“Should I organize my shop by design or product type?”

It’s a question I have seen asked on the boards countless times over the years. In my opinion, it is best to organize your shop by design rather than product type (ie. apparel, gifts, housewares etc.).

The first reason for this opinion is one of the most important things to remember when managing a CP shop: More than anything, you are selling your designs. Yes, you customer may be looking for a t-shirt or gift, but more often than not, the first thing they care about is the text or image on the product.
When we first opened Lekker Politics, we made section thumbnails using product images. This was before we had the ability to use images from our image basket, and we were still in the state of mind that we were selling products, not designs. After the election, we were contacted by CP about ways to improve our shop navigation and sales conversions. One thing they had found was that they got higher conversions from shops which used a design image as a section thumbnail rather than a product image. CP later used this info to create the marketplace we now know and love (or hate - depends on the day). After changing over our thumbnails, we have found this to be true as well. It just makes sense - you can give your customers a preview of the design that’s larger than it is on most products, perhaps reducing the amount of clicks a customer has to make to preview the design. If your image includes smaller text, the larger design thumbnails allow customers to read more than if they are just looking at the image on a shirt. I know that I tend to pass over shops if I find that I have to click on every product to see what the design looks like or says.

Also, Cafepress already has a built in function to browse designs by product. You can find the product drop down code in the CP Learning Center.

Another reason why we believe shops should organize by design is that it makes adding new products much easier. Also, sections are designed with defaults that are best used when a section contains one design on multiple products. You can add the same name prefix & description to each product in the section in just a few steps.

I have found that many affiliates prefer shops organized by design as well. When using tools such as CPShop, affiliates can easily pull entire sections into their shop. I do this in Lekker Bride. There are a lot of designs I would love to feature, but the SK either has the design scattered in sections across their shop, or has nested sub sections with products sectioned off by type. Continuity is very important to me and many other designers, so designs with this kind of setup are not given the exposure in larger shops like Lekker Bride.

Last but not least, when you organize by design, it makes offering a wide range of products a snap. We firmly believe that designs should be offered on the widest range of products possible. We choose to put a little more time and create multiple images to take advantage of the bleeds when available & cropping/sizing depending on the product range. However, this leads to loooooong pages - hopefully we will see a way to paginate CP hosted stores soon. This is an available feature if you use CPShop to host your shop on your own domain.

Of Course, this isn’t always the answer. If you only offer an image on one product/product range, it usually makes more sense to organize by product. For example, we have sections for thank you cards, holiday cards and journals at Lekker Designs. If we later decide to re-work these designs for other products, we can move the existing products to a new design section.