Zazzle has updated their category (formerly product lines) structure to allow shopkeepers to more easily manage what is going on within their shop and implemented the ability for these categories to be displayed on the main page instead of just single items.

You’ve been asking and we’ve been listening. Zazzle now offers:

1) Improved Category and Product Merchandising for Store Owners Create categories (formerly called product lines) and display them with personalized icons on your storefront. Set the display order of all categories and products within your store with easy drag and drop tools, or choose quick sort defaults. Easily feature your best products in your “front window” with drag and drop. Display categories fully expanded or as a scrollable list. Learn more here.

Now when you enter categories you see only the items in that category also making it much easier to manage what is going on instead of having pages and pages of designs to scroll through while managing your shops. However one thing that I have found annoying is that apparently you also get a display of items that are in all the sub categories of that category too. For example, if you have a Category A with sub categories B, C & D when you are looking at Category A you see everything in B, C & D too. Maybe there is a way around this, but I have not found it yet and if there is not it is still inferior to the systems implemented by Cafepress, Printfection and others. However it is a major step in the right direction to making more user friendly shops and helping shopkeepers in an age where some PoD’s don’t seem to care all that much. I’ll let you guess as to which one I am referring to with that comment.

—————————————————————–
J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.

So you want to ditch corporate America, work for yourself, be your own boss. You want your commute to be a trip to your downstairs office where you can work in your pajamas if you want to. Nice thought, but what on earth would you do to make this dream possible?

Maybe know some witty sayings and thought they would look cool on t-shirts or maybe you are artistically talented and want to sell some of your creations on t-shirts. I personally went this route a few years ago when I started selling my own creations online. I overcame a few stumbling blocks along the way and can share what I wish I knew at the beginning.

Where do I go?

There are many websites where you can sell your designs but the three biggest are Cafepress, Printfection and Zazzle. Each company has its own line of t-shirts and gifts. These companies are best bets for first-timer to open a shop and be successful.

Cafepress is the leader by far. You can open a free shop with limited products or you can open a Premium shop for about $5 a month where you can have an unlimited number of products and designs. You can also personalize the shop any way you like. In addition, your designs are available in the Cafepress marketplace, where the buying public can find them with a keyword search. Cafepress makes it easy to put your images on many products at once with their bulk upload tools. You pick a product name, description and image and put these on all the shirts and all the other products you select at one time. None of the other online vendors have this feature.

One drawback is that Cafepress has become a victim of its own success. As it has grown, the marketplace is crowded and the print quality is spotty. Sometimes the site is down, or slow.

Another company, Zazzle, is giving Cafepress a run for its money and with a $16 million investment from Google investors may blow Cafepress out of the water.

I first discovered Zazzle years ago when my husband custom-designed a motorcycle shirt at the request of the local Harley dealership for the top executive at Buell motorcycles. My husband, a graphic designer, was impressed with the retail quality of the printing. I didn’t initially open a store with Zazzle because I could not name my markup.

This has changed. You can not only custom design a t-shirt or gift but you can put the creation in the Zazzle Marketplace and in your own Zazzle Gallery for sale to the general public and name a markup up to 50% of the product price. Each image is featured on a model rather than just on a boring old t-shirt stock image. Your customers can then further customize the products before they purchase them. I have tested the Zazzle features myself and am very pleased with the results. The images upload quickly and the products are available almost immediately in the Zazzle marketplace. The only thing lacking at this writing is the bulk-editing tools available on Cafepress. Those tools are coming to Zazzle as of first quarter 2008. And this isn’t a pie-in-the-sky promise. Zazzle is a serious competitor. I have had the opportunity to beta test one of the bulk tools, the bulk uploader for images. I recently uploaded 100 images in about 10 minutes to a folder of my choice with no downtime and no connection drop-off. All I can say about this tool is WOW!

Printfection is the third online vendor. It has a nice selection of shirt styles but no infant apparel and a limited selection of gifts. Printfection probably wanted to combine the best of both Cafepress and Zazzle but has not grown in the past year. There are no bulk editing tools for putting your design on multiple products at once, and none seem to be on the horizon. Opening a shop is free and the owners are enthusiastic and listen to their shopkeepers, but without a big capital investment, market visibility for this company is limited. Customers visit Cafepress and Zazzle websites more often.

