Zazzle is a print on demand service where you can take your designs online and place them onto various products that they sell, like mugs, postcards, calendars, etc., and print them for people when they purchase them.
This gives you a license which qualifies you to make royalties.
In this article, you will learn some of the best tips to make your sales more robust and give you some traction on the site, so let’s jump right in.
Tips For Zazzle Sellers To Make Money
1. Sell products that customers can customize themselves
If you want to successfully sell just about anything, you must realize that emotions are key. And when it comes to print on demand, they are even more important when compared to normal standard dropshipping.
So let’s say that you decide to list a camera lens mug in your store.
You will want to write a product description that tells potential buyers more about the product.
Well, you could write a product description that lists all the features it has, but a product description that describes how the product will best benefit your customer will convert better.
Image source: Konga
In the case of the camera lens mug, most people will not buy it because it is made out of food grade plastic; they will buy it because they want to see the hilarious look on people’s faces when they think you are drinking out of a real camera lens.
If you are able to inspire emotions in customers, whether it is adoration, envy, jealousy, or humor, it will increase their desire to buy, which will thus increase your conversion rate.
And this is especially important when it comes to print on demand because, to be honest, a lot of these products are quite expensive to buy in the first place.
For example, still on the camera lens.
If you wanted to buy it on AliExpress, it will cost you less than $5, which is pretty cheap right?
Image source: AliExpress
So because you are getting it so cheap to start with, you can put a huge markup on the price in your store for bigger profit margins.
But if you wanted to buy a custom print on demand camera lens mug, it can cost you upwards of $10.
Image source: Scarecrow and Raven
So the high price means that you don’t get to put as much of a markup on it, which means that you will make less money, right?
Well, not quite.
Like any business model out there, selling on Zazzle has its advantages and disadvantages.
One of the disadvantages is the high cost to purchase the item for the customer.
But one of the advantages is that you can get much higher conversion rates because you can ‘super customize’ a product to what the customer truly wants.
By being super-targeted to what the customer desires, you trigger their emotions, increase your conversion rate, and you can sell items for a premium price.
And nothing makes a product super targeted than when customers can customize it themselves.
So Zazzle allows customers to engrave items with custom messages, alter image sizes, and change the layering of design elements. All this happens automatically without you having to do anything.
Enabling this feature lets you get your customers involved, which is actually powerful because with print on demand, it is actually about emotional selling and it doesn’t get any better than that.
So when you can introduce that, and your competition is not actually doing that right now, you can get a leg-up on them.
2. Optimize your search ranking
When people try to find a product on Zazzle, they have something in particular they are looking for.
For example, if you have placed your designs on some Jungle leaves mouse pad, potential buyers might look up Jungle photos, and you’d want your products to come up in that search.
You need to be optimized so that Zazzle will go through all the products available and find yours as relevant so that it comes up at the top of the page and people can click on your products and buy them.
To optimize your product, start with the title.
You want something that is descriptive and also makes your product appealing.
For example, in the case of the Jungle leaf mouse pad, the name will suffice, and you can add a few extra words to advertise and really sell the product.
Image source: YouTube
Then you’ve got the description field to tell the item’s story and explain why it is special.
You want to talk about how you created it, what the design looks like, why people are going to like it, and why they should buy it.
It’s important that you spend a lot of time on the title and description because you can have a great product, but people won’t be able to find it.
Categories are also important.
Especially because they will help people find your products easily.
Tags are quite important as well. They are basically keywords that you tell Zazzle are relevant to your products.
Image source: YouTube
You will want to use keywords that are directly or indirectly related to your product.
In the case of the jungle mouse pads, it will be apt to use tags like forest mouse pads, jungle trees, etc., provided that they will help to discover your products.
So in the search results, tags will help your products come up, and therefore help you sell your products.
But keep in mind that the first 10 tags are power tags, which basically means that they are the tags that Zazzle will think are the most important of all, so make sure you have your most important and relevant keywords in the first 10.
You can have up to 40 tags, but try to keep it around 20.
As basic as this tip sounds, there’s a sneaky way to go about it, which your competitors are not doing.
There are plenty of places you can go to get designs, but the first place I’d recommend is Pinterest and here’s why.
