Building a Section

Ok, so now you have gone through the steps of creating a design, loading it to your media basket, tagging it, applying it to a product and then typeing in descriptions and making it available for sale with a markup. 

If you want to keep a Free CafePress shop, you will be allowed to apply 1 design per product.  So that means you can either have 1 design on all the products, or a different design on each product (and combinations of them - IE you could apply one design to all the shirts).

For those of you who want to build a complete shop, I will now walk you through the steps to create a section.  You may recall that I wanted to load designs for all of my websites.  I have 5 different sites, and have created and loaded 10 different designs already.  I will now give you the steps to create a section.

1. The steps below will require you to have a Premium shop.
2. Log In, Click on Your Shops, Click on Sections / Products for the shop you want to edit.
3. Click Add a Section.
4. Here is where you will want to decide how to organize your shop.  You can either organize it by design or by products.  Most of the larger shops organize by design.  Then they can apply a single design to all the products.  Shoppers can then easily find a design they like and buy it on the product they want.  It is also an easier and faster way to create sections.  Applying 1 design to all the products is how I will be walking you through the rest.
5. Click I’d like to add one design to many products
6. Now you will be able to input things like the design to show on the front of the section, name of the section, etc.  But we are going to leave all of this blank!  Why?  Because we are going to build a section template that will allow us to create new sections a lot faster.  The only thing you might want to type in, is a product markup.  You can either do a tiered, or a flat number, or a flat %.  I put in a flat markup of $5.00.  This way 1 sale a month will cover my monthly fees.  Some products are less likely to sell with that type of markup though, so you will want to price those products accordingly later.  Click Done
7. Click Done once more.
8. You will now see your new section, but since it will be your template, click “Hide” (this is a little gray box on the section itself.  That way shoppers can’t see your blank template section.
9. Click Edit, Click Add one or more products
10.  You will now be choosing the products you want to add to your section.  This in general will be the same across all of your sections, so if you do it slowly and do it correctly this time, you will have less editting to do later.  We DO NOT want to simply add all the products.  This is because our designs won’t fit right, or won’t look good on all the products.  We also want to make it so certain items show first.  T-Shirts are the best selling item in CafePress by a long shot.  Also, if you want affiliate marketers to link to your shop to increase sales, you will want  a crisp looking shop with the T-Shirt first (that is what they want).  So, Click on the Make Selections under Shirts
11.  Click on the pictures of all of the lighter colored shirts.  Such as: White T-Shirt, Value T-Shirt, Women’s T-Shirt.   Click on each shirt only once, and DO NOT click on the dark / black T-Shirts.  Your designs will have to be created specially for dark/black T-Shirts.  So just leave those out for now.  You will know which ones are “dark” because they will say so in the description.  Do not choose the black polo either. Click Add Selection
12.  You will now see that all the T-Shirts that you clicked on are in the box on the right side.  Repeat this step for the following products in this order:
    1. Shirts Long
    2. Kids Clothing
    3. Bags
    4. Mugs
    5. Pets
    6. Hats
    7. Intimate Apparel
    8. Fun Stuff
    9. Buttons and Magnets
    10.  Stickers
    11.  Cards, Prints, Calendars
    12.  Home Office
    13.  Flip Mino Camcorder
13.  The products will show up in your sections that order and you will have to do minimal rearranging now.
14.  Click Add these products
15.  You will now be brought to your new section.  What you want to do now is rearrange the products.  We want the white T-Shirts to be on the first row.  So if you have 3 products to a row, move your White T-shirt, Value T-shirt, and Jr. Jersey T-shirt to the top by:
    1. Click Rearrange
    2. Click on a product
    3. Move it up or down with the arrows
    4. I also scroll down to see my buttons, magnets, and stickers.  I like to put them in order as well, so 1 sticker, then 10 stickers, then 100 stickers (same for the magnets, and buttons).
    5. Click Save
16.  Click Done
17.  You now have a template ready to apply a design to.  You will notice that your template is grayed out if it is being “hidden”.  If it is not hidden, it will be orange.
18.  You now want to create a copy of this section.  So Click Copy
19.  You will now have 2 grayed out sections.  You will want to edit the copy.  So Click Edit
20.  You will now see the guts of your section
    1. Click on Section info
    2. Type in a name
    3. Type in a section Teaser - this will appear on the parent page
    4. Type in a section description - be sure to use some keywords here.
    5. Select an image
    6. Click Save
21.  You are now back to your section contents.  You will apply the same thing to all the products, so before each of the steps below, you will check the box “check all items“
    1. From the drop down list, next to the “check all items” you will find several things to do.
    2. Add/change image - Choose this one, and select the image you want to add, then save
    3. Change Description - choose this one, and type in the description for the design you have chosen.  Type in sentences and try to add keywords in your description.
    4. Change name - choose this one, and type in the name you want for the design.  If you don’t type in a name, each product will just be called something like “white t-shirt” instead of “From Pink Slip White T-Shirt”. 
    5. You don’t need to fuss with the others in the drop down list.
22.  Click Done
23.  You can now click “Show” and your section will be open for business.

There are several “clean up” type of things that we will want to do to your section, but since this post became quite long, I will include those in the next post.  In the mean time, give creating a section a try.  If it doesn’t turn out, you can always delete it and start again.

Any questions?  Concerns?

Slippy

From Pink Slip