What do I sell?

So what the heck do I sell, is one of the first questions people ask. What kinds of designs do people like? The most successful sellers find a niche. Popular niches include life changes such as birthdays, weddings, moms and babies. Also popular are international and ethnic designs, politics, holidays, and awareness designs for breast cancer or autism. Photography and very arty designs such as fractals do not seem to sell very well unless you already have a following before you open your shop. It does not mean that your art is not very good; it just means that the buying public is looking for something else. That is the most important thing to keep in mind. It will save your ego!

How much can I make and is it worth it?

How big are the checks? The simple answer is that the more unique designs you have, the more you earn. Some people earn as little as the minimum check amount, which is $25, but others earn as much as $3000 a month and some others even make Cafepress’ 20% bonus category, which is $10,000 in base sales.

The most important advice for success at any of these websites is to keep adding new designs. Equally important is to give your products good titles and descriptions using words that a customer might type into a Google search. And do not even think about copying somebody else’s design because your products will be removed. Read the message boards on each of these sites because they are an excellent free learning environment with tips for building your shops and trends in the business.

Happy Selling!

Websites:
http://www.iheartswimming.com
http://www.helloworldshirts.com

Land of the Free Studios, Inc., my company, relies heavily on online t-shirt and gift sales to keep going strong. But we do not use just Cafepress. We have products at other sites too such as Printfection and Zazzle. While Printfection has the versatility of CP when it comes to ease of designing a store and Zazzle does not, Zazzle outperforms Printfection for the products we have available on those site. Those revenues have also been growing while receipts from CP have shrank in large part to new pricing and bonus structures. Sure, the economy has something to do with that too but with growth at other sites it is hard to see that CP could not be doing things better on their end.

Another tool we use to generate revenues if Google Adsense. Many of the sites we operate are monetarized to generate revenue from ads that Google serves. This revenue stream has also been grown in the last year to help take some of the sting away from changes at Cafepress and further illustrates how being diverse in your revenue streams can keep you afloat when changes that are not of your own doing come a calling.

As each egg you hatch grows and matures it will slowly replace revenue lost to another source.

—————————————————————–
J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.

The entire post can be read on the Seller Blog and includes items like plans to:

• Get your content on Zazzle, fast:
  Drag-and-drop thousands of images directly into your account with Zazzle’s Bulk Image Uploader for Windows. Coming very soon: Zazzle’s new flash-based Bulk Uploader allows Macs and PCs to upload hundreds of images to your account at a time!
• Create Zazzle products quickly:
  Use Zazzle’s Quick Product Create (QPC) tool to create up to 100 products simultaneously. Use QPC in conjunction with Zazzle templates to rapidly create great-looking products. Coming very soon: Sku / Style filtering allows you to control the available styles for your Store’s custom products!
• Control the look and feel of your Zazzle Store:
  The Zazzle zBar reduces the size of the standard Zazzle header to provide you with more space to highlight your own Store branding. The Zazzle Create API allows you to pass custom content to Zazzle products from your own site. The Zazzle Store Builder allows for easily featuring your Zazzle Store products on an external website. Coming very soon: Zazzle’s Advanced Store Customization Public Beta will allow for highly-flexible Store skinning using CSS and custom HTML!
• Take advantage of Zazzle’s rapidly growing traffic:
  Zazzle.com nearly tripled in traffic in the last 12 months and now has over 7.5 million unique visitors per month with no signs of slowing down (Compete.com is low, but is a good relative indicator of growth). Zazzle’s Google Base upload service streamlines the process of listing products in the Google search engine. Zazzle also recently launched a true localized website in the United Kingdom, optimizing the new domain implementation (www.zazzle.co.uk) to enable Sellers to reach an important market of brand new customers. Coming soon: More localized international sites, more new customers!

Ever the opportunists of at Zazzle they are and while I don’t agree with some of the things they do, this is a smart move.

