The people over at Zazzle have been bugging me to expand some of my stores on Cafepress to their site as well. This is not unusual in that I often get contacted by PoD service providers begging me to put my 1000s of designs into their own marketplaces to help them grow.
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.
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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.
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December 28th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Oh please let me know how this works out! I wanted to open a Zazzle store but my friend who used to use the service warned me away from it.
I went with Cafe Press instead but I figure more people selling my designs couldn’t hurt.
December 28th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Yeah, a lot of people hate Zazzle. Mostly it seems to be because they show their t-shirts on models instead of showing them flat. T-shirt designers don’t want their designs be be rounded or draped over people. It makes the designs look silly. Even if customers like this “feature”, Zazzle should take it away or they won’t have anything left to sell.
December 29th, 2007 at 3:54 am
Of all the things to say about Zazzle the whole model issue is probably the least of their worries.
When you account for slow delivery despite fast turn around, often poor quality printing, the inability to create more than one type of product at once, a rating system where people just arbitrarily rate a design not based on the quality of the design, completely SEO unfriendly storefronts, that you have to have everything in one gallery unless you want to split into multiple galleries and have multiple checks, and so on, the actual models is probably the only thing Zazzle has that sets them apart from the competition.