Zazzle is what’s called a POD website, it stands for ‘Print On Demand’, which means customers find products they’d like to buy from Zazzle’s stock of many thousands of different products and designs. Then the customer places his order, he pays, and Zazzle begins producing the product for shipping to the buyer a day or two later.
Zazzle – a sizzling opportunity to sell thousands of different products on eBay, and Amazon, also on Etsy, and any other marketplace on or off the Internet
It’s quick and easy for buyers, and gives them a mammoth choice of designs and products, as well as providing an excellent money-making opportunity for our readers also.
That money-making opportunity has several features, all springing from the original act of uploading your own designs to the site and leaving Zazzle to offer your work on a massive range of products, including:
- Clothing
- Accessories
- Cards
- Home & Pets
- Office Products
- Art & Posters
- Electronic
- Other Products
One major benefit of Zazzle over Café Press and some other POD suppliers, is that Zazzle product illustrations actually look real, so the image of a t-shirt looks like a real human being is wearing it compared to some illustrations at Café Press & Co. that look exactly what they are, just pictures plonked onto a flat surface with no thought to what effect the lines and curves of the human body have on the appearance of a t-shirt when worn.
For another example, take a look at mugs created from your basic designs at Zazzle (.co.uk and other country sites as you’ll see from the bottom of the company’s home page) and you’ll see illustrations with perspective and shadows, just as real mugs might look on a kitchen bench. And that means those images look like real products, not mock products as at many other POD sites. And because potential buyers like to see products being worn or otherwise used, those pictures Zazzle provides are more likely to tempt orders for your own promotions on and outside of Zazzle.
Now let’s talk about how you can use the site for profit, apart from earning commissions as an affiliate (Zazzle calls them ‘associates’) promoting other people’s designs at Zazzle.
As Zazzle reveals, you can:
“Make money online by selling your designs on hundreds of retail-quality products! It’s free and easy to create an online store on Zazzle to sell t-shirts online or sell posters online featuring your art, images, and designs. Best of all, you can sell your art online for free and make even more money when you join Zazzle’s Associate program and refer buyers to Zazzle. Use Zazzle’s powerful tools that make it possible to sell your art on t-shirts, stamps, posters, mugs, business cards, shoes, skateboards, calendars, tote bags, hats, posters, and more. There’s absolutely no cost… it is all profit for you!”
Zazzle provides details about what images you can and what images you can not upload to the site, and generally we’re talking about using copyright-free images only, such as those in the public domain, or others you’ve produced or had created for you where copyright is exclusively yours.
It’s very easy to upload your images and choose from hundreds of different products to create to sell at Zazzle’s own website as well as from your own, including on eBay. However, I recommend you only sell your own designs on eBay to avoid competition from fellow Zazzle members’ designs and because using Zazzle images is what most other sellers will do so every listing looks just like all the others. The end result is no incentive for buyers to choose your product over another eBay seller! But don’t be too worried about fellow Zazzle members promoting your goods on eBay, because every sale, whatever its source, makes money for you.
Nonetheless, you want your eBay products to look at least a little different to what others are selling, and you do that by make your offers unique, like this for example:
- Offer a free gift with your sales, such as a spoon with every mug sold, or a certificate of authenticity with every product indicating it came direct from the artist. That means you need to buy stock from Zazzle to send direct to your buyers, with the COA.
- Start a line of posters and prints from your own basic designs. Posters and prints sell like hot cakes on eBay and you can sell hundreds or even thousands of products from one basic listing. But so can every other eBay seller, and that is why you order copies of your work from Zazzle then hand sign and number every item sold. You call your prints and posters ‘limited edition’ which doesn’t mean they are limited in quantity – well you don’t really want to stop associates earning you commission on every sale, do you? – but they will be limited in terms of copies signed by the artist.
- Create a sumptuous illustration of your product being used in real life, so potential buyers can see your print on the wall behind a sofa, for example, or the family sitting round the table drinking coffee from your mugs.
- Buyers like to think they’re getting personal service from a famous artist, even though you don’t feel particularly well-known or talented. So make a big thing in your listings about orders being sent direct from the original artist and send a signed COA with every sale.
All those ideas mean you need to order goods to post direct to your buyers, but remember only to keep a limited stock, and never more items than you can confidently sell in two or three weeks. That’s because you need to keep cash aside for a handful of units of every new design you upload to Zazzle to subsequently test market on eBay. If a product is hugely popular, use profits from sales of that product to increase your physical stock until eventually you have ten or twenty best sellers and enough stock to fulfill orders for several weeks to come.