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Avoid these 11 Common Metadata & Product Creation Mistakes

Avoid these 11 Common Metadata & Product Creation Mistakes

Mistakes are helpful – if you manage to learn from them. To save you from your own learning curve, we’ve collected the most common mistakes other Marketplace Designers have made before you. Learn from their mistakes and give your Showroom a boost.

Want your Showroom to shine? Then you’ll need to learn to show off your designs. But how?… Next time you’re ready to create a product, be sure to watch out for these common pitfalls.

Top 5 mistakes in product creation

1. Your design is too small when placed on the product

Your design looks bigger on the on-screen product preview than it will look in print. This is because the online preview shows clothing in size M. Larger products have the same size of print area, so designs will look smaller on a bigger product. As a rule of thumb, enlarge your designs when creating a product. It will come out just fine when printed. If you want to double-check, you can also see the measurements of your design when resizing it and check it in real life with a good old-fashioned ruler.

2. Your design isn’t published on enough products

The design and the product must complement each other—that much is obvious. But if you only offer your design on a few products, you have worse chances of making sales. Let customers decide what they want! Place your design on as many products as possible, considering your design still looks good and makes sense for the product’s target audience. Which brings us to our next mistake…

3. Your design is published on too many products

This is also true the other way around! Publishing one design on all products is easy, but usually the wrong decision. In the worst case, you put products on the Marketplace that violate our community standards. This may happen if you put mature designs on kids’ products, for example. It’s good to use your common sense and avoid weird or inappropriate combinations, like a “Best Grandpa” design on a baby T-shirt.

4. Your design was placed incorrectly

Maybe you’ve created a design intended for a specific placement—for example a breast pocket design intended for a T-shirt. Our system places your design automatically, but you should always check if the placement is correct. This means that your breast pocket design will need to be placed on the side rather than center of the print area, and it doesn’t belong on mugs or hats, etc. Use your common sense to select the right products and the correct placement.

5. Product colors don’t fit design

Is your design very light? Then deactivate the lighter product colors. Similarly, dark designs should not be published on black or dark products. Like a white swan in the snow or blackbird in the dark, avoid these combinations to make sure your design is visible when printed.

Tip: Create a few templates and save time when you publish new designs.

Top 5 metadata mistakes

Here’s a tip you can take to the bank: always fill out the metadata form when uploading your designs. Always. This is the only way your customers will be able to find your designs when they search for them. You should also avoid the following mistakes:

1. Using descriptive tags only

Tree, tent, campfire, bus – you immediately have a picture in your mind. This kind of tag is great to describe your design. But no user will enter these four terms at once and come across your design. This is why you should think about both context and theme of the design, as well as broader terms that describe the lifestyle, hobby or interests of your target audience.

So let’s say you have a design featuring an outdoor scene with a campfire, tent and bus. Terms like wild camping, outdoor adventure or van life would fit as additional tags.

2. Inappropriate design names

We often come across designs that have a file name, a string of numbers, or some other cryptic thing as a design name. But design names are important for your design to be found! Give it an appropriate, evocative name.

3. Inappropriate tags

Automatically generated tags can be very helpful. But always make sure that they match the design before using them!

4. Product names as tags

Gifts, T-shirt, cap, mug… we can see why people would choose these kind of tags, but they are completely useless. When customers type “t-shirt” in the search bar, they won’t end up on a list page with designs tagged in this way, but rather on the T-shirt list page.

Category and product tags do not improve your ranking in search results either. Don’t do it!

5. Too many tags

Using loads of tags will not improve your search ranking! You should only use words that really fit your design.

6. Using tags that violate our guidelines

Brand names like Nike, Google or Ford are obvious trademarks and will lead to your design being disabled from instant publishing, even though these aren’t considered offensive words that go against our rules. Your designs will be reviewed manually, and the tags will eventually be removed.

That’s it! We hope you’ll find our tips on design placement and metadata useful to get your designs off to a great start on Spreadshirt’s Marketplace. Hungry for more useful knowledge? Then check out this article: How to Avoid these 8 Common Design Mistakes.

The Marketplace forum also allows you to share ideas with other designers about design creation and placement, metadata, and more.

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