Cafepress vs Printfection vs Zazzle Part 3

This is my third article comparing the relative success I am having with these three Print on Demand companies. If you would like to read the others first, they are:
Cafepress vs Printfection vs Zazzle
Cafepress vs Printfection vs Zazzle Part 2

Today being January 1, I'd like to look back at my December sales with each store to see how they performed.

At Cafepress I have 4 premium stores: ottoblotto, Soup to Nuts, The Happy Nest Site, and Biblical T Shirts. My 13 year old daughter also has a store: Bird Geek.

Here are my results by store. In ottoblotto I sold items from the following designs:
Obsessive Chihuahua Disorder
Pool Boy
It's My Mother's Fault
Obsessive Catfish Disorder
Unsocialized Homeschoolers Bumper Sticker
I Love My Bouvier des Flandres
Token Straight Friend
My Heart is in Forks
I Love My Irish Wolfhound
Ask Me About My Pink Slip
I Love My Alpine Goats

In Soup to Nuts I sold items from the following designs: I Love My Nigerian Dwarf Goats
I Love My Brussels Griffon

In The Happy Nest Site I sold items from the following designs:
My Quaker Parrot Ate My Homework
My Chickens Ate My Homework
Obsessive Cockatiel Disorder
Toucans Rule
Macaws Rule

In Biblical T Shirts I sold items from the following designs:
1 John 14:6
Proverbs 27:17
Psalm 139:14
Groovy Christian Chick
John 3:16 Albanian
John 3:16 Maori
John 3:16 Portuguese

In Bird Geek my daughter sold items from the following designs:
I Smell Popcorn [I wish she'd sold more]

Several designs sold multiple items. I sold 9 items from the Obsessive Chihuahua Disorder design. It was certainly the best month I've ever had, but is it enough to call a living? Hardly. All that represents an income of $217.76 [at premium price level] less the monthly shop fees for 5 shops.

I have 3 shops with Zazzle: Live Simply, Biblical T Shirts, and ottoblotto. December saw my first sales at Zazzle. Here's how Zazzle shakes down.
In Live Simply I sold items from the following designs:
Obsessive Coonhound Disorder
Obsessive Cockatiel Disorder

In Biblical T Shirts I sold items from the following designs:
John 3:16 Swedish
John 3:16 Haitian Creole
John 3:16 Slovak

In ottoblotto I made no sales.

That gives me a combined earning from Zazzle of $13.13. Wow.

I have 3 shops with Printfection: ottoblotto, Biblical T Shirts, and Birds of Paradise.
I have yet to make a sale with Printfection.

One thing you might notice about all the designs that sold: they contain no art. They are just words. I have had a huge number of my Library People on Cafepress along with other art. It just doesn't sell. So if you are looking to make money, you might take these results into consideration.

You might also see that pets, be it birds or dogs or chickens or goats, are likely your biggest sellers.

Another thing I've found is that with my Biblical designs, it is mostly the non-English designs that sell. Also, Christmas being a Christian holiday, one might think there would be more sales of Christian designs, but apparently not.

I use a variety of ways to advertise my stores including my email signature, blogs, articles, and telling everyone I know. Still, not one single sale this month came from any of those efforts, despite numerous people telling me they would be shopping this Christmas in my shops. All my sales came directly from the marketplace. Another thing to take into account.

I hope these articles are helpful to you if you are currently working in POD, or thinking of getting started with a POD company. If you have experience here that can be helpful to us, please comment.

Cafepress vs Printfection vs Zazzle Part 2

OK, for those of you who are in POD, or are considering getting started in POD, this is another in a series of random observations regarding the online POD opportunities.

November is over. We find out today that we are in an official recession, and have been for a whole year now. Duh. I certainly didn't need a committee to tell me that. However, November's sales were somehow promising, if only temporarily. Here's how it racks up.

On Cafepress, I made sales of items in the following designs:
Psalm 139:14
Don't Make Me Break Out in Tourette's
John 3:16 Czech
Guitar Boy
Unsocialized Homeschool Children on Board
I Love My Norwegian Elkhound
I Love My Flock
We are Unsocialized
Obsessive Cockatiel Disorder
Obsessive Catfish Disorder
I Love My Toy Manchester Terrier
I Love My Nubian Goats
Tasmanian Devil in Tutu
John 3:16 Hungarian
I Love My Alpine Goats
Obsessive Chihuahua Disorder

OK, that's not great, but considerably better than any month in recent memory.

