TechRevu Review

Zazzle / Cafe Press / POD
Edited by Review
Review by David Em
Cafe Press ISBN/ITEM#: CPDE0930
Date: 31 March 2009

Links: Zazzle Website / Cafe Press Website /

Welcome to the Print On Demand (POD) revolution. POD enables anybody with a keyboard to graft a picture onto single copies of books, posters, mugs, hats, shoes, or almost anything else you can think of. Millions of users are designing billions of products that generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales.

POD turns the traditional production and distribution model on its head for both product designers and the retail stores that market their wares. Since the products are one-offs, there's no upfront investment in a product run and zero inventory to store or keep track of.

And since the companies that produce the products also handle order fulfillment, there are no employees to manage. From a historical perspective of merchandising, this is pretty radical stuff.

A PLETHORA OF PRODUCTS

To see how well the system works in practice, I tested products from the two biggest players in the business, Zazzle and CafePress. There's a lot of overlap between the two companies, however each has its own distinct personality.

There are three ways to interact with Zazzle and CafePress. You can buy products made by others, you can create and purchase your own products, and you can set up a web store to sell your products to the masses.

The two outfits offer some similar customizable items such as mugs, cards, mousepads, and T-shirts, but each has specialized items as well. Zazzle has many innovative selections such as Keds shoes, skateboards, and ties. CafePress offers customizable thongs. The base shirts and mugs you apply your images to are individual to each company. For example, Zazzle mugs can have colored interiors, while Cafe Press's T-shirts are a little more stylish.

SETTING UP SHOP

Both companies let you set up a web store for free, but there are significant differences. Zazzle stores can be customized to an extent, but they retain the essential "Zazzleness" of the main site's look and feel. This includes a disruptive herky-jerky "detail zoom" animation effect that occurs every time your mouse passes over a product. A simple "click to enlarge" button would make for a more fluid interface.

Cafe Press has two store tiers, a free Basic level that's pretty bare bones, and a Premium level that costs five bucks a month. Premium stores are highly customizable and you can operate several of them from the same account. Setting up and updating a store is easier with CafePress Premium than with Zazzle.

With a little work, you can make a CafePress store look like an extension of your own web site, ensuring a seamless user experience. Zazzle stores retain visual links to Zazzle's main site, including their logo. A Valentine's Day special offer with animated hearts might pop up on your order pages, and other people's products appear in "related items" windows. This approach undoubtedly generates more sales for Zazzle, but it also results in your customers being siphoned off to check out your competitors' wares.

DESIGNING STUFF

Both Zazzle's and CafePress's design software leaves much to be desired. Neither system is terribly intuitive. Some things are easy, but others aren't. You can usually get what you want after a bit of poking, but this part of the process can use some streamlining.

CafePress lets you nail down a specific product design better than Zazzle. With Zazzle you have the option of letting other users apply your images to any product (you still get the proceeds from the sale). You can restrict people from doing that, however customers can still change the color, size, and other aspects of your offerings. To most designers, this is anathema.

For example, on Zazzle you can't sell a print of a picture on a specific paper, in a certain size, and with a frame of your choice. Instead, customers choose from many media including multiple art papers, photo papers, and canvases, many size options from a few inches to many feet across, and zillions of frames.

In addition to being potentially at odds with the creator's intentions for a picture, this process can be very confusing to buyers who are confronted with more choices than they know what to do with. CafePress also has this issue, but to a lesser extent.

There are also differences in the degree of optimization available for different products. Zazzle's notecards, for example, let you choose interior colors and text, including the ability to put your name and copyright information on the back. CafePress's notecards don't, a serious omission.

On the other hand, CafePress's software lets you easily edit, organize, rename your products, and do storewide price updates, but with Zazzle you have to start over from scratch when you make adjustments.

QUALITY CONTROL

There is very little information on either site relating to color management, which is crucial in determining how the pictures on your products will turn out. There aren't even Pantone colors to choose from, which would at least guarantee predictable results for flat color areas.

Your safest bet with continous tone color images such as photographs is to stick to the sRGB color profile most consumer LCDs, cameras, and printers use as their native color space. These sorts of controls may be beyond the general public's experience, but any serious designer wanting to use this service should have access to a more professional workflow.

It would be nice if this was a WYSIWYG process, but in my tests it isn't. I tested a photograph I produced in a color-managed environment on several products from both companies, including mugs, cards, T-shirst and prints. The results came out differently on nearly every single product.

THE RESULTS

Zazzle nailed the picture exactly right on a poster, and CafePress did the same on a notecard. In every other case, the results were too dark or too light, or too contrasty or not contrasty enough, or too red or too blue. Whether these sorts of variations from your original picture are acceptable to you is a decision you'll need to make for yourself. Non-continuous tone images such as flat color areas in logos probably have less variance.

I also found image placement issues with CafePress's cards. I ordered two sets of twelve cards. Each set came packaged in a plastic box. I designed the first set to print to the edge of a safety margin, as per CP's instructions, and placed the other inset a little from the edge. In the first set, the image came out cropped more than a quarter-inch, and the crop area was inconsistent from card to card. The top of the image was printed a full quarter inch over the card's fold, and a few of the cards were slightly dinged at the fold. The second set was fine.

Another product I designed was a skateboard from Zazzle. You can choose from a variety of board styles. Getting the design to line up with the board was a little tricky, but the end result came out very well. In any event, you'll want to order samples of your products before putting them up for sale.

MARKETING YOUR WARES

It would be nice if simply setting up a web store translated to instant sales, but with millions of competing storefronts filled with oceans of products, that's not very likely. The signal to noise ratio is simply too high on the main sites to count on any regular business. To get any real sales volume going, you'll need to do your own marketing and promotion.

Both companies let you set keywords in you products' code, so that can potentially bring in some business. The products I created in Zazzle came up instantly on Google. Both companies also encourage you to incorporate your shops into FaceBook and other social networking sites, and provide you with code to insert Flash ads into those potential venues. You can also join an affiliate program to make money selling other people's products in your store, making a commission on each sale.

Most products ship within twenty-four hours, with the exception of specialty items like shoes that must be assembled as well as fabricated abroad. Everything I ordered from CafePress arrived at the same time, while the Zazzle products came in a couple installments. All the items were well packed and labeled. Both companies add their own branding and propaganda in the package, which might or might not matter to you.

CONCLUSIONS

CafePress and Zazzle provide a similar service, but each also offers some distinct advantages over the other. For sheer range of customizable products, Zazzle rules the roost, with everything from skateboards to shoes, plus licensing affiliations with Disney, Looney Tunes, and other branded characters you can use on your own products.

CafePress has the edge in overall user experience for both designers and consumers. It's much easier to design and manage products on CafePress than it is on Zazzle, and you can individualize your shop to represent what you're all about to a much finer degree, from overall look and feel to the final checkout process.

While there are several bumps in the process, Print On Demand represents a true revolution in product design and marketing. There are many paths for the fledgling industry to grow. The day's probably not too far off that we'll be able to take advantage of new advances in 3D printing to produce truly unique products rather than simply printing your images on stock objects.

If you've ever wanted to set up your own store to market products with your designs on them without the hassle of setting up a brick and mortar store, now's the time to join the revolution.

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