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| SELLER INFORMATION FOR STORE OWNERS |
Copyrights
Concerning copyrights of anything you upload and make available for printing in the Market Place, your webshops and/or when creating personal products at www.webshophotel.com:
It is required that you own all copyrights yourself and/or have written permission (signed by the copyright owner) as proof to use the uploaded files (images/photos/logos/slogans/text/words etc.).
If you for example shoot a photo of a (famous) person, you need his/her written permission to use this picture, eventhough you have shot this picture yourself and in public (during a concert for example), because he/she is on the picture! This is entirely your responsibility. www.webshophotel.com does not accept to be accused in any way for anything uploaded and/or used by the store owners at www.webshophotel.com.
Please do not take this warning about copyrights lightly - many expensive lawsuits has started this way!
Copyright infringements and flagged images
If you notice/suspect copyright infringements, you can goto the Market Place of the Domain Store (if available), search for the specific image(s), and under each image in the Market Place Search list you suspect to violate copyrights, click on the yellow button More Products - under each image you will see a link called Flag as inappropriate, click it, and write the reason. All reviews will be read and action taken as soon as possible. Extended print licenses has been purchased for all the images available in the shopping section at www.webshophotel.com, so these images are all legal and made available at the Market Place under each Domain Store.
Any image that is uploaded and estimated to be either inappropriate or to be illegal in some way will be flagged by a red frame in the File Manager of the store. Flagged images are invisible to the public and can not be sold in stores, nor at the Market Place at Domain Stores. There will be an option available to appeal this decision, but the store owner needs to be able to display written proof in the form of a legal document testifying the ownership, purchased extended print licenses for resale, or leasing of the copyrights required. If the user continues to upload and publish inappropriate or illegal images, their account will be suspended without warning.
Public Domain and Royalty-Free stock images
If you do not have any images to put on products in your store, you might be lucky to find free images within the Public Domain offered online (like photos from space, or vintage images with expired copyrights). However, free Public Domain images in high resolution for commercial printing purpose can be hard to find. And remember to read any terms very carefully, before you put any free images on products and make available for sale commercially.
If you do not own the copyright of high quality images suitable for printing on the products in your store, you can purchase high resolution images online. Please note you will need to purchase extended print licenses for commercial printing purposes, like print-on-demand products. Extended print license usually grants printing of up to 10,000 products imprinted with such a licensed image. These tested and recommended Royalty-Free Stock Photo sites offer extended print licenses: 123RF, Dreamstime and Fotolia.
Market Place
You always keep the copyright of your own creations. When you upload files to www.webshophotel.com, they are only available for your account, so keep your password safe! But when you combine your images with products (and especially tag your files), they will not only be available in your webshop(s) for yourself and your customers, but will also be available for potential buyers in the Market Place at all Domain Stores under www.webshophotel.com!
All images for the Market Place go through a review process. If an image does not show immediately in a Market Place search, please be patient! It takes time for all submitted images to be inspected. If images are released immediately online, they will be inspected later. Also make sure your product sections are not in hidden status, and that your store is not marked private. You can select this option by going to My Account -> My Stores -> All Stores -> Store Profile and mark/unmark the check box next to "Do not list my products in the Market Place".
To be sure that your images and products show in a Market Place search at Domain Stores under www.webshophotel.com, you need to insert relevant and detailed keywords in the tags of each of your images for the Market Place search engine and customers to be able to detect and find particular products designed with your images.
A tag is a keyword or category label, that you assign for the images and designs that help customers find your items in the Market Place. Tags can be any words that describe the image meanings, ideas, concepts, colors, texts etc. (each word/sentence must be divided by commas). You can add and edit tags to your images from your File Manager and designs on products anytime you like. Adding tags to your images and designs is not a must, but you are recommended to add a few tags for each of your images.
The order of results in a Market Place search is both based on tags and on products' popularity (more purchases will get a higher rank). Designs that are poorly or wrongly tagged will shift to the bottom of search results and will have minimal impact. If your images are properly tagged, uploaded in excellent quality, and customized properly in size and shape to the available products (please note the special Italian Charm Packs and License Plate Frame templates), they will have the potential of high demand in your webshop(s) and/or the Market Place at Domain Stores under www.webshophotel.com!
