Using Wanelo to get more sales

I decided to join Wanelo. Wanelo helps you get your Zazzle store products in front of more people.  Wanelo gets its name from the terms Want, Need, Love. Wanelo is something like a big online catalog from a large number of stores organized by users themselves. I keep reading it's the place to be if you have a store online, big or small. Unlike Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter or any other, Wanelo is purely a social shopping website. What does this mean? It means people go there just to browse products and shop. Yes, Wanelo makes it possible to purchase items directly from vendors in a very easy way. You can use Wanelo to showcase the stuff you sell. That's awesome. Using it to increase sales sounds a natural thing. I’ve been trying Pinterest for a while, and yes, it gives some exposure. But I kind of feel like it’s more crafts and DIY-oriented site. With Wanelo it’s all about shopping. At first sight, it looks very geared towards fashion. But I found enough variety of items already to keep me interested!

Wanelo is the ideal site to show products to potential buyers. In fact, it looks better than Pinterest for that because you already know that everything you see there it's for sale. People can save products to their Wanelo's. If I save a product this means I like it. So, saving a product I created may be a sign that someone liked the product and maybe that there is an intention to buy it. It can give me some clues on what to do next.

Wanelo is great because it is built for sharing. Every time you search, hover over a product or visit a page you can Save, Share and Follow, Wanelo it’s a community experience. 

How to Use Wanelo? It’s rather simple. All you need to do is to create a personal account and post your Zazzle URLs products to Wanelo. This is simple. All you have to do is pick a product and click on it. Posting items from my Zazzle store using the bookmarklet or the Wanelo Chrome extension is just easy. Automatically it adds the product image to the site. Then you must pick the category your product fits in. Then update the product description, check if the price is right, and don’t forget to add some hashtags for it. Hashtags are a quick and easy way to help products get discovered. It’s done. Later you will get to see a big Buy Now button that links to the product purchase page on your Zazzle store, another button that indicates how many times the product has been saved by others. From there you can pin to Pinterest, share on Facebook or  Twitter also. Before this, you should take care of your profile. Add a photo or a logo that identifies you and your business, pick a username, write a short bio,  connect to Facebook and Twitter. It's done!

After joining Wanelo I Googled some info because I wanted to know how to increase my sales. It wasn’t a surprise. People are saying the usual. It’s the same for every site or social network you join. You have to make it work for you. It does not happen automatically. Here's a summary of what I learned:

• One important thing for sure is to post good content. It does not matter if you’re selling products or if you are writing a blog. This is the golden rule. Post good, original, unique content. So I decided to bring only my best products to Wanelo, the ones I really feel confident about and not all the products I create. I think that we must be selective here. I shall see if the good people will save and re-save as expected. I sometimes have doubts on what potential customers prefer!

• The other important thing is to be active. That’s quite a problem for me and most Zazzle creators. It’s hard to create and to promote at the same time. What happens most of the time is that when I am having fun creating new  Zazzle products I forget completely about promotion. But this is the way to do it. It’s two faces of the same coin. You will not succeed if you don’t make that extra effort! With Pinterest I found that is useful to schedule the pinning. At a certain hour, I pin some products and I’ve been trying to do it every day.

•  Create collections of your products and other’s Zazzlers too. When doing this we must think about shoppers' profiles. A shopper is a person that has a defined style. So fill that collection with products that potentially will fulfill that person’s style or needs. You will need to do product segmentation. There are lots of ways to do this: Holiday, Sports, Colors…Why creating collections of other stores than yours? Because those products will reveal your taste and preferences and this is how you also build a reputation as a trusted seller. People will check the person who created that particular nice collection and probably will get to your products also. You can also make collections from stores that sell complementary goods to the ones you provide. Mixing products is a good idea to please customers looking for complementary goods.

• Engage in commenting whenever you can but don’t force a sale, don’t force marketing efforts, don’t sound artificial. Be sure you offer useful insights and advice! One thing I read is that we should find products that are similar to ours, to look for connections between them. It will be nice to point out those connections relevant to others in a comment. You can address users directly by mentioning (@username) while commenting on products and stories. There’s also story reposting.

• Create stories. What are stories? I haven’t created any story yet.  A story is a paragraph of text that focuses on a group of products. Stories can include external links to a blog or your Zazzle store. A story can include several brands or types of products. Stories must generate discussions and comments, create surprise, not easy. But you can use it to make announcements or any other thing you feel like saying to your followers.You can include hashtags in your story. When you publish a story, it goes out to all of your followers. They can also be embedded on a blog. Stories can be easily shared to Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter as a single image of up to 9 products. Hashtag pages are created automatically when products and stories are tagged. So don’t forget to use it in stories also because they are useful, very useful.

• Adding SAVE buttons to your the site will allow visitors to post items onto their personal pages. Zazzle made it easy to pin products to Pinterest from our stores. With Wanelo you don't have a button showing all over your products. Wanelo Extension for Chrome works fine. But you can also share a product via SHARE button inside your product creation area. Click it and then hit the HARROW button and type Wanelo on that tiny search box. The Wanelo button will show and the connection to Wanelo is created allowing you to post. Probably there's a lot more about Wanelo that I will discover after a couple of more days using it. But this is the basics. It's pretty simple, don't you think?