On Zazzle, I made sales of items in the following designs:
None. No sales.

And on Printfection?
Zero. Nada. Zip.

Interesting. I checked what was going on between the three websites over on Google Trends. Here is the result.

The blue line represents search volume for Cafepress, and the yellow line represents Zazzle. Printfection's numbers are so small, they don't even make it to the chart.

Of course, you could make the case that since I have more designs on Cafepress, that accounts for much of the discrepancy. However, I don't have that many more designs on Cafepress, and Zazzle and Printfection offer a number of items not available on Cafepress.

All of this suggests that, although galleries are free on Zazzle and Printfection, you may get exactly what you pay for. We'll see how December stacks up.

See Cafepress vs Printfection vs Zazzle
See Cafepress vs Printfection vs Zazzle Part 3

Cafepress vs Printfection vs Zazzle

Print On Demand Companies. Is this a great idea or not?

I have had a Cafepress shop for a few years. In those few years, I have managed to sell enough to actually cover my shop fees a few times, and once, last Christmas, I actually earned enough to receive a $28 check. So as a way to make a living, it hasn't exactly happened.

The Cafepress site says that they have shop owners who make 6 figure incomes from this stuff. I have tried to figure it out. I believe it is a numbers game. If you have 2 million products out there, you're bound to sell something, right? Another aspect of making Cafepress, or any of these sites work, is to write A LOT of keyword rich copy so the pages get indexed by the major search engines. This is the most boring part of it. Having to come up with all this copy can really stress one's imagination. Quite frankly, I hope no one reads all this stuff.

If you compare the three sites on Google Trends you will see that Cafepress is getting the most traffic, followed by Zazzle, and then Printfection. However, Printfection and Zazzle are showing increases in search volume while Cafepress is decreasing somewhat.

It seems to me that Cafepress has so many designs on it that it is hard to get seen just in their Marketplace. It's pretty much the same on Printfection and Zazzle. I somehow doubt many people search beyond the first 5 or 6 pages of designs, so your only options are to write obnoxiously keyword saturated copy for your designs so they will appear in natural search, or heavily promote your shops via blogs and outside websites.

I have had my shops on Printfection for a couple of weeks now, and opened a shop on Zazzle a couple of days ago. From examining my stats, I can conclude one of two things; either:

A. No one is going to these sites
or
B. My designs suck.

Of course, hardly anyone has visited my Cafepress sites either, despite the use of Google Adwords [a topic for another day]. So it might be option B.

I have 2 shops that have Biblical designs; Biblical T Shirts on Cafepress and Biblical T Shirts on Printfection. Half of my sales on Cafepress in the last 3 months came from the Biblical T Shirts shop there, and the other half came from the ottoblotto shop. The Printfection shops have had no sales.

My ottoblotto shop has a number of the items I have shown here on my blog, including numerous Library drawings.

I also have 2 shops that feature bird designs, Happy Nest Site on Cafepress and Birds of Paradise on Printfection. I have made only one sale on Cafepress from the site there, and nothing from Printfection. I am working on the creative copy stuff.

The good thing about Printfection and Zazzle is that their shops don't cost anything to have. You can upload a bazillion things there, and if nothing sells, you aren't out anything but your time. It only costs like $6 per month per premium shop on Cafepress, but you can only have 500 sections per shop. Of course, it will take you awhile to fill that up. Apparently, there are no limits with Printfection and Zazzle.

All these companies offer similar items for you to customize to your heart's content, and each offers a few unique items as well. Cafepress offers Print on Demand books, Printfection has glass cutting boards, and on Zazzle you can get skateboards and tennis shoes. All of which is time consuming. So maybe it will work out eventually, but I'm not holding my breath.

I have made an order from Cafepress. I can't say I was wowed by it. The printing was good, but the colors were not as vivid as they were on my monitor, specifically the aqua. I thought the printing on black was pretty good, though. I haven't tried Printfection or Zazzle yet. When I sell something and have some cash built up, I'll probably give them a try, too.

Maybe I'll be there next year...

See Cafepress vs Printfection vs Zazzle Part 2