Zazzle vs Cafepress - a Whole New Ballgame

I've written a lot about Cafepress and Zazzle in the past. Up to this point, Cafepress has certainly been the more profitable choice in Print-on-Demand, but that may be changing.

About a year ago, I began branching out from Cafepress into Zazzle and Printfection. [Print-who? Exactly.] Not long ago, I closed my Printfection shops, as they were doing nothing; not one sale. But Zazzle, on the other hand, is really rising in the ranks of POD companies.

Let's look at Google Trends. Here, the blue line represents Cafepress, and the red line represents Zazzle, and the span of this graphic is the last 12 months. Gradually, Zazzle is being searched more than Cafepress. Interesting.

Cafepress recently went through some major changes that left a number of its shop owners with their panties in a wad. They decided to make all prices throughout their Marketplace uniform, although the prices people had set in their shops would remain the same. There was much talk on discussion boards around the internet that people were going to close their shops on Cafepress and run over to Zazzle.

Why?

POD is passive income, which means that you set it up, but it doesn't require any further affort on your part to make it make money, so if you were making money on Cafepress, why would you want to mess that up? In this economy, I'll take what I can get.

Zazzle, however, is beginning to make sales for me, which is great. Not a lot of sales, but I hope it, like the rest of the economy, will begin to improve. And Zazzle has one really big advantage over Cafepress: the shops are FREE. That's huge, since I am counting every dime these days.

I've started re-vamping my existing Zazzle shops to make them easier to navigate, since I didn't really grasp that too well the first time around; the whole sections and subsections thing is a little confusing. Plus, I've added some new, tightly focused shops, which I couldn't afford to do on Cafepress because it would cost too much while waiting for the designs to get better ranked.

I opened Zodiac Attack on Zazzle. It carries only Zodiac themed designs, but there are beginning to be a fair number to choose from.

I opened Sun and Shadows on Zazzle. It currently has only sun themed designs in it, but I'll branch out from that eventually.

Last night I opened A Total Flake on Zazzle, which has winter themed designs. It isn't likely to be real popular here in June, but I hope to have it fully stocked by the time fall arrives.

My other Zazzle shops include the new Birds of Paradise, along with Biblical T Shirts, ottoblotto, and Live Simply, which is going through a major overhaul right now. Will they come out making more money then Cafepress? It will be interesting to see.