As a confirmation of what Printfection told us about yesterday I received a letter from Google about my Zazzle feeds. Other people received them about their Cafepress and other POD feeds.
Hello,
We’re happy to let you know that as of September 3rd, individual sellers on marketplaces no longer need to submit feeds to Google Product Search. Going forward, marketplaces will be responsible for submitting a feed of all their sellers’ items, so we will be retiring your account to avoid duplicate entries on Product Search. Zazzle will also be responsible for ensuring that your feeds are up-to-date and compliant with our policies.
In most cases, marketplaces already submit feeds of their sellers’ items. If you have any further questions about your items or Google Product Search, please contact Zazzle. We look forward to continuing to display your products, and hope you enjoy the new streamlined submission process.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Base product or account.
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
I love the way it says they are happy to tell us, like it’s good news, when in fact most POD shopkeepers and even the PODs themselves will lose out because of this.
Google Product Feed is no more for POD shopkeepers
Printfection made this announcement a few days ago but of course it is relevant to all POD sites as far as I can see.
We were notified by Google today of changes Google is implementing to their Google Base/ Google Product service. Starting tomorrow, September 3, 2009 Google’s new policy will no longer allow non-domain owners to submit products to Google Base on behalf of the domain. This means you cannot submit products to Google Base with www.printfection.com in the URL as you are not the “domain owner” for printfection.com. Furthermore, any products with www.printfection.com URLs you have submitted to Google Base in the past will be removed from Google Base shortly.
Going forward, all products will have to be submitted directly from Printfection, from a single Printfection-Owned Google Base account. Please be patient while we work on a new solution to submit your designs and products to Google Base.
To be honest, because I have been so busy I haven’t been uploading my feeds to Google base recently anyway but this will be a further blow to many shopkeepers, especially Cafepress shopkeepers who are fervently trying to compete with Cafepress itself for sale of their items. It’s hard enough to compete with CP anyway because they have the resources (paid for with our sweat) but this development doesn’t help at all.
In the case of Cafepress, there might be a workaround though. If you have set up a domain with cpshop you may be able to create a feed using that website. I think I have heard of it being done but I haven’t done it myself. If I get time to figure it out I will certainly post about it here. And of course you could opt out of the Cafepress marketplace. I haven’t done that either. When I get more time I will see how to proceed.
As previously mentioned by here on POD Helper Cafepress have formed a partnership with a website called Sellit that provides widgets that you can use to promote your store in MySpace, Facebook and basically anywhere you you can post HTML code without restrictions. Previously when I checked it was in closed beta so I couldn’t really get a good look at it.
Now I have looked at it I have to admit that I am unimpressed. I think that people new to the web love this type of widget/gadget but the fact is that in general they look very unprofessional. I think they can only look good if they can be can be seamlessly integrated into the design of the website. I have yet to see this happen though.
Actually you are very limited to what you can do with this widget. It seems that you can only use a section which contains products which for most Cafepress shopkeepers means that you can only promote one design at a time. Apart from choosing whether to display one item or a grid there seems to be no customization features. At the moment you can only associate one Cafepress store with your membership too.
Verdict: One good point about this is that the links lead to your store rather than the Cafepress marketplace so you can get the commission you deserve but unless they add some features I recommend that you spend the time you have allotted to marketing your products elsewhere.
This is about the 5th in the Zazzle University series but I will be posting the others when I get time and hopefully the series will continue for a while. In this video Rob rambles on about the fact that you should market your products and while he is right I don’t think this is where to talk about it. Nonetheless this is a pretty good video that shows you two ways to market your items via twitter.
The first way is to manually twitter each item from the Zazzle product page, this is awesome. I tried it and it is simple and fast to use. They even give you some set text just in case you are too lazy to write your own. I think it would have been better if they could pull the title from the shirt though. Be sure to be logged into your account in order to earn referral fees. You can also use this as an affiliate tool.
The second way is to set up your twitter account to automatically tweet your new products. Haven’t done this yet but I think it could get messy with the bulk create tool. I recommend setting up a twitter account specifically for your store if you are going to adding significant numbers of products.
By the way, you can follow me @RudeRetro where I usually tweet about new t-shirts, sales and such like.
I came across the news today that Cafepress have formed a new partnership with Sellit to make widgets called ShopBots which can be used to help market your Cafepress stores across platforms such as blogs, and MySpace. I don’t use MySpace myself but I do use a blog obviously so I signed up. Unfortunately it is still a closed beta at the moment so I can’t really give you much information about it.
They do have some information on their web page and FAQ and of course the first question I had was: what does it cost me? Well, it seems to be free. I think that that company will make money as an affiliate and recent changes to the Cafepress Affiliate Program may mean that it doesn’t even affect your volume bonus as the links go to your store and I believe all items sold from your store front contribute to your volume bonus.
As you can see the widget is squarish and less than 400px wide. It should easily fit in most blogs if that is where you want to use them. I am not big on widgets myself as they can be slow loading and can be frustrating for people with slow internet connections.
Zazzle has a similar widget which you can access from your control panel but it is not as cool as this one in my opinion. On the other hand you can use the Zazzle widget to earn affiliate dollars and you can include other people’s stores and items if you choose. That may be more important.
As I mentioned in a previous post, coupon codes are not just a way for you to get discounts on products from POD vendors. They should be used as a promotional tool in your marketing efforts. In most cases you will be able to include the coupon code in your POD store but even if you can’t, you can use them in your off-site advertising. Below is a perfect example of marketing with coupon codes. Spreadshirt has already promoted this coupon code as being for the new year but in their new email campaign but now that the Obama inauguration is coming they have recycled the code and well, you can see below what they are doing.
Purchase a piece of history, with Obama related designs and products and save 20.09% off until January 16th!
On January 20th history will be made! Take part in this historic event and purchase a piece of history with our large selection of Obama products and designs. From Obama Mama tees to Obama for Change sweatshirts we’ve got you covered on Inauguration Day 2009! As an added bonus we are offering 20.09% off all orders over $20.00 now through January 16th, so stock up on your Obama gear today!
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