On-Demand T-Shirt Printing Review – Part 5

Zazzle Review – Better late than never, right folks? Well it’s a few days late, but here’s the final part of our 5 part review of On Demand T-Shirt printers. If you missed any of the previous articles, you can get links to them all by clicking here.

Zazzle
www.zazzle.com

I think everyone has heard of Zazzle; they are the Pepsi to Cafepress’ Coke. I can understand why. This site is designed mainly it seems for people who want to create their own product and not so much for sellers, while it is offered.

The link to access the selling side of things is way at the bottom and says ‘Publish Products’. Wow, why not give it a button at the top so people can more easily find it?

Anyway, I would have to say that the Zazzle interface is the most unintuitive of all the interfaces that I’ve used. During one part of the process I thought to myself, “Ok, my design is ready so I can push the little button that was at the bottom to sell the design and I clicked on a button to select the tee type and the button disappeared completely.

I then went to the main page and lost my design only to find it as an unfinished design. Once I went back in, I was able to click the button and get the thing up and running.

I have to say that setting up a shop on Zazzle is only enjoyable if you enjoy pain. And while I like a little roleplay as much as the next guy, the repeated spankings from their interface got a little old. Getting back to the site, they have lots of shirt colors and they also have the ability for folks to add their designs to the site and make money off of them. Not so unique now huh Spreadshirt?

These guys do digital printing only, no flex, flock, or screen printing here. The file formats that they allow for designs are JPGs and PNGs. Once you accept that you’ve been a Baaaad boy and work your way through their interface, you can customize your gallery (note that they do not call it a shop so pain must be a part of the gallery experience).

You have a Comment Wall where people can talk about your designs and you with them. A cool idea, though I’m suprised that the quotes don’t consist of “ZOMGWTF HOW DID U FIGUR OUT HOW 2SETUP UR SITE?”.

Anyway, other features for your gallery include, a fan club which lists people that love your designs (pretty useful actually), 20 different themes or your own custom one, you can decide which side to put your navigation on (in case you’re a lefty that wants to stick it to the man), and much more. While the site seems very social networking-esque, there isn’t much here for serious designers.

Pros

  • Some premium level features that the other guys don’t offer (comment wall and fan club among them)
  • Lots of shirt colors available
  • You can use your own design or someone else’s
  • Designers can make money here
  • I am in ur site social netwrkng wit ur ppls

Cons

  • Holy crap-tacular interfaces batman!
  • Some additional premium shop features would be nice (No Seriously, like an easy way to set one up)
  • Only Digital Printing here though you could make a nice coffee cup for grandma
  • Do I need to bold the first one and increase the font size or what?
Facebooktwitterredditpinterest