The big draw back to using Zazzle as a PoD has always been the horrid shop structure that they implemented and the shopkeepers have had to deal with. It has made creating a storefront through their service tedious at best and given shopkeepers a lack of customization options. Well, this week that changed … sort of.

Zazzle has updated their category (formerly product lines) structure to allow shopkeepers to more easily manage what is going on within their shop and implemented the ability for these categories to be displayed on the main page instead of just single items.

You’ve been asking and we’ve been listening. Zazzle now offers:

1) Improved Category and Product Merchandising for Store Owners

  • Create categories (formerly called product lines) and display them with personalized icons on your storefront.
  • Set the display order of all categories and products within your store with easy drag and drop tools, or choose quick sort defaults.
  • Easily feature your best products in your “front window” with drag and drop.
  • Display categories fully expanded or as a scrollable list.
  • Learn more here.

Now when you enter categories you see only the items in that category also making it much easier to manage what is going on instead of having pages and pages of designs to scroll through while managing your shops. However one thing that I have found annoying is that apparently you also get a display of items that are in all the sub categories of that category too. For example, if you have a Category A with sub categories B, C & D when you are looking at Category A you see everything in B, C & D too. Maybe there is a way around this, but I have not found it yet and if there is not it is still inferior to the systems implemented by Cafepress, Printfection and others. However it is a major step in the right direction to making more user friendly shops and helping shopkeepers in an age where some PoD’s don’t seem to care all that much. I’ll let you guess as to which one I am referring to with that comment.

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J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.