Collections vs Categories on Zazzle

Collections vs Categories

What is the difference?

It's important to remember when doing Zazzle, or any POD site, that you need to have your own vision, and each person will set up their store differently. In this post I am just giving you basic information and then you will have to use your own creativity to expand on this info to make your store unique to you, and to set it up so it works with your style, theme, niches and products.

And remember, Zazzle is a huge platform, you cannot learn everything at once. You will end up changing many things about your stores many time through the years. We all do it. What works one year might not, the next. So it's ok to make changes, make mistakes, make adjustments as time goes. Don't let yourself get "stuck" on any one detail. Most people find your shop through a google search and are looking for a specific product, so adding a good title, description and tags is probably what is most important. 

Ok that being said...

Categories

Categories are broader groupings of products. 

There are two main ways I see people use categories. 

1. by product type such as t-shirts, stickers, buttons etc.

2. by a theme such as "boy's baby shower" or "burgundy wedding"

There is not a right way or wrong way, and if you have more than one store you might do it differently in each store.

Sub-categories

You can also make sub-categories. 

So say you use product type as a category, you can divide it up even further.
For example you can put category as T-shirts then put sub-categories as "kid's t-shirts" and "men's t-shirts" and "women's t-shirts". 

Now say you make categories by themes.

For example your category could be "Baby Shower".

You can then add sub-categories under that such as "boy's baby shower" and "girl's baby shower". 

Sorry I had to use the cancer image but it's one of the few times I have ever used sub-categories. 

Collections

Collections can be used in a couple different ways too.

1. You can make a collection per design. So say you made a cute bumblebee sitting in flowers design. You can put that design on a button, a coffee mug, a thermal mug and so on. So you can make a collection of all the products you made with that design.
Here is an example of a collection I made with using a design. 
Cozy Corner with Coffee, a Good Book and a Cat

2, An event. This is usually a combination of a design put on different itmes that are all for an event such as a wedding, baby shower or birthday. 
Here is an example of one of my event collections. 
Baby Boy and Dachshund Dog Baby Shower

3. By Product Type

You can make a collection of coffee mugs for example.

Here is a collection I made based on product type.

Funny Pop Art Birthday Cards

So to sum it up, you can play around with categories, sub-categories and collections and make it work for what kind of products you have in your store. Just remember categories are broader, sub-categories are less broad and collections are pretty precise. 

Here is a video I made explaining all of this also. I hope this info will help!

 

Happy Zazzling!

Lisa