Several years ago, a friend asked me to create what would turn out to be one of my most popular designs. At the time, I was only using CafePress, so I put it up there for her to buy. She really wanted it on a different shirt style, and asked if I could set it up on Zazzle.
“It’s free? Sure, why not?”
It’s taken me a few years, but I’ve come to appreciate far more about Zazzle than just “it’s free”:
- Fine control over image placement
Zoom in, rotate, shift, flip, multiple images, add text … - Customer customization of items
This opens up a whole lot of item options, like business cards, invitations, and more. You just provide the image templates.
Even better, it’s optional – you can disable it on a per product basis for things you want to have printed exactly like you designed them. - More item types than you can shake a stick at
Sneakers. Posters. Business cards. A panoply of tshirt styles and colors. Speakers. Skateboards. - One product on your page for all styles of that item
Other sites (*cough*CafePress*cough*) make you create eleventy thousand separate products, one for each possible shirt style. Zazzle lets you put your design on “all shirts”, “all light shirts”, “all dark shirts”, or even just this one exact particular shirt. Same for buttons, stamps, and all their other multi-style items. - Set your own royalty markups
… that don’t get overridden for the marketplace. This is good news for artists who want a bit more for their work. - Free shops
Just sayin’. You can now have multiple shops under the same email login, so you can put your fine art in one shop and your nerd shirts in another. - Serious promotional tools
From banners to WordPress widgets to their Store Builder that lets you turn your website (or a Page) into a Zazzle store. Zazzle wants you to sell stuff, wherever and however it works for you, not just them.
If someone wanted to add some merchandise to their website, but didn’t want to deal with inventory and fulfillment … Zazzle has become the site I would recommend.
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