Haywire Graphics Blog

Zazzle provides a very useful script for Zazzle shop owners to display their merchandise on their own Web site.  It is called Zazzle Store Builder and can be downloaded for free.  The main advantage, is of course, increased exposure and SEO for your shop and designs. SEO stands for search engine optimization.  No matter how good our designs are, the Web is a vast ever-growing beast and getting found online takes some doing.  Besides writing good, keyword rich descriptions for your product lines and products, having an external domain allows a shop owner to add even more relevant keyword rich content for search engines to index.

Another advantage of Zazzle’s Store Builder script is that when a shopper clicks on one of your products, they are taken to your Zazzle store with your referral ID, so even if a shopper doesn’t buy one of your products, you’ll still get a commission if the shopper buys from another Zazzle shop during their visit.

The default setup of Store Builder is a bit limiting because it takes visitors away from your site to your store, which isn’t necessarily bad but it doesn’t give us much chance to increase our exposure on our own site.  In order to provide more content for search engines to gobble up, a good idea is have pages for each of particular product lines.  I’ve done this.  I’ve created pages for each product line in my store and pulled in products, from each particular product line, into their respective pages on my site.

How To Do It:

In the default Store Builder configuration.php file, you’ll notice that, by default, the $productLineId isn’t specified, so all the products from every product line is pulled in and displayed.  We can change this to a particular product line ID number.  To find the product line ID number for your product lines, just visit your Zazzle shop and click on the product line.  For instance, when I click on the Critters & Varmuts link, the url is:  http://www.zazzle.com/haywiregraphics/gifts?cg=196245801180315861.  The numbers after the equals sign is what I need to know.  But we need to create a new configuration file for this product line.

Below:  My default configuration file:

I created a new PHP file and named it critters_config.php and saved it into the same folder that contains the original Store Builder configuration file.  I then copied and pasted the original configuration file script and pasted it into the new critters_config file but specified  the productId code.  (See the image below.)

That easy enough but that’s not all I need to do.  I also need to create a new zstore file for my critters section.  I created another new php file and named it critters_zstore.php.  Again I just copied and pasted the original zstore.php script into the new page.  The only change I need to make is to point the script to the correct configuration file.

The original zstore file, which you want to leave alone, specifies the included class libraries near the top of the page.  These are the additional files that the zstore.php file needs to know the paths to in order to work.

I need to specify in my critters_zstore.php file where the configuration file is for it.  Remember we made a new configuration file named critters_config.php, which will pull in products just from that product line.  So I’ll make the change.

Now I need to upload my new critters_config file and critters_zstore file.  Make sure that you upload them into the same folder as the original Store Builder files.

Now, to get the products to display on my page, instead of using the default include statement:

<?php

// configure Zazzle Store Builder display
include “include/zstore.php”;

?>

I’ll change it to:

<?php

// configure Zazzle Store Builder display
include “include/critters_zstore.php“;

?>

Now I’ll need to upload the web page that is going to have my critter products on it, which I named critters.php and test it out.  Now I have a web page that will show just the products from this particular product line, thus increasing my SEO!