How long have you been creating works of art or taking great photographs or how long have you had all those funny t-shirt ideas locked up in your brain? At some point, you probably wondered about the best way to get those items out to potential customers. There are quite a few websites out there that can help you accomplish this goal, but the one I want to discuss today is Zazzle.
I liked Zazzle after watching a CNN news report that interviewed the company’s co-founder, Jeff beaver. He talked about the company’s sales figures and how popular the site had become, but what I really got from it was just how easy it is to launch your own slew of products branded with your custom designs. Watch CNN’s Zazzle video to see what I mean.
What is Zazzle?
Simply put, Zazzle offers you a selection of over 50 customizable products that you can place into your own custom store using your own custom designs. From there, your products are instantly searchable through Zazzle’s main website as well as 15 other domains around the world. They claim to have over 20 million unique visitors across their websites, so there’s plenty of buying potential out there.
The selection of products include all the usual suspects such as tshirts and many other types of clothing, cards, stationary, postage stamps, coffee mugs and stickers, but Zazzle also offers a few of the obscure like phone cases, skateboards, guitar cases, speakers and canvas art prints.
Once you create a store, you start adding products into it by uploading all of your artwork, resizing it to fit on whatever you’re creating and then publish it to potential customers. The process is super easy and literally takes a few minutes.
Get paid!
Zazzle has preset prices for all of their products, but you have control over how much your royalty rate is. For example, if you have a poster print that you want to sell, the standard price for a glossy print starts at $24.95. You can then apply on top of that, a percentage you’d like to make ranging from 0% to 99%. This will be your profit. Note, any percentage after 20% carries with it a service fee.
Anyway, so you list your $24.95 product with a 10% royalty fee and your new sales price is $27.45 with you making about $2.50 in profit. Now in the case of posters, depending on how large of an image file you’ve uploaded, you could easily have prints available for your customers in very large sizes. The pricing can be further customized by a customer given the paper type selected and whether they want it framed or not.
All that for just one product! As I mentioned before, you can choose how many products you want and customize their look to infinity.
My two cents
This post is just a very light view of what Zazzle can offer to you and your products. Personally, I am not much of an artist, but I’m discovering that I do have some photographic talent that I plan to utilize with Zazzle. My goal is to take some of my photos and turn them into high-quality prints and sell them from my own website. With Zazzle, I don’t have have to go out to a print shop and have 50 posters made, keep them on hand and hope I can sell them to people.
This way, I just create the products I want to offer and let the world have what they want. Zazzle doesn’t make anything until it’s actually ordered. Of course, there are costs to be had, but that’s business. I’d rather pay a small premium to not have to deal with inventory. Plus, this could just be a small stepping stone…if my products got big and well-known, I could easily carry inventory later, knowing that I’ll sell everything and make even more money!
Check out the DigitizingLife Print Store to see the store I created and the products I have. At the time of this writing, I only have one. As a follow-up to this post, I have ordered a copy of my own product to see what the quality will be.