Dazzled by Zazzle
I’ve spent the last week working hard on Zazzle. If you haven’t heard of Zazzle, feel free to go and investigate, and see if it’s something you might want to do.
The principle behind it is Print on Demand (POD) merchandising. So if you think you have a creative talent, you can make yourself a design and upload it to Zazzle. Then what you need to do is find some products to sell that would nicely accommodate your design – whether it be a pattern, logo, a funny phrase, or whatever you like.
I have found using the editor very easy, and it has allowed me to create almost twenty products super-fast. You might be wondering what exactly you can sell on Zazzle. The answer is pretty much anything, they offer over a hundred different items, from t-shirts and jackets, to fridge magnets, baseball caps, skateboards, keychains, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Here’s my current shop; I called it ArtSiren’s Zazzle Store. By the way, you make your shop once, and then if a customer goes to the dot com, it prices everything in US dollars, and if they go to the co.uk it gets priced in pounds. I guess other territory domains use the relevant currency – though I haven’t checked.
As an entrepreneur it is a no-brainer really, as your only investment is time – opening your own store is free. You can build it up slowly if you like, as and when you find spare bits of time, and there’s no limit to the number of products you can offer.
So what’s the bottom line then, you might be wondering. Well each product item has a base price; if you sell at the base price you make no money! The beauty of Zazzle is that it permits you to choose your price, by setting the mark-up you want on each item in your shop. For example, if you use an item with a base price of $10 and set the mark-up to 50%, when you sell one, you will get $5. But of course Zazzle are the ones who hold all the stock and do all the manufacturing and product despatch. Though of course, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from ’selling’ items to yourself at zero mark-up and then physically selling them to other people yourself, if you want to do it that way. Perhaps a nice mix of the two methods would produce the returns you want.
I like the idea of coming up with a design once, and then attaching it to products I never need to touch – back to the residual income idea I introduced in my earlier post – ‘Residual Income, an Easy Option‘. In this case, like with all things on the internet, your job is to promote and market your Zazzle shop, so that people can find it – and your products – easily. In this respect, it’s best to find yourself a nice little niche to concentrate on first, so you can design it with search engine optimisation in mind.
So if you are looking for creative ways to make money there are quite a few companies cropping up that work through Print on Demand; Zazzle is one of the biggies, as is CafePress (a very similar set up). For getting your own book project off the ground, you may also want to look into LuLu. Have fun getting creative, and I’ll post more on these POD opportunities later.
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