Yay for Zazzle

Does anyone remember that I mentioned Zazzle a few weeks ago, and that I had bought some postcards from there ... ? Well, they arrived, it took about a week and a half. So, not very quick shipping, but OK. I got a really good selection, take a look at this:

Cool, huh? The two in the top right corner - the mountain landscape that I've posted here before, ages ago, and the little flower - are my own products. The rest are from other sellers. Now I cannot wait to pull an address on Postcrossing where someone says they're a Jane Austen fan ... !! :-D

But I've already had one major success - see the very colorful hand drawn butterfly in the top left corner? Isn't it fantastic? I love it, it's so cool. Gorgeous. I couldn't wait to send it out. And I was in luck; two days after the cards arrived, I got an address in the Netherlands ... this PXer, Jessica is her name, says on her profile that if you just send her 'a nice colourful' card she'll be happy. So I figured that hey, you want colorful, you'll get colorful ... ! :-) I sent the butterfly, it arrived, and wow, what a response. On Postcrossing.com, you get your own postcard wall, or rather four of them - Received, Sent, Favorites and Popular. (That last one is only visible to you, for some reason.) Here's mine. You can add any card you like to your Favorites wall. It lets other members see what kind of images and styles you like and then they'll maybe send you something similar. I have lots of elephant cards on mine. :-) But where was I ...

Oh yeah, I sent the butterfly card to Amersfoort. Jessica registered it, and three hours later, 21 people had added it to their Favorites. :-o 21, that is through the roof for any of my cards! Before that, my record was 7. I think that's pretty good too. But this one, wow, it went viral, PX style. ;-) Since then even more people have added it, so now it's up to 28. I think that's actually pretty darn good. Not just by my standards but by site standards. Yay me. Or actually, yay Zazzle!

Oh, and to get to the actual point of this post ;-) - the cards are pretty good quality, but I have to say that my initial impression was correct. They are not as good as moo.com postcards. They are smaller, for one thing - moo cards are standard postcard size, Zazzle cards are a little smaller. And the cardstock also isn't the same quality. I'm not sure about the weight, but it's definitely lighter. Ie, thinner paper. So, you get more variety, but less quality. I would still recommend them for the former. But I'll never give up moo. :-)

Need postcards?

Unusual ones that not everybody's got? Then look no further! :-) Check out my brand new Zazzle store! I set it up a week and a half ago, so, pretty brand spanking new. :-) I basically did it to get some of their postcards with my own images on it ... I've received a couple of Zazzle postcards through Swap-Bot and they're pretty good quality. I can't say that they're quite up there with moo.com ... the paper they use is of a lighter weight. moo's got the most solid postcards I've ever seen - a cut above even what I buy in stores here, in fact. But Zazzle's got the one feature that I really miss at moo - you design and/or order just one card at a time, so that you can add descriptive info to the back of each card, unique to that image. At moo you have to get either 20 or 60, and although the images can all be different, the text on the back (if any) has to be identical. You know ... they have to all say, for instance, Ireland 2010. You can't have one saying The Dublin Spire, Dublin city center, Ireland 2010 and another Wildflower at the Burren, Co. Clare, Ireland 2010 ... or whatever. It all has to be the same, so unless you use all identical images as well, you can't get image-specific text. But you can get that at Zazzle ... so I decided that I just had to try it.

Another difference between Zazzle and moo is that the latter is 'just' a printing service - although they do have a good range of ready-made items too, where you don't need to have your own images - while the former is an online store as well, where you can both purchase other people's work in addition to selling your own. And of course you can buy your own work too. Just upload the image and make a product. Your products can be set to private so that other users can't see and buy them, of course. But I figured that if my photos are good enough for someone else to want as postcards or stickers or whatever, then why the hell not? It's worth a shot. :-)

And, ooh, get this, it works! I made my first sale today. :-o Someone bought one of my postcards!! That's actually pretty crazy. But also pretty cool. :-) It's impossible to tell who bought it, unfortunately - I'd love to thank that person! :-D - but someone out there did in fact buy a postcard made from a photo I've taken. And I made $0.12. :-D Hey, you gotta start somewhere. I've got, let's see, 23 different postcards in the store, as well as a few other items, and I think all the photos are good, but I wasn't at all surprised to see that this one was my first sale. :-)

So, where was I ... Yeah, I sold the postcard, and IMMD. :-) I'm waiting with bated breath for my own first order from there to arrive. Yeah, I've never bought anything from Zazzle until a few days ago, after I set up my store ... so I can only judge the quality of their products from what I've gotten in swaps, but now I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of 12 super cool postcards with designs I could never find in stores. I'll let you know if the quality lives up to my expectations. :-) And please let me know what you think of my store. :-)