How to Add Images to Zazzle Categories

However you decide to organize your Zazzle store - by product or by design- you will need to use the categories to make the store easier to navigate.  You will most likely end up with thousands of products in the store.  In order to keep things nice and neat, create a category for each set of items.

Which ever way you decide to group products, the category holder will need an image.  The category sections will remain out of site on the home page if you don't add an image to the section. 

If you are knowledgeable and creative you can make graphics with text to represent the category. That can be a time-consuming venture.  But there is an easy way to make the category show.  

Grab an image of a product from the category that needs it.  On my laptop I use the "snipping tool" to cut around it and then save it for upload.  On a Mac use the "command, shift, 4" and do the same cut around the product.  Find one of the best looking products to represent the category and take a screen shot of it.  If the product has the "customize" button in the way, click on customize to see the image clearly before making the snip.

Go back to the category area in the back end of your store and find the category that needs the image.  In the edit mode, you will see the area where the image belongs.  Simply upload the image and you are done!

In the image above, the shop owner will see the empty category, but on the storefront, it won't show at all.  That means that any customers who come to your store and land on that first page, won't even know you have any of this items for sale.  The products can still be found through tags and searches, but it's in your best interest to make sure they appear with all the others.

Any category can have numerous sub-categories.  Those will not show up until the main category is chosen, and they must also have images in order to show.

The trouble I have with sub-categories is that the order of the products can't be changed.  Main categories have that option.

I began selling at Zazzle in 2007 and the website has made many changes throughout the years to keep up to date with this fast-paced online world.

It's difficult for me to remember exactly how things were way back then.  There were certainly not as many products.  These days Zazzle adds new products weekly, if not daily at times.

We used to have the option to colorize our stores.  Background, header, text, sidebar, and so on.  Some people would create truly hideous combinations.  The consensus was that a plain white background looked most professional.  And Zazzle changed all of the site to look the same in 2013.  We can still add our own banner image.

One of the products that we were offered to create was the Ked's shoes.  I remember that people went nuts making awesome looking shoes.  Some people opened new stores (yes, me too) just to display the shoes.  I did sell some shoes, but suddenly Ked's shoes were no longer available.  I lost an entire store.

So keep in mind the fact that products can disappear and all your hard work will be gone.