Are you a designer or an artisan who is looking for an opportunity to sell your work online? Then you have probably heard of Zazzle before. What can you do with it and most importantly, can you make money on Zazzle? This review will answer these questions and show you an effective way to start an online business from your passion, so read on.
What Is Zazzle?
Zazzle is an online marketplace that allows designers to offer their artwork on custom made products as well as artisan to sell their homemade crafts. Founded in 1999 by Robert Beaver, the platform currently attracts more than 30 million visitors and serves more than 100 countries worldwide.
How Does It Work?
Generally, there are two ways to sell on Zazzle. If you are a designer, then you would start by creating a store and choose a blank product to go with your artwork. After uploading the images and editing the necessary dimension, you can publish the design for sale.
When an order comes in, Zazzle will do the printing on your behalf and ship the products to the customers. The way you earn is from the product mark-up, also known as royalty. The royalty value is determined by the seller and it could range between 5%-99%.
For example, if the base price of a white T-shirt is $20 and your royalty is 5%, the product would sell for $21 and you get to keep $1. However, if your royalty is more than 15%, Zazzle will charge a 5% transaction fee.
The next method applies if you are an artisan who sell handmade products. In this case, Zazzle is going to function like an eCommerce platform, but before you can list your products, they must first be reviewed by the Zazzle team.
Once you are approved, you can create a store and start selling. For every transaction, you’ll need to pay Zazzle a small commission and take into consideration the shipping cost and sales tax.
What Are The Advantages?
As a designer who has no experience selling online, Zazzle may appeal to you for these reasons;
- The set-up cost is very minimal as there are no joining or listing fees involved. There is also no limits as to how many designs that you can upload.
- Since Zazzle deals with product acquisition and shipment, you don’t have to worry about inventory at all. Plus, they offer a wide range of day-to-day use merchandise, so this gives you an opportunity to be creative with your designs.
- You can leverage from Zazzle’s huge daily traffic to promote your designs to potential shoppers.
What Are The Disadvantages?
Despite the perks, there are a few downsides to take note if you want to be a Zazzle seller.
- If you look through the calculation that I showed you earlier, you can see that the earnings are marginally low. To achieve a targeted income stream, you’ll need to create and list as many designs as you can, frequently and consistently. If you only have like 5 designs, you are not going to be earning a lot.
- Shoppers pay Zazzle first, before you can get your royalties. So there’s a slightly longer fund-transfer time in which you don’t have much control over.
- Due to the ease of listing on Zazzle, many people will flock to open their online stores and this creates a huge competition for any given product category. For example, in the women’s T-shirt section, you are up against four hundred thousand items by other designers.
That’s a very tough competition to beat if you are a newbie.
So, Can You Make Money on Zazzle?
To answer this question, there are two situations that need to be addressed first. First, it’s very difficult to get noticed in a crowded marketplace. Second, without visitors, it’s almost impossible to make any sales no matter how skillful you are.
The truth of the matter is, if you are dependant on Zazzle’s internal search mechanism and store features to attract shoppers, you’ve got to try harder because you actually don’t have any control over the marketing of your store. Over time, your listing will only get pushed down and disappear along with other ‘passive’ sellers.
So, what can you do to solve this problem? You’ll need an independent platform and the best way to do this is to create a business website which gives you more control along with these benefits;
- Through blogging, you can leverage from keyword research to attract a specific audience from the search engine such as Google or Bing. For example, you can target people who want to print customized T-shirt to your site and lead them to your store on Zazzle.
- It allows you to create an online presence through your own branding so that people can recognize your unique skills apart from other Zazzle sellers.
- With a website, you can get to know and interact better with your buyers.
- Heck, once you become an authority within your niche, you can even sell directly from your site and keep all the profits to yourself. No sharing commission with anyone.
- As a website owner, you can diversify your income streams. So, if for some reasons, you stop producing designs down the road, you can use other strategies such as affiliate marketing and earn from recommending other company’s product online.
And in case you think creating a website is only for techies, it’s not. With the help of SiteRubix, you can install a WordPress website within seconds. All you need to do is enter your brand name, choose a theme and your site is ready to go.
Another awesome feature about SiteRubix is that it is also linked to an online entrepreneurship training in Wealthy Affiliate. So if you are thinking about how to make more sales, whether it’s for your Zazzle store OR through your own personal website, this training course will give you a good foundation that will ensure success for your online business.
I hope this review has helped you understand that you can make money on Zazzle, if you implement the right technique from the beginning. Learn more about the their awesome training here and if you need any help getting started, just give me a shout.
Do you have any thoughts or questions about this topic? Feel free to leave them in the comment below and I shall get back to you.
Hello Cathy,
Awesome job on Zazzle review. Thank you for sharing this information. Zazzle looks very complicated. I am a member of Wealth Affiliate and my businesses are growing because of the knowledge that I have gained at WA. You are on your way to helping many people start their online businesses the right way.
Hi Cathy! I have heard the name Zazzle enough times to finally look into. Good thing I ran into this post first. It sounds good, but it also sounds like a huge mountain to climb. I have a few idea’s I’d like to promote and sell. But i’m now thinking that Teespring might be a better option to make a few more dollars. Great post!
Teespring can definitely offer more value for your designs, given the quality of their apparels. I wrote a post about how to use them for selling T-shirts, so do check it out.
Hi Cathy,
I loved reading this! It’s very timely for me. I’ve been thinking about selling things on Zazzle because I’ve heard of people being very successful on there and then selling their accounts for even more.
What are your thoughts on using stock photos (appropriately licenced, of course)? I’m guessing with a saturated market place this wouldn’t be a good idea. Have you heard of Teespring? It sounds similar to Zazzle but just sells t-shirts and I think your earnings are a bit better.
