Make sure your Shop looks its best!

Choose a name for your shop; it’s good to use the product name in your shop name, for example: Jo’s Puzzle shop.
Choose a logo,
an Avatar or a picture of your products to put on your first page of your shop.
Create a product portfolio of your created products,
it’s always nice to show a range of your products rather than just one.
Use real pictures instead of renderings.
Name your products as this looks much nicer.
You can do this by naming your picture (when logged in, go to MyDesigns, on the product page, where you can load new pictures you have a field with “Description”, change this to a relevant title, again this would include a key word, e.g. The Pentagon Puzzle).

How should I price my products?

Search for a healthy balance between avarice and affordability

We suggest a mark-up of approximately 20%, but the choice is entirely yours. If in doubt, lean towards affordability.

What should I do to get easily found?

Work on your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) otherwise no search robot can find your shop.
SEO helps to increase the visibility of your shop on the search engines such as Google. What is most important? In anything you do often use your chosen keywords, e.g. mention you are all about jewelry or puzzles, or whatever it is that you want to sell.
Link anchor text, i.e. if you include links to other pages, do not say click here and link the word “here” but rather say e.g. find more puzzles and link the word “puzzles”.
Be descriptive in your body copy, again use key words e.g. for a good example see Oskarpuzzles.
Only pick the relevant categories your Shop belongs to. Optimize your text with relevant words in this way and you will be higher ranked by the search engines.
Regularly update your shop, e.g. add new products, updated text, descriptions, etc.

How can I improve my sales?

Be your own Ambassador, this does not cost you anything!

Promote your shop as much as possible, “spread the word”.
Add direct links www.shapeways.com/shops/yourshopname (deeplink = link to your own shop not just to www.shapeways.com) on your own website or blog (if you have one). So, talk about your shop on your own website and blogs.
A quick and easy way to get more people looking at your designs and an effective way to direct traffic towards your pages are with social bookmarking aggregators such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook and Twitter, you can also use:

YouTube
LinkedIn
MySpace
Etc.

More info of how to do this and examples of the quick successes you can achieve can be found on our related tutorial.

Make a video about your products and link from YouTube to your shop and vice versa.
Increase the number of links to your shop, e.g. by putting it on websites which have relevance to your product, e.g. Sites, blogs, photo streams or galleries that you follow.
When you submit your product to one of these sites make your own ‘press release’.
This could include the following:
- A least one photograph where the object fills the frame with natural lighting and a neutral background,
- A detailed shot of a critical component of your product,
- A photograph of the object in use to give scale and context,
Write a brief description of the item along with a short bio with direct links to your item and your personal website or blog. Journalists (and especially bloggers) can be lazy and if fed information they can convert into a story without too much research they will be more likely to write about it so make it easy for them.
Some examples of design sites that accept submissions are:

www.freshbump.com
www.notcot.org
www.notcouture.com
www.mocoloco.com
www.yatzer.com/info
www.yankodesign.com
www.designboom.com/eng
http://ifitshipitshere.blogspot.com
www.shapeshifters.net
www.designspotter.com
www.materialicious.com
www.behance.net
www.dezeen.com

Ask your friends to do all the above as well.

Your very own paid for advertising campaigns

Attend and showcase at events related to your shop, contact us to see if you can get any Shapeways sponsoring (we cannot guarantee sponsorship take a look at our sponsorship guidelines and we will look into each request as they come in).
Pay per Click. Advertisers (you) pay their host (in this case Google) when your ad is clicked. Advertisers typically bid on keywords or phrases relevant to their product.
Place contextual adds. Google explains further.

Don’ts

Don’t SPAM others; you don’t want to come on a black list.
Don’t be discouraged, it might take a little time before you will get more traffic.

Do’s

Do all the above to promote your shop.
Do let other know of your successes via the forum.

Shapeways is always improving and innovating therefore it is very important for us to receive your ideas, comments and suggestions about “How can I promote my Shop”.