Greed

What shocked me the most about selling my designs on Zazzle was the degree of greed by the other designers and the Zazzle staff.

Although Zazzle wants you the buyer to think they are squeaky clean the staff and many of the designers are anything but.

This website is all about Greed. There are designers on Zazzle without a conscience. They either spend their time perusing Zazzle stores looking for new designs to steal or are busy creating items with your stolen designs. These designers are not on Zazzle because they are artists, they are on Zazzle because they are scam artists.

Today's Best

On Zazzle, there are shops of differing sizes. Some shops only have 100 items while others have several hundred thousand items.

Although my store was small and boutique-ish my designs were trendy. By the spring of 2012, I was getting several TBA's a day. TBA's are Today's Best Award.

This is how other designers found my store. This is also how other designers found my designs. This is how I began to lose sales.

After a few months I would do a search of one of my items in the Zazzle marketplace and find Zazzle had gone so far as to create a category for it unto itself.. only my item was not the only one in search, hundreds were..copied.

I would check the other designs that had been copied from my design and they were always created AFTER mine was. None of them were created before my item was designed.

Copycats

If you are a trendsetter like myself, and you want to open a store on Zazzle, get used to having your designs stolen.

I set several trends on Zazzle and the lemmings then proceeded to copy all of my designs. There are 2 kinds of designers on Zazzle.

1. Trendsetters

2. Copy Cats

The trendsetters think for themselves. They are always brainstorming what their next design will be. They design something and within 24 hours the copy cats are copying their design to the last detail.

Copy cats are lazy and don't have a creative bone in their bodies. They don't WANT to brainstorm their next design when all they have to do is copy yours and make bank.

Zazzle Marketplace

After selling on Zazzle for 2 years I know quite a lot of their secrets. Let's start with favoritism.

Ever wonder why you've been selling on Zazzle since forever and your items are not on page 1 of search?

Favoritism.

If you go to Zazzle search and type "iPhone 4 cases" and hit enter, you will most likely find thousands of  iPhone 4 cases. But who determines WHOSE iPhone 4 cases appear on page 1 of search?

Zazzle will tell you it's all about "algorithms". Lies.

It's about their favorite sellers.

I will tell you how I found this out in a later post.

How It All Started

A few years ago I was searching for business cards to buy and the dreaded Zazzle.com appeared on search.

I purchased some business cards from Zazzle, though they were very pricey. Every time you log into Zazzle you are urged to open your own store.

About 6 months later I did open my own store on Zazzle.com only as a means to market my Etsy business. I created a handful of items in the Zazzle shop and logged off without a second thought.

When it was time to order more business cards I went back to Zazzle and when I logged in I noticed I had a sale, one of the items in my Zazzle shop sold. I was pleasantly surprised and thought "Hey why not add a few more things?".

Although I didn't have that many items in my Zazzle store they were of high quality and on the cutting edge of trends...for that reason I had a lot of Zazzle affiliates referring my items.

By fall I had made Zazzle Proseller.