Use Polyvore to Display Your Products to Advantage

Polyvore can be used to design collages of products that can then be used to drive traffic to your blog or website (where you CAN add affiliate codes by editing the images) or directly to your own products, such as on Zazzle, Etsy, or other print-on-demand sites. You may even be able to set up attractive displays of merchandise you sell on eBay, for example. Polyvore will earn the referral commission, but you will earn your own sales commissions for selling your own products.

Let us look at some statistics to see where Polyvore sits with regard to social media sites. According to Alexa, Polyvore users are more likely to be female, university graduates and surfing from home as opposed to school or work.  Yet we can see by the table to the left that Polyvore still has a long way to go before it begins to complete with the other social media directly. Still, if you use the collages you put together on Polyvore as pins for Pinterest and as shares on other popular social media, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, you are making attractive material that may be more likely to serve as a magnet drawing likes and further shares and, therefore, traffic.

The most effective way to use Polyvore is in designing collages that show off your products to advantage, that show visitors how various products go together as sets and why they should consider purchasing certain items together. Some marketing sites suggest that when you show a collection of products that fit together well, the potential buyer is more likely to select what you have chosen over products shown individually.

I decided to make up a set of jewelry boxes that I designed using photographs from Israel. Follow the steps below to add a number of products to your account.

1. Open the Zazzle product pages for those designs you want to include in your first set. The order in which you clip your products onto your Polyvore account determines how items will overlap in a set, with later added items overlapping the earlier ones.
2. While on the product page, click the clipper tool that is now on your toolbar. This will open a small window on your Zazzle product page as shown in the image to the left below.
3. You see that the product title appears automatically (1); add tag words (2 - more tag words can be added later if you don't think of all of them at this point); click the small arrow beside the number 3 in order to select the correct price of the product; click "Like" (4 - this is not a Facebook like).
4. A new window will open (see image to the right below) with the title and price information on it. Click "Done" and this item will be added to your account.
5. View all your items and begin to build your sets by clicking on "Create", then "Set". On the window that opens, click on "My Items" from the bar at the top right of the screen.

Click on each product you want to display in a single set. A small window will open. You click on "Add to set".

I don't like the white space in the middle of the items, but this can be taken care of after publishing the set.

Click on the blue button in the upper left corner of the Polyvore screen. It says "Publish". You can save this arrangement as a draft if you need to return to it later to finish.

A new small window will open that asks you to give a title to your set, to provide a description (this is the chance for adding keywords that will help search engines find your work) and to select a category for your set. Click "Publish" and you will get a new window that offers you the chance to share your new set on various social media. Click "Done" on this window and your new set is completed.

Once completed, you can see it by clicking on your icon image and clicking "Sets". Open the new set and you will see the option to edit it. When you click "Edit", on the right-hand side of the screen you will now see a variety of "Embellishments". One of these is text with a variety of fonts and text colors. You can change the size of the text by manipulating the text box.

Below is my final set:

After you have gained proficiency with building sets, you can build collections, which are special groupings of sets and favored items, and templates that help you build new sets in the future. There are many options on this site and the best way to learn how to use all functions is to play around with them.