Zazzle

Basics:

Zazzle helps you sell your art through print-on-demand, and/or design and manufacture products to be further customized on Zazzle.

Expected pay: You set it

Husl$core: $$$$

Commissions & fees: 30% for “makers”; You set your own royalty rates for print-on-demand products

Where: Nationwide (remote)

Requirements: 13 or older

Zazzle Review:

Zazzle offers two ways for freelancers to make money. You can upload art for its print-on-demand operation, which pays a royalty on each sale. Or you can make products for sale, such as tote bags and t-shirts, under Zazzle’s Maker agreement.

So, we’ve divided this review into two parts dealing with the two different opportunities.

Print-on-demand

Zazzle allows you to upload your art and make it available on everything from greeting cards to tote bags.

Like other print-on-demand operations, such as Society6, RebBubble and FineArtAmerica, you don’t have to do the production or shipping. You simply provide the art and earn a royalty for making it available to beautify coffee mugs, t-shirts and tote bags.

You set your own royalty rates. However, if you want more than a 14% royalty, the site may hit you with additional fees. The site pays you once you earn more than set amounts ($50 for payments through PayPal; $100 when you want to be paid via check.)

Paper products

Zazzle’s print-on-demand arm is particularly strong with paper products, such as wedding invitations and customized napkins. If these are the products you want to make, Zazzle is our top choice in the category.

However, there is no reason not to sign up and sell your paper products with other print-on-demand operators, such as Society6, RedBubble and FineArtAmerica too. All of these sites operate on non-exclusive contracts.

For designers (makers):

Zazzle allows “makers” to create their own products that can be customized (with Zazzle print-on-demand designer’s designs). However, you can’t simply set up shop here as a maker, like you can as a designer under the site’s print-on-demand banner.

Makers join by invitation only. This may be because the site was having some quality and mailing issues when it was easier to sign up to manufacture products on the site. Recent reviews indicate that those problems may have been solved, making Zazzle a good option for both manufacturers and artists.

Makers price the products they sell and pay 30% of revenue to the site.

Recommendations

If you want to offer greeting cards for sale, Zazzle is our top choice.

With other print-on-demand products, we think there are a lot of good options, including Society6 and RedBubble.

If you’re making your own products, though, we think Etsy is a better choice, offering the ability to sell what you make at a lower net cost. To be sure, you won’t have someone else’s art to decorate your, say, aprons. But maybe you want to decorate them yourself anyway. Either way, neither site asks for an exclusive lock on your talent, so you’re free to sign up with both platforms.

What their sellers say:

Kristen Juckiewicz, owner of Redwood & Vine, which is a top-seller on Zazzle, agreed to describe her experience with the site and respond to questions about Zazzle’s print quality and terms:

“I’ve found Zazzle’s print quality to be excellent. Since the site relies on user-generated content from designers as well as photos or text that a customer might add, there are bound to be occasional snafus with printing. Sometimes those are due to customers uploading low resolution photos and graphics and ignoring the warning that they may print poorly, or not heeding the bleed areas on a particular product, resulting in text or images being cut off. And sometimes there’s a problem with the designer’s template, like text that’s too light. When that happens, or when the print job just isn’t satisfactory, they’re really good about making it right with a reprint or refund.

I set my royalties between 10-15%. I find those prices to be in line with fellow Zazzle designers and with competitor sites. Above 15%, Zazzle applies a small transaction fee or carve-out. They encourage a 10-15% royalty to keep prices in a range that customers would be willing to pay, but designers are free to set whatever royalty they prefer.

Earnings expectations

“There’s really no guideline as to what a Zazzle artist can expect to earn,” Juckiewicz says. “I earned about $150,000 in 2017.

“My Zazzle store, Redwood & Vine, started as a side hustle in 2015 when I was on maternity leave from my former job in the management consulting industry. By early 2016, it had grown to the point that I was ready to take the leap, resign from my firm and pursue it full time.

“I experimented with many different products before settling into a happy niche with weddings, holidays and special events. I love that on Zazzle, customers can find not only invitations, but postage, labels, menus, thank you cards, favors, photo gifts and hundreds more items. That breadth has allowed me to extend my design range to everything a customer needs for that special milestone or event.”

From SiteJabber

“The design lab they offer is very simple to use due to the self-explanatory steps involved and installed guides making it very user-friendly. Also, users can set up their own store and promote their own brand.

