Selling on Zazzle « Gallery of the Soul’s Enlightenment

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Selling on Zazzle

Everyone joins Zazzle in the hope that they might sell something… after all, if you just want to share images with friends and family, there are plenty of other sites that do this better than Zazzle (Flickr for one). So, I also joined Zazzle in the hope of making some money. I doubt if anyone gets rich through their sales on Zazzle but it can generate some income to help offset the money spent on creating your images in the first place.

For me, the income stream is quite small at the moment, but has been increasing over time. It took months for my first sale and now I am seeing regular sales each month. Sales now number almost 450. Why now, you might ask? Well, here are my thoughts on this matter:

1. Number of products – as I added more products to my gallery, sales started to climb. Currently I now have over 2,030 products and I am adding them on a regular basis. So, my first tip is to add as many products as possible, without compromising on quality. The more you add, the more likely sales will happen. Remember too that Zazzle is growing all the time so this has the effect of diluting your profile on Zazzle, so you need to add more products on a regular basis to keep your profile from disappearing in an ever-increasing ocean of products.

2. Quality counts – if you upload rubbish you will lose customers. Make sure that your images are sharp, correctly exposed and of high enough resolution. Whatever kind of image you upload (photo, paintings, drawings etc) they need to be good quality.

3. Network – make friends, leave comments, join fan clubs, be nice to others. Offer advice and encouragement. Make sure you join more fan clubs than you have fans, that you leave more comments than you receive and you will generate more page views as a result, and possibly sales too. certainly, if you never leave comments nor join any fan clubs, you are unlikely to generate page views and page views are the key to sales.

4. Royalty – you can set a royalty of 99% but be aware that will make your product so expensive that only mega-rich folk are likely to buy it! However, there is a relationship between royalty and exclusiveness, so if you want to sell a product that is seen as exclusive, price it accordingly but you may wait a long time for that sale that will make it worth it in the end. In my opinion, you’d have to be a pretty amazing artist to afford to price you products with higher than 75% royalty. Use the advanced royalty calculator to work out the selling price and your royalty in $$ at different royalty levels to check the final cost of the product to the customer (exc. postage). Then ask yourself how likely it is that someone would pay that price for your product. Compare it against similar products on Zazzle and see what others are charging. As a general guideline I suggest:

Postcards, stamps and buttons etc: 10 – 15%

Greeting cards, hats and mugs etc: 10 – 20%

Posters, T-shirts etc: 10 – 30%

Exclusive items, no more than 50%

Finally, remember to change your gallery’s look every so often. You don’t need to change it much, just tweak the text of one of the colours and it will show up on the Zazzle site as newly changed gallery. This helps to raise your profile and if you can do it daily it will help greatly.

So, happy selling. Here is an image of my latest sale: