Zazzle

Zazzle is a Print-On-Demand service. They offer a wide variety of products that you can customize and/or personalize with your own photos, designs and/or names. You can do a one-off print or as many as you like; you can do it just for yourself, or you can join Zazzle as a “Designer” and offer your work for sale to others in Zazzle’s Marketplace and in your Zazzle store.

Please note, Print-On-Demand sites are not get rich quick schemes for anyone but the very lucky few. With much effort and commitment however, and a little artistic talent, I believe that PoDs can provide at least a part-time income. If you’ve got a five year plan to leave your current job, now is the time to start building your store and online inventory so that you’ll at least have a chance of a part-time income when you leave. I’ve been on Zazzle for a little over a year now and my 2014 earnings (from two stores) were $ 498.46.  Some people will make more in their first year and some people will make less.

I will also be the first to admit that my early “designs” were not very good; as well as learning about Zazzle and print-on-demand this last year, I’ve also been learning how to use the tools to create my designs (I’m using GIMP and Inkscape, which are both open source and free).

Why I Chose Zazzle

Zazzle‘s main competitors are CafePress, Society6 and RedBubble. I chose Zazzle because it has the simplest business model and was the best fit with my criteria (see my About page for my criteria list).

Here is a quick comparison of the four PoDs:

PoD Comparison

	Set Own Schedule	Location Independent	PoD Handles Inventory	PoD Handles Financial Transactions	PoD Handles Order Fulfillment	PoD Handles Customer Service	Zero Cost
Zazzle	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
CafePress	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	?
RedBubble	Y	Y	Y	??	Y	Y	Y
Society6	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y

 

? : CafePress has a couple of store options: a free Basic store or a Premium store. The Basic store allows you to feature one of each product type where the Premium store allows you to feature the same product type multiple times. The monthly fee for a Premium store can be paid as 10% of your earnings (up to $10) or it can be pre-paid at $6.95 per month, with lower rates if you pay several months at a time, down to $5.00 per month if you pay for 12 months in advance. CafePress also has the option to simply submit your work to their Marketplace without opening a store – items submitted to their Marketplace have a set commission of 8% vs up to 10% if only featured in your CafePress store.

?? : RedBubble handles most of the financial transactions associated with selling your work, except for the remittance of sales tax. RedBubble will collect the sales tax for you, but it is your responsibility to remit. Depending on your jurisdiction and your success this may or may not be relevant (you’ll have to look into your local sales tax requirements). For me, this would first become an issue at $10,000 gross revenue in a year – so I’m still a long way from this being a concern.

Zazzle vs CafePress

I found Zazzle much simpler to get started at with free stores where:

• you can feature as many or as few products as you like
• being part of their Marketplace doesn’t decrease your royalty
• your royalty is not limited to 10%
• you can earn both a royalty and a commission on products you sell from your own offsite website

Compared to Zazzle, I found that CafePress really complicates the financial side – for example, not providing referral fees to your own products unless they are linked to your products in the Marketplace (with the lower royalty) rather than your CafePress store.

CafePress does however, have a variety of products not available at Zazzle at this time, so I may still look at opening a shop there just for those products. Zazzle has added a huge number of products over the last year though, so they may catch up on the product offerings before I get around to revisiting CafePress.

Zazzle vs RedBubble

I chose Zazzle over RedBubble for two reasons; because Zazzle has a much larger product selection, and because RedBubble’s handling of sales tax required me to look up my local sales tax remittance requirements which I hadn’t gotten around to until just recently. Also, RedBubble is located in Australia so I’d imagine the shipping charges outside of that market would be fairly significant.

Zazzle vs Society6

I chose Zazzle over Society6 because Society6 has a limited selection of products (though they still have some that Zazzle doesn’t) and because Society6 royalties are a flat rate royalty that they set for each product except art prints. I felt I could earn more per product at Zazzle than Society6.

These were the four main sites I considered when first choosing a PoD, but there are still more PoD sites out there that you can explore and that I may yet explore. Good Luck!