
  • An account on IFTTT - and know how to make applets there
  • A Pinterest business account (or you could tweet or share on Facebook)
  • The free NiftyZSort bookmarklet
Got those? Great, you're good to go :) No? I'll wait while you get them...

What is a best performer?

Products which get viewed only a few times on average before you make a sale are "best performers".

Note that if you've only had one order for a product after only two views, it's not really a best performer, you might just have got lucky! I think you can be sure of it being a best performer when it's sold more than a few and it's still got a low-views-to-orders.

Prodesigners report somewhere in the mid teens of views per order is average for their best ones. And some of those sold in their hundreds.

Identifying and choosing your best performers

First, decide on roughly what style / theme / type of product you want to run with this time. See the screenshots below for more detail.

  • Get to your Zazzle store's back end 
  • move to the category, department or search to bring them up
  • from the sort drop down, choose Orders (All time)
  • and lastly, set the page size to 204

An example might be that you want to identify and auto-promote your best performing designs in your fine art category

Here's more detail of the above steps you'll take. Why not follow along?
By the way, a "pid" is the unique Product Identifier of each and every product that gets made. It's the long number at the end of the url in the address bar when you're on a product's page.


Screenshots of each step are here, up to starting off your applet creation in IFTTT.



Get the right products showing in your store's back end with sort order & page size as shown

⬇︎


click the NiftyZSort bookmarklet in your toolbar

⬇︎


In the dialog box that opens, copy and paste the below
24 sordersalltime reverse export

⬇︎

 You'll first see a page summary dialog and when you close it, you'll see:


A new export window opens with the top 24 performers as a comma-separated pids list
note: if it's already open, it'll update instead

⬇︎


Copy the list of Pids ready for the next step. Then click the link to the nIFTTTy Pids Scheduler

⬇︎


Paste your pids where indicated and set up the rest of your schedule

⬇︎



Finally, make the feed and hit the copy button ready for using in IFTTT

⬇︎

make your new RSS feed based applet using the Feed Url you just copied

⬇︎



Now get on with more important stuff like designing and let IFTTT pin on your behalf!



Confirming the selected products are ok

If you want to see the products that got selected, close the export window and look on the page in your store's back end.

You'll see some with alltime perf... highlighted in red. They're the ones that got selected. Note that the products are sorted in your store's back end with those with the highest all-time orders at the top.

I did it this way (in the NiftyZSort config dialog) so I can confirm that each one with that highlight has had a high enough number of orders for me to rely on it being a best-performer, time after time.




Last point

You don't have to use Pinterest as the Then That part of your IFTTT applet. Other common choices are Twitter and Facebook. Some Zazzlers even auto email them to their autopost blogs.

------------------------------------------------

Things to know

  • the scheduler can handle a maximum of 72 pids, so don't configure NiftyZSort for more than this
  • when the scheduler runs out of pids to pin / tweet / share, then delete the now defunct applet
  • when it pins / shares, the tracking code will have the pinning / sharing date appended

Enjoy 😎