Anyone here use Zazzle?

First off... I'm not sure about the rules here on posting links to a site like Zazzle. If it's not okay then just remove this post (and please accept my apology).

Ok, for those who don't know, Zazzle is one of those sites where you can create products to sell (posters, t-shirts, mugs, ect...) using your own custom art/designs. Just something I decided to try out because I'm broke
I haven't made any sales there yet (only just signed up last week though), but others seem to so I'm trying to stay hopeful. I'm wondering if anyone here has tried selling through their site (or another similar site).

Here's a link to my store, take a look if you like
http://www.zazzle.com/starvinmarvin

http://www.cafepress.com/?CMP=KNC-G-EF . i'm a member here. you can do pretty much the same thing, upload an image and have them apply it to real world items which can then be sold, either through them, or order yourself at a discount and sell on your own. i've only ever done one upload, one of my rose pictures, which i had them apply to a nice, white coffee mug. i then ordered one for myself. it's a nice mug at a reasonable price. you have to make something like $25 worth of profit to you sales before they send you a check, but they do a lot of business. i was never in it for the $$$, just trying it out, but they seem reputable.

zazzle's base rate seems a touch high on a couple items. not quite sure why, for instance, a poster runs $19.95 as the base. i would think printing costs would be quite cheap, then shipping and handling add a bit more. but, their t-shirts seem about right. i havent used cafepress in a long while, so i'd have to go and compare to be sure.

but looks like they're doing things pretty much the same way as cafepress, which is good. you set your mark-up over base and i like that.

yes, jffe, they do normally advertise the sellers. you get your own web pages for displaying your stuff. the digital media is yours. you set up your 'store' with your media applied to their products. like, i took an image and uploaded it to my 'store' on cafepress and set the image to be tagged to their white coffee mug. i dont sell the media; i sell the their mug with my image applied to it. when i ordered the mug, they went ahead and applied the image to the mug and send it to me.

basically, they provide the base products at a fixed price. you provide the images to be applied to those products and you choose how much you want to sell the whole for in your 'store'. and that's the basic arrangement.

there is a bit more you can do with a bit of aggressive work, like embedding your store link into other web pages to advertise. they dont provide that part. so, you can be as aggressive in sales as you can find sites to embed your links within. the competition and participation on cafepress is pretty stiff. there are a lot of folks there all trying to sell stuff. so, i dont think my one image applied to one mug has ever been noticed. lol. but then, i didnt expect it to be. i dont really advertise and all i used was their freebie account. you can buy more expensive accounts to get more of a front page billing, but i wasnt interested in doing that.

you could conceivably make a decent living with something like this, but you'd have to be far more aggressive about it than i ever was or will be. thus, as an artist, and not a salesman, i wasnt that interested.

the ideal, to me, in something like this, would be that they provide the base product and i provide the artwork and let them handle the whole sales and store and stuff, though, there is some satisfaction in setting up the various products with various images. that part is somewhat artistic. but the aggressive sales part...nah

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Kraellin wrote: you could conceivably make a decent living with something like this, but you'd have to be far more aggressive about it than i ever was or will be. thus, as an artist, and not a salesman, i wasnt that interested.

----That's just it, none of those sites do much for ya as far as actually helping people find *you* and your stuff, or as far as actually selling it. Especially if the prices are all flat-rate set and the same for all, then if anything, people will just upload any picture they steal online and have it made into a cup or t-shirt and bypass the 'artists' on those sites. It reminds me of those back of the magazine poetry "contests", you know the ones where everybody wins, all they havta do to get published is buy a couple copies of the book. Like a pyramid scheme only legal since there is a trinket of small value being sold to you along with the much more attractive dream that is a marketting ploy.

jffe

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Kraellin wrote: no one's going to guarantee you exposure and advertising unless perhaps you were a world recognized artist whose work was selling for hundreds of thousands at a pop, and those folks are rare. ya know?

----Then it's basically like I said, *you* will be your #1 customer ha-ha.

jffe

I don't have anything against those sites, I guess I just look at them as a waste of time, since they never really help you make enough money to pay the internet bill let alone rent. *shrug* If a person is serious about making money doing some kind of artwork, they'll have to spend the time and energy to market it, or spend however long it takes to get an agent or several, to do the marketting for them. I don't really want to spend any time "marketting myself" or my artworks or whatever, but if I don't, then I have to find someone who will, not a website to bury me with a million other lazy hopefuls ya know.

jffe