This post will show you how to Start a Successfull E-Commerce Store in 2 days.
Like most people, you’ve likely thought that you also want to make money online. Yet, you don’t know how to get started.
There’s been a tremendous increase in e-com stores during Covid-19. You probably even know somebody who’s selling something online by now.
In this post, we will be using the knowledge from Chris Jankowski. He’s been selling on Zazzle for more than 3 years and have figured out how it works.
After reading this post you can start your own store. You can even do it while you’re reading.
Let’s get started!
Who’s Chris?
Chris started working with Zazzle in 2017 because he was looking for a side-income. He had no clue what Zazzle was or how to start a successfull e-commerce store. He found a story about Elke Clarke who was crushing it on Zazzle, it made him interested.
He decided to try it out.
He made a couple of mistakes but managed to fix them in a matter of weeks and after 5 weeks he got his first sale. The first sale was a simple T-shirt with a 4-leaf clover on it. Nothing fancy, but it got the job done!
So, what mistakes did he do?
For you to understand why his mistakes were big mistakes, what prolonged the first sale for weeks. I need to tell you how Zazzle works.
What is Zazzle?
Zazzle is a Print on Demand Company.
Zazzle allows you to design whatever you like and have it printed on different products. Zazzle takes care of all the inventory and the printing. The only thing you have to do is create or choose the designs/images and place them into their virtual marketplace.
You can put these designs on anything. Some popular products are:
- Facemasks
- Hand sanitizer bottles
- Backpacks
- T-shirts
- Hats
- Stickers
- Cards (Chris is selling wedding invitations)
- Mugs
- Pillows
- And much much more
It sounds very easy, and it is! The part that takes some knowledge is how to get your designs to reach out to the customers.
How to make money with Zazzle
There’s two ways to make money on Zazzle.
- Sell your own products
- Sell other peoples products
To make money from other people’s products is a typical affiliate type of thing. You promote it and if someone buys from your links, you make money. On Zazzle you get 15% of the profits for affiliate sales. That means that you can make money with Zazzle without a store.
There’s a little more to it if you want to sell your own designs. We need to break it down from the beginning. First you need to have a store.
How to set up a store
Your store needs:
- A picture to use in profile, a logo or something else that’s professional
- A banner image. That’s the big picture on top
- Tagline, somthing people will remember
- A text about the store, what it does for buyers
- Tags, to find the store
- Link to possible website
- A “location”
Then, when you’ve uploaded products. You put them into collections and categories to help customers navigate better. This is an important step.
How do I Design products?
It depends what you want to do.
If you would like to make a design by yourself, you can create that in any way you want. Most designers use InDesign or Photoshop.
I’d recommend using Canva if you don’t know how to use ID or PS.
Canva is easy to use and they have a tutorial on site.
If you need any photos you can use stock photos.
Click here for a list of websites that have stock photos
Read the terms and conditions on the websites to make sure you’re allowed to use the pictures how you want to.
You can also edit a bit inside Zazzle if you want to. But I’d still recommend using Canva because it’s more user-friendly.
Make a lot of different designs.
Remember that Picasso painted more than 13 500 paintings in his life but only 48 are worth more than $2 million. That means you shouldn’t only focus on high quality, you also need quantity.
After a while you’ll know what designs are the winners, and you’ll focus on that. More on that later!
You must also make your designs editable. That means that the buyer can change things they don’t like about your design.
Chris made the mistake of not doing this and it resulted in a few lost sales early on.
Making the products noticed (TTD)
You should write good
- Titles
- Tags
- Descriptions
You need people to find the product. If they don’t, you won’t sell anything. Find what keywords to focus on for your specific product and you’ll make plenty of sales. Remember to niche down as much as possible!
This is one of the things that Chris failed to do, and it ended up costing him several weeks of not getting any sales.
Can you make money with Zazzle?
That’s all up to you and how much time you’re willing to put in.
Zazzle has different levels of designers with different bonuses on them. You level higher the more you sell.
- $100 – Basic
- $1000 – Bronze
- $25 000 – Silver
- $100 000 – Gold
- $250 000 – Platinum
- $500 000 – Diamond
Right now, Chis is closing in on the Gold level. In 2019 he made an average of $314,12/month, up 120% from $145,75 in 2018. What 2020 will bring is too soon to say but since he’s main product is wedding invitations, it will likely be down a bit.
If that doesn’t sound like much, we can compare it to the time he spends on Zazzle.
On average he spends 2 hours per month working with Zazzle. All he does is look what is selling good and adds more like it. That’s it.
You can of course find those who work only with Zazzle and make far more. Like Elke Clarke from above. She has sold more than $15 million worth of products on Zazzle.
After a couple of months you’ll have enough data to see what products are selling and what products are being rejected. This will tell you that you should focus more on the products that are selling. There’s a problem with the products that’s not selling. With enough data you’ll know if it is fixable or if the design is bad.
More from Chris
Best advice
My best advice when starting a store is to not give up. I see way too many people start a Zazzle store and assume it’s a get rich quick type of deal. It’s going to take consistent effort and design creation to build up your store.
I see far too many people quit because they haven’t made a sale in their first 3 weeks. It takes time for the products to settle into the Zazzle marketplace and for people to find your items.
What have you learned?
I’ve learned that making that first $1 online changes your mindset going forward.
My first Zazzle sale was for like 47 cents or something like that. It was a t shirt with a 4-leaf clover on it. Very simple. My royalty setting was 5% so it didn’t yield me much in my pocket. But it showed me that online income is possible.
For a dude who has no design experience to be selling wedding invitations and t shirts online, that’s huge.
Why are you spending so little time on Zazzle?
When I asked Chris this question, I got an answer that was unusual but very important. Doing this will likely make him worry a lot less:
I don’t give Zazzle as much time as I have in the past. Reason being that I am trying to expand other side hustles currently. Zazzle is on autopilot with sales.
I spend 1-5 hours per month. Average is probably 2 hours. When I do work on it, I’m adding new designs and new fonts and templates to my best-selling product.
For example: I sold this shirt overnight.
If I see that it continues to sell regularly, I’ll expand on it some way that will (hopefully) sell more down the road
I can definitely do more with Zazzle.
I’ve already created one, now essentially passive income stream. I’m going to work on creating more income streams to diversity.
Final Words
You’ve now seen the whole landing strip and gotten familiarized with most of the steps. With the information found in this post you could easily start your own Zazzle store. Not only start it but you’d do better than most others because you have seen the view from above.
However…
To be able to land the aircraft successfully, you need a bit more than to see the landing strip. You need to know how to maneuver the aircraft.
- Which settings to use
- How to maximize profits
- What royalty to choose
- How to find the best tags
- How to decide what print to use
- Being connected to a group of creators
- And a lot more!
Now that you have come this far, you are clearly interested in creating your own Zazzle store. Here’s your options now:
- Do nothing and believe you’re going to come back to this later, which you never will
- Learn all Chris secrets that didn’t get revealed here by taking the Ultimate Zazzle Designer’s Course. FREE of risk as it comes with a 100% money back guarantee! (We have completetd the course and stand behind it fully) Click Here!
- Pay $1997 to learn from Elke & Jen Clarke without money back guarantee here (Click Here!)
All Clickable Links:
Canva
The Ultimate Zazzle Designer’s Course
Elke & Jen Clarke
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Read The intro page in The Ultimate Zazzle Designer’s Course Below