From artist Cindy Hopkins Monro in All About Zazzle:

“If, like me, you pursued art or photography as a hobby, it will be less rewarding and perhaps discouraging at first. With persistence, you could make at least $1000 your first year, building up to a second income by year three. The speed at which you increase sales will be determined by the time invested, the quality of your designs, the networking you do, and how successfully you have gauged your audience. At the end of each Christmas season, take stock of your accomplishments and adjust your Zazzle related tasks accordingly (you may need more products, you may need to blog and network more often, you may need to specialize or expand you product line).”

And Plus Your Business, which is a big fan of Zazzle says:

“Create as large a virtual inventory as possible – each sale will give you a relatively low amount of money (remember the 29 cents?). You have to sell in volume to make a substantial income.”

*Updated 2/8/2023

11 responses to “Zazzle”

Eric Hwang

October 29, 2019

Zazzle is a Horrible Site for Artists

If you’re an artist looking to sell your designs, don’t use Zazzle.

I’ve had a Zazzle Pro Designer account for nearly 10 years now. In the beginning, I used to make a few bucks from royalties. Today, they removed over a dozen of my designs that have been online for nearly a year. Subsequently, I removed all 500+ of my designs and removed all the products from my store. During the time that I’ve had my account, I’ve had over 100 designs removed and royalties cancelled for no apparent reason and with no appeals process or recourse. When I questioned it, I was told that something violated their terms of service, but never was informed of the specifics of this violation. All this happens even though I see a never-ending stream of blatant copyright and trademark infringing designs daily. All my designs are original. Creating designs is time consuming. Posting them on their site, adding descriptions, and determining pricing took a lot of time, only to have them removed. Only ten percent of what I posted on Zazzle has ever sold. I make more royalties from other similar sites in a week than I make with Zazzle all year.

It’s just not worth the headache.

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1. SomeGuy
  
  January 3, 2020
  
  What Zazzle alternatives would you use/recommend? I too want to start a custom art shop but I’ve read so many negative Zazzle reviews.
  
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SomeGirl

December 1, 2019

Zazzle started out as a nice company for designers, but not anymore. It takes so much time to create products and post them for sale, that for many designers it is very hard to leave Zazzle when they don’t like them anymore, because it would mean deleting years of hard work.

And Zazzle knows this and takes advantage of this. Every time they make decisions that will take away some of the earnings or rights of the designers. They are very arrogant, hardly don’t reply to designers questions and concerns on the forum. If you look at the forum now, you will be shocked!

Their latest move is they will add design elements in to the design area of the products designers have created. They offer these elements for free to their customers and when they add it, the designer will have to pay up to 25% of their royalty. Designers are practicly begging zazzle not to do this but Zazzle doesn’t care.

It’s really sad to see a company that earns so much from all these hardworking designers, that they treat them with so little respect and many designers really hardly earn anything.

They don’t care about their customers either. The have added a chat function to every designers account for customers to chat with them. Eventhough many designers have said they don’t have time for this or are just not available, Zazzle doesn’t care that their customers will not get a response because they will not give designers the option not to participate or a least leave some kind of absent message.

Anyway, my advice would be, don’t start with this company.

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Lisa

February 20, 2020

I have been on zazzle for many years and would love to find a competitor to use instead. Zazzle is terrible to the designers. They make sweeping changes that affect the designers revenue stream and could care less. They know they can get away with it. I have seen designers begging for answers on the forum and Zazzle just ignores it. So, I definitely would love to join a new site that caters to a similar customer!

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Desiree

October 8, 2020

I 2 have been selling designs on their website for 10 years now. I feel that changes that they are making are solely to benefit them and not the designers. I agree, it takes a lot of time and work to post designs just to have them hidden a year later- I barely make 60.00 usd a month. After taxes, this is not a livable wage. I do believe that there is a small number of designers that make a living and the majority don’t.

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E

December 31, 2020

I had a bad experience selling on Zazzle years ago and decided to give them another chance recently. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they have not improved at all. After putting in 2 months of work on my shop, Zazzle removed dozens of my designs they had already reviewed and approved for false claims of IP infrignement even though there is no actual dmca or complaint against my drawings.

The short version of the issue is that Zazzle had once gotten a warning about selling military/navy logos without permission on products that look like official merchandise. There is a law in the UK that you can’t produce military/navy clothing without license. I have some wall art for kids rooms a tiny detail of which is a flag that is in the public domain. Zazzle insists that those tiny 14 inch flags appearing in a larger scenic picture are illegal even thought they keep on selling other designs containing this very common flag. I even contacted the office that Zazzle said owned the IP and got confirmation that there is nothing illegal in selling my drawings.