One of the biggest complaints in the past was that their method of creating products was time consuming and laborious without a bulk creating tool. Well, that changed in December when Zazzle announced that it was releasing a new bulk product creating tool:

Quick Create Up to 100 Products at Once

Now you can create up to 100 products simultaneously from your own template or one of Zazzle’s default templates. We have developed a simple 3-step product creation wizard that saves you a lot of time when you want to apply a single design to multiple products.

Together with the Zazzle Bulk Edit feature on your Public Products page, it keeps getting easier to manage your products. Look for the Quick Product Create tab on your products page or try Zazzle’s new Quick Product Create now.

I have played with the tool a couple times and found it to be a little buggy, creating blank products for some unknown reason, but it certainly helps to get products into the marketplace quicker. That is something that helps not just shopkeepers but Zazzle as well and it certainly makes their site much more friendly to serious entrepreneurs.
—————————————————————–
J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.

I’m having sort of mixed feelings about Zazzle’s service at this point. First of all, I am thrilled that Zazzle is able to actually make me money. I have uploaded 130 some odd items for them to take a crack at selling and they have sold a fair amount considering the selection that I have given them.

Kudos to them on that point. But beyond that I quite a few bones to pick with Zazzle.

First of all, I don’t know how Zazzle operates but generally when you ask someone if you can talk to them and offer up such as a possibility I think you should at least make an effort to do so. As I mentioned before, Zazzle approached me about adding my items to their data base. The first email I got was from a Mr. Robert Greenleaf.

I responded to him and told him when I was available to talk. He responded back after missing the couple dates and times that I told him I was available. So I sent him another set of dates and times. Those have come and gone without so much as a peep.

Being very busy I don’t have the ability to say “just call me whenever you get a chance”. Perhaps Mr. Greenleaf and others over at Zazzle are not used to recruiting potential contributors who actually are busy and have a business to run. I do not know. I am preparing to send him another email today to see if I can get a response because I do really have some questions, concerns, gripes, suggestions and so on that I would like to discuss with him.  And since I can’t get them on the phone, I will cover them later in this post.

If I can’t get him to give an interest after he recruited me, I’ll call Zazzle and see if I can find someone who gives a darn.

Things I don’t like about Zazzle:
Creating products: It takes too long. You have to make a t-shirt then make a mug then a whatever. This is vastly inferior to other sites which allow you select a series of products and apply a single image to them in literally one step. The faster you can create products the faster you grow. I can create vastly more new products on other PoD sites in the time it takes to create just a t-shirt and a mug on Zazzle.

Product Design “Rating”: I don’t know whose brain child this was but I hate it. What Zazzle allows you to do is rate a product with a star based system. You only have to be a contributor to rate someone’s designs.  Here’s what I have found however. People don’t actually rate the product. They either rate the “message” of the product or they use it to put up poor marks for products that compete with their own Zazzle products.

The “rating” system is what we call in the business a “point of contention” which people who might be inclined to buy a certain product might decide based on someone else’s opinion (even if it is uninformed, slanted or bogus) not to do so. That hurts me, but it also hurts Zazzle.

This feature should be kept IF they only allow people who actually purchase products to rate them. Give a link to the rating screen in the receipt they receive with their purchase or something, but allowing just anyone to rate items is bad for business especially when those doing the rating are doing it from spite or other less than pure motives.

Luckily however I have enough friends that I could ask to go over to my gallery and counter out these sorts of folks with honest opinions.

Product Comment Section: Yet another nuisance along the lines of the rating system. The comment system has already been abused and I have had to deal with deleting the weirdest and dumbest comments one can imagine. Providing such a section is yet another “point of contention” which can turn off potential buyers depending on what is said in it.

Limited Customization: Nothing ticks me off more than not being able to do serious customizing of my sites. Zazzle galleries are customizable to a very limited extent only.

Everything in one gallery: Now this is just plain bad design. On other sites you can separate your designs into individual stores. On Zazzle you can have subsections of a single gallery. Very bad especially if you are trying to keep different themes separate to avoid turning people off because they might not like or be offended by other themes you offer.

Yes, you can open up new galleries, but they are treated as separate accounts for billing purposes best I can see which means you have to reach minimum commissions in each gallery in order to get paid for that gallery. That is not a problem for me, but I don’t want to be receiving multiple (and smaller) checks each month once I get everything up and chugging along.

Sub Par Commissioning System: This one really gets my goat. If I create a shirt and set the commission at 20% I make one amount on one type of shirt and a different amount on another type of shirt with a different base cost. I would like the option of placing a straight markup ($4, $5, whatever) on those items and know how much I will make with each t-shirt sale rather than getting $3.99 for one type and maybe $3.78 for another.

Yeah, I know I’ve complained, but remember I did say that I was happy that Zazzle has actually been able to make sales for me over the past month. Problem is that these sales have only been for one category of item designs and themes which worries me a little. But I am going to keep plugging along over the next couple months, see if we can get some of Zazzle’s faults corrected and make a little more cash with them.

—————————————————————–
J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.

Of course I have already got a Zazzle galleries that prior to a couple weeks ago had a limited number of my best selling designs.  The reason Zazzle never got more?  Because they hadn’t been able to sell very many while other sites were taking those designs and making me significant money.

However, with some changes to the Zazzle website I have decided to start the great Zazzle experiment and add some more designs (all that are best sellers on other sites) and see what Zazzle can do with them.

I have my theories about why Zazzle has been spending some time contacting shop owners from other sites and based on what I have been reading in some threads on their message boards, they have had a lot of problems that have caused many of their contributors to move on.  In the past when trial shirts were ordered, the printing technology was very sub par but I have been told this has changed for the better.

So I am going to see what Zazzle can do with some of my designs.  I’ll keep you updated about what I like and don’t like and whether or not Zazzle is ready to play in the big leagues of PoD products over the coming months.

—————————————————————–
J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.

This comes as part of what they are terming a “relaunch” of their service.

The next generation in on-demand retail is finally here! We’ve just re-launched our site with a fresh new look, a major partnership with MySpace, and an amazing set of new technologies. To commemorate this huge milestone, we are giving away special, limited edition re-launch shirts. So, the first 2,000 people to order apparel today as of 10AM PST will receive this official, Zazzle re-launch t-shirt for free.Zazzle limited edition t-shirt
Be sure to check out Merch to the Masses partnership with MySpace, and see why the #1 Social Networking site in the world chose Zazzle to be its official merchandise platform:

* Exceptional Dark Apparel – Our new printing technology is the first ever on-demand manufacturing of top-quality dark apparel and is available in an endless number of colors.
  * Model Realviews – It’s the real 3D deal. Now you can design a t-shirt and see what it looks like in real life! Zazzle is the first ever to let you design directly on a real person’s curves, shadows and everything.
  * Name Your Royalty – For those of you who are or want to be contributors, you can now make lots more money by easily setting your own royalty rate on your products, from 10% to 99% of the base retail price.

I’ll be considering Zazzle a little more closely if, as they say their new printing technology is as good as it says. Despite claims made in the past, their quality has not been as good as other companies like Cafepress or Printfection or Spreadshirt when I have ordered samples.

—————————————————————–
J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.

Hot Zazzle Stats This Week

Top 5 searches:

1. Halloween
2. Funny T-Shirts
3. Breast Cancer
4. Cute T-Shirts
5. Christian

Hey Zazzler,Zazzle’s got a new look and a new logo! So it’s time to show your design skillZ by using the new logo to make great merchandise! Mix the logo into any kind of trendy, crazy or just awesome design you can think of (no gross stuff please) and voila, you have the perfect entry into the Zazzle Pimp our Logo contest! Learn more here.

What do you get for winning?

• Grand Prize Winner: Wacom Cintiq – Digital Drawing Tablet (a $2,500 value!)
• 2^nd Place Winner: $1,000 USD
• 3^rd Place Winner: $500 USD
• Honorable Mentions: $25 Zazzle Gift certificates

Contest ends October 18, 2007, so get started!

To be perfectly honest I would believe your time is better spent on your own products and designs rather than screwing around with products for the Zazzle logo. But that’s just me.

—————————————————————–
J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.