I am guessing that the majority of shoppers would go to Zazzle to print with their own photos instead of using stock photos. So, it could be a bit challenging to get your product out there.
Interestingly, I wrote an article on how to make money with Teespring and the profit is definitely way better. The apparels are of good quality and it’s something that you can continuously promote on your blog. Do check it out.
HI there,
Zazzle is something I have heard of. They do just about everything from phone covers to T-shirts. Pretty cool place if you want your own unique phone cover (do it yourself) I had no idea it could be used to earn some money. I love your idea of remaining independent of them or semi-independent of promoting your own designs via blogging platform and getting traffic from Google.
Very informative post here, Cathy. You have quite an attractive website! I am considering starting a Zazzle or Cafepress account and promoting my artwork through one of my websites. Have you ever used Cafepress? If so, how does Zazzle compare to it in general? Also, what do you think are the most effective social media sites to advertise your products on? Thank you!
Thanks for the compliment Elijah.
No I don’t have any experience with Cafepress but now that you ask, I will check it out for you and come back with an article.
As for social sites, I think Pinterest and Google Plus are great if you are into artwork sharing. I find them to have more visual appeal and better community interaction. Here’s an article on how you can use Pinterest for your online business.
What a really great article. I hadn’t heard of Zazzle until now but if I was to start down this route, it would be a great site to start with. Most people don’t know about many other sites after Ebay and Amazon. Do you list good’s on here? Have you had a good experience with them? Are they just US based?
Hi Sammi,
Zazzle is not limited to just US sellers. They operates across Europe and Asia as well. Here’s the link for more of this information.
To answer your question, no I don’t list my designs on Zazzle mainly for the 3 setbacks which I mentioned in the article. I did at the initial stage but when I found out the lack of uniqueness of my store name and the huge competition, I choose to create a website on SiteRubix instead. But you can do both if you like.
Hi Cathy, this is a very thorough review on Zazzle and it is very useful. I am currently selling my artwork at Etsy and I wonder if you could tell me the differences between Zazzle and Etsy. It seems like a greater platform as compared to Etsy. I wonder if I should switch to Zazzle or just open an account and selling my artwork at both platforms.
The last option seems like a great idea to build my own shop at SiteRubix. I think you are right that I should sell my products on a platform where I can take 100% control of the business operation. Will check it out and be back for more information.
Hi there Alex,
Zazzle sells customized designs printed on their product range while in Etsy, people make or acquire their own materials, turn it into a creative product and sell it on the marketplace. I can’t really say which is better because their target shoppers are different – Zazzle is catered for modern designs and daily stuff while Etsy is more focus on unique goods.
Either way, you can’t go wrong building your own online store on WordPress while having a store on Zazzle/Etsy. There are so many plugins to help you out; the free ones are great if you have a handful of products and the paid ones are preferred if you have a large collection.
Hope this information helps.
Hi Cathy.
Awesome article. I never heard of Zazzle before but I got so excited to find out that I can finally do business cards designs of my own because I’ve been looking for a website or software to do that and work on a new niche. Thanks for your honest review. I really appreciate it.
Hi there Mona,
As a shopper this is a great place to mix and match a product of your choice. There are a ton of designs to choose from in the business card section alone and I find them reasonably priced too. All the best!
Hey, that sounds like a great business opportunity, especially for beginner artists. I wonder how many monthly sales they get on average and if it’s possible to convert it into a full time business. I think it’s amazing that such opportunity exists and I’ll let my very talented friend know about it, thanks for sharing.
Hi there Kams,
It’s hard to say how much one can really make on Zazzle platform as you are just putting up your design on sale and not involve in marketing. Some people do very well especially if their designs get featured a lot but it will take time to get that kind of recognition.
Greetings Cathy. Thanks for letting us know about Zazzle.
Guess you don’t recommend registering with them. However, I think it can be beneficial if we have one site in the form of WordPress and one for Zazzle, no? But then again, I guess that’s more suited for someone who can really multitask. Thanks for the insights by the way.
Hi there Tar,
There’s absolutely no harm creating two sites for your online store. Of course you might want to focus more effort on the WordPress site because that’s where you can get targeted audience/shoppers that are looking for the things that you are offering.
Hi Cathy
I love your review. It’s very honest and I’m glad I read it!
I was actually looking at Zazzle and a couple of similar sites and it all sounds so enticing, but I did question how much you would really make etc. but you have raised some points that I hadn’t even thought of and one the keyword tagging. Another was the quality of the product.
Anyway, food for thought as they say. Thank you for sharing such a great review.
I am glad the article got you thinking there, Olive.
The keyword tagging is actually mentioned within Zazzle’s FAQs, but what I think they meant is tagging a broad keyword like “green dress” or “homemade quilt” to increase the product’s visibility. Those keywords are more like categories rather than search terms which means that your product could get bundled up with the others.
Keywords should be used with the purpose of solving a question or addressing a concern. Therefore using elaborated keywords aka long tail keywords such as “green cotton dress for summer” is more helpful for online shoppers. Here’s an article if you are interested in learning more about keyword research using my recommended tool called Jaaxy.
Hello. I found this article on Zazzle really useful. I’ve been thinking about how I can sell my own acrylic paintings online, and to start with this seemed like a really good idea. But, as you point out, there seems to be far more scope by creating my own business website first. I will certainly check it out. Thanks!
Hi there Peter,
I would say combine all these tools for better results. Your website can help build your online brand while Zazzle can do the product printing. That way, you don’t have to stock up and can always print on demand. At some point, you might also want to consider selling the products from your own site for better profit margin.