Comparison of Make-Your-Own Greeting Card Services: Zazzle

As some of you already know, I've been gradually building my greeting card collection at my Cafepress shop; you can see some samples above. I'm using Cafepress for now because I have a Premium Shop there, but I'm also investigating other services in case I can find something better. Feel free to put in a request for any favourite cartoons/images I've posted in Blatherings, Inkygirl or other sites in the past, and I'll see if I have a high-res version that's suitable for a card.

Here are collections of some of my images; feel free to suggest any image for a card:
Sketchbook
Writing cartoons

Also feel free to suggest a particular strip from any comic series I've done in the past. Please note that making a suggestion does not obligate you to buy the card. :-)

For my service comparison, I'm focusing on those that will enable me to upload a digital picture and enable people to buy printed cards online. I made a feeble attempt to do the research a couple years ago, but was overwhelmed by the variety of choices.

This time I decided to go about it somewhat more methodically. Before you read any further, you should be warned that if you want to save the most money and can afford to print your cards in bulk (hundreds at a time) or want to be able to oversee the process (e.g. colour tweaks, etc.) throughout, you'd probably be better off going to a local printing service.

My situation, however, is different. Time is more valuable to me right now than money...I would rather take a cut in profit and have someone else manage the printing, selling and administration, packing and mailing. I would rather take the time saved and put it toward my writing or illustrating.

I focused on researched well-established services to decrease the chances that they'd go out of business anytime soon, and so I'd be able to find more reviews online. I also wanted a service that a big enough presence online that people might find my cards through the main site rather than always through my blogs.

I also wanted to make sure that any service I used would not try to grab copyright beyond what it needed to print my cards.

Please keep in mind that these findings are based on my own experience. For each of the services I'll be mentioning, there were always people who had bad experiences with the company as well as people who were loyal fans of the service.

I heard good things about Zazzle, so I decided to check them out first. Zazzle lets users create a wide variety of customized products (t-shirts, etc.) but I'm focusing on their greeting card services. I'll be covering other services in future Blatherings.

I recently got a Zazzle mailing, by the way, announcing their launch of Profile Cards (which look a LOT like MOO cards) and multi-sized Business Cards.

But right now I'm focusing on Zazzle's make-your-own greeting card services:

Factor	Remarks	Rating
Copyright/image protection	Only smaller, low-res images are available to the public. Artist keeps all rights.
User interface	Clean design.
Set-up experience	Easy-to-user interface. Optional customizations include uploading own header image or choose from templates.
Quality of product	Good heavyweight card stock. Colours seemed a bit dark to me. Zazzle logo on the back, but at least the user can upload his/her own image to the back as well.
Price of cards/shipping	More expensive than other services.
Artist payment.	Standard royalty rate is 10%, but you can select a rate up to 99%.
Marketing tools.	Tools/widgets to help you sell cards on MySpace and Facebook, send-to-a-friend, invite-a-fan and fan club, share this URL, create HTML link to your gallery, Zazzle Flash panel to add to your blog.

Here's what the cards cost:

I ordered 10 note cards (4" x 5.6") for US$2.19 each and 10 greeting cards (5" x 7") for $2.49 each.

Someone buying a single card from Zazzle would pay $2.49 for a note card and $2.99 for a greeting card, which is more expensive than other services I checked out.

Here are their shipping costs, within the U.S.:

Airmail to Canada/Overseas: 1-9 cards $3.99, 10-49 cards $12.99, 50-99 cards $29.99.

Description of card stock from the website:

"Ultra-heavyweight (120#) card stock with a gloss finish. Printed with a unique process that imparts a rich depth of imagery and an almost 3D-like effect. Each card comes with a matching envelope.

Free boxed sets for orders of 10 or more."

Payment/Commission to artists:

From their Nonexclusive License Agreement:

"Royalty. Zazzle will pay you a royalty for all sales of Public Products incorporating your Design ("Royalty"). Zazzles standard royalty rate is 10% ("Standard Royalty Rate"), but you have the option of selecting any royalty rate between 10% and 99% (in increments of .1%) for each of your Designs as incorporated in each Product category ("Your Royalty"). If you select a royalty rate greater or less than 10%, Zazzle will change the retail price to reflect the increased royalty rate payable to you."

Copyright

Good image security; only smaller, low-res images are available to the public. Artists keep all rights. You can specify whether or not you're allowing your image to be changed or incorporated into other people's creations (I always say no).

Extra customization

Unlike the other services I've looked at so far, Zazzle allows a user to add an image to the back of the card:

The cards themselves were of excellent quality. The image printed out a bit darker than how it looks on the screen.

User interface and Marketing tools

Clean user interface design, and of all the services I checked out, I found Zazzle the easiest for uploading a new image and posting it for sale in your own customized gallery. They have a variety of templates to choose from (one-click to change the look of your Gallery) or you can upload your own image.

Zazzle also provides you with HTML you can paste into your blog or social networking profile (like MySpace) to display your "Zazzle Panel."

SUMMARY

Good quality cards, but the cost/card is a tad higher than I'd like. In order to make any profit, I'd have to charge a user even more. I'm going to keep looking, and will post results here.

Follow-up on the death of Gary Gygax:

Order of the Stick tribute

XKCD tribute



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