There’s lots to love about Zazzle, but it’s not without its issues. Not sure if Zazzle is worth it for you? Here’s a helpful table of the pros and cons.
Pros
Cons
You are your own boss
You are your own boss
You can make money monthly
Slow to start
Make passive income
Learning curve
Low/No barrier to entry
Saturated
The sky is the limit
Repetitve
Set your royalty rate
Opportunity for Everyone
Highly rated
Growing company
It’s fun!
Edit Table The above table is a brief overview of what makes Zazzle great, and some of the drawbacks of the platform. Keep reading for a detailed explanation as to why each item made the list.
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links. We may earn a small commission for purchases made through links in this post, at no extra cost to you.
MY RECOMMENDED PRINT ON DEMAND TOOLS
Creative Fabrica – Where I buy ALL of my graphics and fonts. They have an awesome POD license.
Drawing Tablet – This is the one that I have. It’s an entry-level, affordable tablet that has allowed me to create graphics I never could have with a mouse and keyboard.
Adobe Creative Cloud – Photoshop and Illustrator have allowed me to level up my graphic design skills in a way that wouldn’t have been possible using the free alternatives.
Canva– I use Canva to assemble the graphics I find on Creative Fabrica and create unique graphics.
YOU ARE YOUR OWN BOSS
Starting your own business is a lot of people’s dreams and getting to be your own boss and decide what you do, how you do it, and when is a huge draw to that reason why. Making this a major pro in our books.
However, being your own boss also comes with its own drawbacks. You need to be accountable to yourself, and if you aren’t going to get the work done and put the time in you aren’t making any money. Discipline is a key component to starting your own business a print on demand, Zazzle business is no different.
Zazzle pays out monthly and all you need is a Paypal account to get your funds. As well as a tax form, the specific form is dependant on which country you are working from.
Sales take 30 days to clear through Zazzle, so you will have to wait for earnings to clear before you can get paid out. There is a minimum payout balance of $50 or you will be charged a $2.50 service fee to take your funds out early.
MAKE PASSIVE INCOME
One of the biggest draws to Zazzle, for most people, is the ability to make passive income. You put in the work upfront, in your downtime, and you can reap the rewards for the rest of your life, or at least as long as Zazzle is around.
Passive income is awesome! And it’s opened up a lot of doors for a lot of people, including myself, even a few bucks a day adds up big time over the course of a month or a year and the years to come. Passive income is a big ranking factor for making Zazzle worth your time.
Do you need help making product designs more efficiently? Creative Fabrica has a MASSIVE collection of fully made, ready to go, graphics and fonts to add to your products! I’ve been a member of Creative Fabrica since 2020 and can’t say enough good things about their catalogue. Get your first month for $1 here. OR use code: allaccessspecialevent to get your first year for $59.00 – this is a limited time deal.
LOW/NO BARRIER TO ENTRY
Almost anyone can join Zazzle as a designer. There is no approval process, all you need to do is sign up and verify your email address and you are off to the races. Zazzle is also international, they are open to having designers from all over the world. Note that you will need to fill in tax information before you can get paid out.
THE SKY IS THE LIMIT
You can make endless earnings on Zazzle! Don’t get me wrong, it’s not going to happen overnight, or even over the course of a couple weeks or months. It will take a long time to make big money on Zazzle. But the possibility is there! And you can make consistent money fairly quickly with a solid effort and a decent eye for design.
YOU CAN SET YOUR ROYALTY RATE
The minimum royalty rate is 5%, which for some products, literally equates to pennies. But you are free to set your royalty up to 99% for any products that aren’t PPE related, such as face masks, shields, and hand sanitizers or Zazzle Heart products.
Note that anything listed for a 15% commission or higher is automatically charged an additional small commission for every sale.
Zazzle is a fairly big company, they sell internationally and have a huge selection of products. They also are one of the only print on demand marketplaces to have their own in-site design tool and the ability to monogram and customize products, making their selection of products more exclusive than other print on demand marketplaces like Redbubble or Society6.
GROWING COMPANY
Zazzle has done nothing but grow since it first hit the scene in 2005. They went from a handful of products to design on to hundreds, if not thousands. And they continue to add new products regularly. They usually add one or two new products every month, sometimes more sometimes less.
I only see this company growing bigger and the sooner you start the sooner you can get in on that!
IT’S FUN!
I have a lot of fun with Zazzle, which makes designing on Zazzle worth it for me. When I first started out, I was borderline obsessed with creating products and cool new designs. If you see yourself having fun with it like I did you should definitely sign up!
SLOW TO START
With any print on demand marketplace it can be really slow starting out. Especially if you are brand new, have no design experience, and don’t already have a following on social media to promote your products to.
It took me about 3 weeks to get my first sale and the first 4ish month were slow, with sales trickling in here and there. After the 4th month, or so, my sales started to pick up each month. If you keep at it your sales will grow.
When it comes to slow sales: Think about the time of year you are starting. During the winter holiday season products are flying off the shelves, however, in the summer months, things can be quite slow.
ZAZZLE HAS A LEARNING CURVE
If you have no design skills there will be a bit of a learning curve, but give yourself the time to learn and you will get better and start making sales.
Check out my helpful guide of tools that I have used during my Zazzle/Print on Demand career. You can read it by clicking here.
ZAZZLE IS SATURATED
Zazzle has been around for over 15 years now, the market is saturated. There hundreds of thousands of competing designs for various products.
However, if you can be the first to design on the new products when they come out you have a better chance of making sales.
Or, if you can find an untapped niche or be the first to create designs for a trending topic, you can do well.
REPETITIVE
Creating designs for products can be a lot of fun, however, the data entry that goes into uploading each product gets tedious and repetitive.
That’s why it’s crucial to come up with a good system to upload designs and add the meta data to products as quickly and efficiently as possible.
See how I upload to Zazzle quickly and efficiently by clicking here.
STILL UNSURE IF ZAZZLE IS WORTH IT?
Try out uploading some designs and see if you even like using the platform. Give yourself a week or two and get as much uploaded as you can in that time, you will know pretty quick if this method of making money online is right for you.
Once you have a few dozen or a few hundred designs uploaded you should start to see fairly consistent sales, depending on your keywords, titles, and design quality.
Keep in mind that Zazzle is not just about the best designs, if you don’t do the keywords research and create compelling titles no one is likely to ever even see your product, let alone buy it.
Tessa is currently based out of Montreal, QC Canada with eyes set on a move across the globe in the near future. She has a passion for learning and building streams of income and is striving for the digital nomad life.
Tessa has experience in finance, as she worked in the film industry in the accounting department for 10 years.
Tessa loves traveling and creating art and is busy soaking up everything she can to make her a better artist.
Tessa is sharing her journey with print on demand, specifically on Zazzle and Spoonflower, on her new website profitsunraveled.com