Pinterest is a social network and people can actually pin what they like to their own board.
So if a certain design is getting more pins, it gives you an indication that the design is popular. Once you have gotten that figured out, the next course of action is to get inspired from that design and create something unique to you.
Try as much as possible to stay away from copying designs from pixels because it can actually hurt you in the long run.
So any design that you find, you should customize it to your own business.
And with Pinterest, it is really easy to search for a design. All you have to do is to go to the search bar and type the niche plus design.
Image source: Pinterest
But the downside to searching this way is that everyone will be searching the same way so you have to think about unique ways to search on Pinterest to get unique ideas.
What you can do instead is to search for niche plus tattoos.
Image source: Pinterest
The reason you want to do this is that people tattoo their bodies with certain designs that they are super passionate about, and if it’s a good design, you can get inspired by it, and put it onto a different product.
And most of the time, it sells really well.
There are plenty of different places to research for designs to upload on Zazzle other than Pinterest.
You can also get ideas from sites like Etsy, where you can read reviews to know what people think about certain design ideas.
As a side note, you can also use product reviews on sites like Etsy and Amazon to write fantastic product descriptions.
Then, test your designs.
When it comes to design testing, you can ask your customers what they want, or email that question to your email list and then get the reply and see what people actually like, then run ads based on it.
Another way is just the structure of your campaign.
If you are running Facebook ads, you can have two ads created inside an ad-set, and Facebook will rotate to see which one gets the most engagement and show that one more often.
Once you know that product one yields more results than product two, you can then focus all your ad budget on product one.
4. To scale your store, hire a designer
Of course, you can use graphics services like Shutterstock to find artwork that you can buy and legally reuse for print on demand products.
And as a beginner, you easily get away with this and it can help you find a niche very quickly.
But the top sellers on Zazzle quickly shift away from this as their store grows, because, let’s face it, Shutterstock is a ‘no man’s land’. Even if you find a pretty good design on there, anyone can easily come in and buy the rights to sell that design as well.
So while Shutterstock is great to get started with, once you’ve got a flow of sales coming in, you are going to want to shift to a designer to make your custom artwork that will be protected by copyright.
And on the plus side, having a designer is very important to help you scale your store fast as well.
You need a constant flow of designs for you to test.
You don’t know if the first design will work or the tenth one.
You need to run ads to it and check analytics to see what is working.
Now it really depends on how well your designers can create those designs and also your knowledge of the niche and how competitive it is.
And while buying royalty-free images is good for getting started, you will run into issues where other people will be running the same design as you.
What you really want to do is hire your own designers. There are many ways to hire designers, and I’m talking about really good ones.
The first place to start is Upwork.
You can actually do a search for all the designers and also post a listing.
Image source: Upwork
One smart way to get the best out of Upwork is to hire up to three designers at a time and give them the same instructions. Then, wait to see who can complete them in a timely fashion, how well they follow instructions, and how good the designs are.
Then you can hire one of the three for subsequent jobs afterward.
The price range for this is usually $20 to $25, depending on the complexity of the designs.
Other places you can look at are 99designs and Freelancer.
The good thing about these two sites is that you can run contests through them and have other designers create designs for you. You can then compare which designs you want and which designers you want to work with.
That is a really good way if you don’t know what you are looking for. You can have other designers come up with the concept for you and then compare.
Most people I know will choose Freelancer over 99designs because they can get cheaper designers and there is a sense of quality assurance depending on the price range that they are looking for.
5. Do not use fan art
In this era of trends, there are two niches that many people really want to build their stores about – Fortnite and Anime.
If you are among this category of people, I’ve got bad news:
You cannot build a Fortnite store or a store that is based on existing anime properties.
It is illegal, even if you hire someone to create an original fan art based on it.
It doesn’t matter if it’s fan art, creating artwork that is from copyrighted characters or trademarked images and logos is illegal unless you have explicit permission to do so.
If you do a quick search on Zazzle, you will discover a lot of Fortnite and PubG T-shirts that will be made using print on demand services.
Image source: Zazzle
These shirts infringe on copyright and trademarks, but as a result of it being so common, people think there is nothing wrong with it, right?
Wrong.
In the case of Fortnite, even though the game is basically free to use, the creators have made it very clear that none of its content should be used for commercial purposes. Since you are going to get paid for each sale you make on Zazzle, it falls under the commercial category.
Image source: Epic Games
And for companies that do not have a blatant disclaimer on their website, it is still illegal to use their creation to create designs unless you get permission, otherwise, you might find yourself losing a lot of money instead of making it.
6. Create different niche stores
Within your Zazzle account, you can have many different stores.
Image source: Zazzle
The reason you want to create different stores is that, first of all, it is easy to create stores.
You can create as many stores as you want within reason. They are quick and easy to create, and they don’t turn people off with unreal event products.
So for example, if people like your store and you are posting things related to photography about landscape and beaches, and suddenly you start posting about headphones, it’s likely that your initial target audience might stop following your store.
It’s better to create different niche stores so that you can easily target different markets. If you want to experiment with different product types, you can keep going, and while some won’t work out, you won’t ruin the ones that will.
7. Post new products often
If you must do this, then you must take care not to sacrifice quality for quantity. You just want to have a good balance of both.
If you post regularly, you’ll attract more customers. If more people follow your store, then you can build a solid community, rather than just getting one buyer by chance from search results.
It will take a lot of hard work to pull it off, but as you’ll find, when you keep posting more products, you will gradually increase your earnings. Eventually, you will have a big store and earn some pretty reasonable money.
The more products you have, the more products you can sell and the more money you can make.
8. Complete your profile information on your home page
Your buyers will likely want to connect with you; they will check out your profile first before making attempts to buy any of your products on Zazzle.
Incomplete profile information may not provide any basis for your prospective customers to connect with you. Also, a completed profile can help to elevate your store ranking on Zazzle.
Here are vital details you can add to catch your prospective clients’ attention.
- ‘About me’
- Your website’s URL
- Your social media handles
- Display image
- Banner
9. Write about your products on Medium
You can write about your products on Medium platform. According to SimilarWeb, Medium has an average of about 160 million monthly visitors.
As a popular platform, you can generate more traffic to your store by crafting high quality posts. This will help you to boost the sales of your products by driving traffic to your Zazzle store.
To publish on Medium, your article must not appear to be promoting your custom printed products directly.
Take, for instance, if your customized art is a forest theme, you can write about the importance of preserving the forest or other titles related to the forest.
Then highlight your forest-themed art products in your write-up, but never make your arts the center-theme of your posts.
10. Entice your customers with Zazzle coupons
To attract more customers and increase sales, you should keep an eye out for Zazzle coupon codes. That way, you can share them on your website, blog, or social media handles to prospective buyers.
To ensure that you’re not serving your customers with outdated coupon codes and also save you time, you should download the Zazzle mobile app to receive notifications on available coupons.
11. Publish your art products on websites
To boost sales, your custom POD products need more exposure. One way of giving your art products the desired exposure is by publishing them on your website if you have one.
To attract traffic to your website, make sure your website has a beautiful theme that complements your art products. That way, you can redirect website visitors to your sales page on Zazzle.
If you do not have a website, you can create a blog or look for websites that allow guest post submissions for an opportunity to promote your brand.
12. Set your store to public view
You may not receive much patronage because you might unknowingly set your store on private view; hence, your products will not get any view on Zazzle.
To ensure that your store is set to Public view, you should go to your Zazzle store’s settings and uncheck the ‘Make this store private’ box.
13. Lower your commission rate
Although Zazzle’s default commission rate is 10 percent, you can beat the competition and increase sales by bringing down your commission rate.
Yes, this will cut down your profit margin, but in the long run, you will enjoy an increased sales volume by making your products more affordable compared with your competitors.
Conclusion
So there you have it – thirteen tips that will help you expand your Zazzle store and reach additional customers to make more money.
Remember, time is valuable. If you want to keep waking up to more emails with subject lines that say “New Zazzle Sale,” then now is the time to act on these tips.
Efose says he is a polymath, which reflects in his work. He excels at inbound marketing, tech, and business. He has a rich experience of working with renowned digital marketing agencies in the past. Often writes for top blogs.