I made some sales at Zazzle!

I know some of you are thinking about joining Zazzle so I thought I'd report back on recent progress.

Sales made

Sold 2: Dog Rose - notelet / card by HightonRidley
Browse more of my Cards

Sold 1: Grazing Pony - postcard by HightonRidley
Browse more of my Postcards

Sold 1: You Lift My Spirits postcard by HightonRidley
Browse my postcards

Products designed

I've laid my designs on 425 products from 40 images so far. The most popular fine art ones are shown in the panel:

make custom gifts at Zazzle

How easy is it to have and manage a Zazzle store?

In a word, relatively straightforward. I created my store on 11th Nov, so I'm three weeks into it (not many sales yet - but that's to be expected for such a new store) and haven't found anything that irks too much.

Like with any new arena, it takes a little while to orientate yourself to their way of thinking but once you've done that all works well.

The basic principles are:

Zazzle is..

...a Print on Demand store. Your designs get put on their product blanks and when they sell them, you get a royalty payment.
You don't even have to have any designs yourself, you can promote others' work and still earn a goodly commission from it.

Store Setup

• There are no setup fees or running costs. When an order comes in and they fill it, you get a royalty fee, based on a commission you set
• You create a store, choose a template / theme  and give it a name. Your store is located at www.zazzle.com/your_store_name
• It's also mirrored at .co.uk .au .ca and others, with all prices displayed in the local currency

Making products

• You place your uploaded images onto the various product blanks that Zazzle stocks
• You fine-tune your design for a product using a pretty neat design tool, sizing and placing the image. You can also add text with a huge number of typefaces / fonts to choose from.
  
• You give the product a title, description and a bunch of tags
  
• They have a Marketplace where you can put your stuff for sale, or you can keep your gear private
  (once in the marketplace, you can't change the image of a product)

Managing and promoting your store

• You get to create category folders and can have nested subcategories. You put the products in them and it's up to you how you organise this.
  
• They make it dead easy to promote your store or individual products, with the same sort of sharing facilities you see all over the web. They give you html for pasting into blogs and emails and generally make it easy to show off your stuff in places other than Zazzle
• I've used some of their promotion facilities in this post—all I had to do was copy and paste.
• They give you a Zazzle blog panel for putting in your blog sidebar though I find it a bit limiting. Instead I use Zazzlit! a Google gadget I created for the purpose. Look over in my sidebar at the top. See a tutorial on using it.
  
• Most blogging platforms are supported
• If you're feeling brave and aren't too afraid of changing CSS and HTML, they have a store builder and you can then control all aspects of your store layout
• ...and, no, I haven't been brave enough yet!
  

Most of my followers are other artists so I'm guessing you're one too? If you are, why not give Zazzle a go for your artwork?

If you decide to have a go, let me know so we can hook up on Zazzle :)

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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Tutorial on using my new Zazzlit Gadget on your blog or web site

After something like five or six intense days, I've finished both my Zazzlit Gadget and the tutorial on adding and using it.

What is it?

Regular readers will know that I've recently opened a Zazzle shop (basically they make it dead easy to get your images onto products. No set-up fees.)

In these tough economic times, sales of my work through my web site have dropped off. People aren't really spending on fine art the way they used to. Not mine, anyway (and I keep hearing the same story from other artists).

The shop is a way to offer my work, albeit in a different way, at a much more affordable price. And it's starting to work.

So what is the Zazzlit Gadget? It's a way for Zazzle storekeepers to display just the products they want, in a small gadget in their blogger side panel or on their web site. Zazzle provide a couple of brilliant panels but they don't allow you to narrow down the products displayed.

But my Zazzlit does! I had to write it because I couldn't find one anywhere that did the job half decently, one that any shopkeeper could use. The thing about the Zazzlit Gadget is that I can put one on each of my sites / blogs and get them to display the type of gear most suitable to the folks who visit those places.

Tutorial - a piece of cake

My tutorial shows you in 5 easy-to-follow steps, with live working examples, how to point and click a Zazzlit onto your blogger blog.

Another revenue trickle / stream is always good...

I'd encourage any of the serious artists who follow me to sign up for a Zazzle shop - apart from the effort in uploading images and applying them to products, any sales made are pure profit. If you do, get things moving by using Zazzlit.

I'm not saying this is an instant earner but if you already sell your work and have a good handful or two of regular followers, then with Zazzlit you should see some additional revenue.

As usual, I'm after your feedback. What I want to know is, was the tutorial easy to follow and understand or did it frighten you?!

Secondly would you/will you use Zazzlit on your Zazzle store or does it have any drawbacks that need fixing?

comments / feedback always welcome :)

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A couple of template updates

Just been dabbling with my blog template. I've added the gfc Wall gadget. It's been on the main site since I started using gfc and I thought it made sense to have it here as well.

It's intended for general posts, stuff not related to a particular blog entry.

I've got it set to allow anonymous posts -- is it just me, or I am I too optimistic that it won't end up getting abused?

We'll see ...it would be so nice to be pleasantly surprised and be able to leave it set this way forever.

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Hacking and cobbling stuff together

I'm rather pleased with myself... it's been a hard old slog over many days to achieve the gadget-ified scrolling image selector you (hopefully) see here.



...and I'll finish writing this post when I can see it works (after the usual test, test and test again)!

Ok, it does - and with only a minor hiccough (see if you notice!).

So, why was it all so hard?

Well, first of all, what actually is going on here? Hover with your mouse to the left of centre, and the piccies scroll towards the beginning of the gallery, and vice versa.

Click on a thumbnail, and it takes you to a page (opens in a new tab) with a larger version of the picture, showing what it looks like in a frame, and letting the visitor buy one of the limited editions of that picture, using PayPal as the payment processor.

Well, in the dim and distant past I once saw someone who claimed they were "doing programming" and, when I looked over his shoulder, thought it all looked a bit like witchcraft to me with strange runes, spells and incantations.

Little did I know I'd end up wrestling and doing battle with the slippery little things! It only began to dawn on me when I was researching how to achieve my vision above, that I was going to have to do a bit of "programming" myself.

I use the term cautiously, it was more akin to hacking and chopping, with a fair bit of kludging, hair-tearing and plead-offerings to the bittybyte silicon gods of the megaverse, thrown in as well.

And there was me thinking, a quick search on google to find a suitable bit of javascript, a deft bit of cutting and pasting and chucking in my own urls and... done deal, or so I niaively thought :)

Once it was all hanging together (small word "once", to really get the meaning across, I need a word that echoes trail blazing over virgin mountains during a blizzard, while suffering from snowblindness and frostbite in eleven toes, or crossing the vast desert plains of the kalahari with only a swiss army knife, a small flagon of dehydrated water to hand and an impromptu overly-friendly "hopping" bird for company, "once" just doesn't seem to cut it) it was easy enough to google gadget-ify it.

..And the problem, well it's not fully transportable - when the scroller has less than 500 pixels to display in, the javascript that drives it still thinks the center is 250 pixels from the left. The width of this blog means the google gadget that contains it can't be wider than 400 pixels - the end result is that to scroll to the right you need to hover much further than right of center than you should.

Obviously my plead-offerings to the gods weren't quite up to par!

If only I knew how to change the javascript to make it right. Hmmm.

I suppose I should say, the advantage of having it gadget-ified is that it is dead easy for friends (and people who find it in the google gadgets directory and who like it enough) to add it to their blog, website etc. See how easu it is yourself, just click the google + button under the scroller to see just how easy it is.

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