Please note www.webshophotel.com does not offer a Market Place anymore. This decision is caused by the new policies for marketplaces at Google Product Search, starting from December 1st, 2009. Domain store owners under www.webshophotel.com does not apply to this new policy for marketplaces, IF they deactivate the Market Place feature for their own domain store.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Login to My Account -> My Stores -> All Stores -> Store Profile to access the fields Meta Tag Description and Keywords for your store.
It is also a good idea to insert clear and detailed descriptions for each of your designs in the description fields for each of your products.
Search engine robots comes by randomly to pick up these descriptions, and thereby gives you free promotion, when people search for something specific which match your descriptions. You can also manually submit your store link to various search engines yourself to make sure your URL will be found and to speed up the process (a new URL usually takes a couple of weeks before it becomes searchable). Google represents about 80% of all searches on the internet. Recently Microsoft's Live Search and Yahoo Search has launched a new search engine, called Bing.
The more general or popular the designs you offer in your store are, the more competition you will also meet. But if you can find and offer a special niche within your interest, there ought to be much less competition, and you will therefore rank higher in search engines.
You can learn more about the behaviour of potential customers in your own store by adding counters, or for example a Google Analytics script. Login to My Account -> My Stores -> All Stores -> My Template -> Customize (the active template) -> MostBottomHtmlBlock and insert the script last in this block (after anything else your might have inserted there).
Promotion and advertising
www.webshophotel.com provides the technical platform incl. a large selection of custom products for Small Home Business to sell, but it is up to you to do the marketing and find customers. If you aim for many sales, you need to advertise for your own designs/products/stores - otherwise you will sell next-to-nothing, no matter how good your designs/products are (especially considering the current global economic crisis). The Internet consist of billions of websites and stores, and your designs/products will be impossible to find by potential customers, if you do not advertise for them in some way.
The best way to promote your designs/products/stores is to advertise yourself everywhere you can: within your family and friends, school, workplace, clubs, at your blog, website, MySpace, Facebook, forums etc. Not to forget selling (for free or fee) at auctions and market places (like eBay, Bonanzle, Amazon, BuyItSellIt etc.). If you intend to resell your own products somewhere, you are advised to pile up stock by having shipments sent to yourself. International shipping can be most unpredictable and delays almost always occur around christmas time (already starting primo November). And remember to investigate about tax, duty and import limits at the customs office in your own country before importing anything from China.
Depending of how serious you are about selling, you can also consider paying for advertising - for example by using Google AdWords. However, this feature is more suitable for larger companies, which can afford this kind of investment. Small Home Business or Private People can simply not afford to compete with expensive bitting on important keywords to rank high enough in search engines. Mass Marketing in general do not apply for Small Home Business or Private People, because most often the return of this kind of investment (called ROI) is either a total loss or brake-even at best.
You can increase traffic to a Domain Store with Google Product Search for free. This kind of free advertising is still under development and only applies for Germany, United Kingdom and United States (Australia and New Zealand will properly be added next). Some of the terms required by Google Base are that the products are offered in the country's own language and currency. All stores have a currency option (to be found under My Account -> My Stores -> All Stores -> Store Profile).
Domain Stores can generate the Data Feeds needed for Google Base, but you still need to manually adapt the raw data (in for example Microsoft Excel) to fit Google Base's Data Feed requirements. After creating a new account and submitting your first DataFeed to Google Base you will receive higher ranking in Google Product Search as promotion for the first 3-4 weeks, then the traffic levels out, and you can in adverage expect to receive about 20-30 daily visitors per account, if you have submitted about 2-3.000 products to Google Base (submitting more products than that will not make much difference).
Please note the new policies for marketplaces at Google Product Search. Domain store owners risk having their Google Base account suspended, IF they have NOT deactivated the Market Place feature for their own domain store.
Google Merchant Center requires from May 18, 2010, all submitting Data Feeds to Google Base Product Search to verify the ownership of their URL. Thus, Domain Stores will need to Edit their Domain Store settings and insert the Google verification code as meta name in the Store Head.
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