My art has been on Cafepress, Redbubble, and Society6 for years (and just got added to TeePublic this week) and none of those companies have had issues or paranoia about my storybook style drawings. I agree that Zazzle has the right to cover their backsides against potential liability, especially because they lost a big lawsuit over some artwork thast belonged to Greg Young, but I despise their hypocrisy in singling out my harmless art made for children while they continue to sell designs that are more infringing or contain the same public domain elements that they will not allow in my work.

I have taken screenshots of many zazzle products using the same flag that they tell me is illegal for me to use and of products that sell this flag copied directly from public domain sources to design official looking naval merchandise which is only illegal use of that image. I plan to write a blog post/review of Zazzle when I have the time to show how unreasonable they are and that Zazzle is not a friend to artists and offer no loyalty or fairness after profiting from many of my designs in the past. To have this happen during a national economic crisis really shows their true colors.

To fellow artists looking to sell art online, I can recommend Cafepress as the easiest marketplace to make sales on even though their royalties are the lowest. Society6 is is a very elegant company and gives you a nice shop and blog. I have just started using TeePublic a few days ago and they are by far the easiest to design on and offer good royalties and attractive prices. These are my opinions from long experience in this line of work. I hope it’s helpful to someone.

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J

February 19, 2021

Zazzle has also started selling outside sponsored ads that lead potential customers away from Zazzle designers’ products. Used to be, once on Zazzle, it was only Zazzle designs that were promoted. Not now. Now the company can make money in a new way. Millions of designers who are trying to make the minimum to get a monthly paycheck are adding to the gigantic number of hits the site gets. These independent designers are also sending all their outside contacts to Zazzle in hopes of a sale, further adding to the number of hits Zazzle gets. With all those hits, a company in Zazzle’s position can then charge huge fees to sponsored advertisers and get high paying Adsense ads because of the huge number of hits their “lower class” new designers are helping to lead to their site. But they don’t share revenue with these people. Before they did this, newbies could eventually work their way up into the ranks where they were seen — and then it snowballed. They’d have a following already established before the sponsored ads began, so now aren’t as affected by the sponsored ads. But that opportunity may be gone. There are even star Zazzle sellers earning money by luring others to join the Zazzle ranks. Before the sponsored ads, those people really did help some struggling designers raise their revenue. But I haven’t yet seen them take a very new beginner starting from the time the sponsored ads began and make any notable changes in their revenue. I hope that happens but haven’t seen it yet.

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E

March 20, 2021

I’ve had a Zazzle account for 10 years and sometimes wish I had not invested so much time on my shop. Working with Zazzle is a constant source of irritation and of the many print-on-demand sites that sell my art, Zazzle is one of the few that makes me feel like I’m not dealing with a nice company.

As an artist I have made over 5000 product listings in a decade. Yesterday I reported to Zazzle that their website started generating broken links when my products are published. For my most recent products, if I or a customer clicked on a product link it goes to an error page every time.

The Zazzle rep didn’t seem to even look at the problematic listings, but gave me a dismmissive basic explanation about how their store works. I had to figure out how to get around the glitch on my own to be able to create products without broken links. I consider my Zazzle shop a necessary evil for now. It earns a little money for a lot of effort, but I don’t enjoy my interactions with the company. I recently opened a Contrado shop and it has been a much nicer experience.

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Michaeline McDonald

April 27, 2021

Zazzle no longer allows designers to buy their own products at the base price. And Zazzle’s base prices are FAR HIGHER than any other print on demand service out there. I have been on Zazzle for over a decade and only earned about $200 total. Zazzle is NOT WORTH YOUR TIME!

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1. Dom
  
  June 17, 2021
  
  Do you submit your work on other POD sites? How do you rate them. I’ve been on Redbubble and Teepublic and think Print on Demand in general is a waste of time. It’s sad but I’ve put in 100’s of hours and made about $200 over the course of a year. Again like to know more about experiences on other sites.
  
  Reply
Jay

June 28, 2021

When Zazzle first came out I made about $1200 on my products, and $1200 in royalties for referrals the first 2 years, then nothing since there after. Almost all my images were set to “Under Review” or rejected for infringement. Not worth the time to do it anymore.

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