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Hello! Everyone and thank you for tuning in the Inside Geek Canada. My name is Evan Thies and today is a website feature, and we are taking a look at a website called zazzle.com that's zazzle.com. Zazzle basically allows you to buy and sell custom merchandise online.
Now I recently just order some stuff for Inside Geek there, and I am going to open a shop on the Inside Geek Canada website as well that will have other zazzle products, but that's going to be another video entirely but I have ordered from them, and they do have some really quality stuff.
I just want to take a look at the site and I'll show you some of the cool designs they have, created by the people that use the website. Let's go and take a look and I'll give you a basic tour of the website.
Okay, we are on the Zazzle homepage right now, and here you can just, kind of, browse around and buy a bunch of different designs. Of course, right now, there is the political designs because the election is coming up in the states. And you can just scroll down here and see different things you have to offer. One of the main pages is the buy page and this is basically reckoned by all the custom designs that you want. So you can scroll down here and they have a different selection of things you can buy.
Now, if you just want to go to politics right now, you can buy different Obama T-Shirts, different McCain's or Palin, whatever you might want to get, you can just order these, and they are custom, and they come on the T-shirt, and then, you can customize all these. In short, there is customizer here, you can actually, basically change the way the t-shirt is designed.
Next page is the create page which is basically where you go to create all your customer merchandise which is probably what you are going to go this site mainly for is to create your own custom stuff. They may have a ton of stuff. They have shirts, skateboard, shoes, mugs, ties, hats, mouse pads, whatever you want.
So just scoop the interesting one here and it says create a mug. You will get a dialog box that looks like this. Basically, you can select the image you want, and you can just click cancel if you don't want an image, and you can add text, add different designs wherever you want. You can also add different mug options. So if you wanted to get different styles of the mug, you can even get really big fancy ones with logo or whatever words just be displayed on that. You can just have, maybe there is a catch phrase you say, or a catch phrase you like, or just some text that has inspired you in your life, you can put it right on here, and they will make it for you. And here is the price down here, and it's pretty reasonable, and that does not include shipping, and that's basically where it comes to the sale page because when you create items, you don't need to have them being just private, meaning you can just order some custom item and bring it to your house, wherever or you can actually sell them on the service and they will be displayed in the service as well. You can aggregate them, bring into your own website.
In this way, I planted you friends, a Geek iPod. I am going to put some products on here, upload them, get some myself for my own sake of course. And then after that, I am going to put them on my own store on the website so people can buy it. And here they give you all kinds of tools that you might need to design and build the store or assess different feeds, kind of thing, APIs, whatever you might want to do different blogs, galleries. You can basically setup zazzle to figure your needs which is really great. And best of this, you can actually earn commissions and you can set your own commissions whether that will be 10%, 20% because you don't want to go too high because no one is going to really buy the product then because the cost is too high. But you basically set the percentage you want to get paid.
The next page is community. Community is basically where you come to participate the contests, provide your stuff or the forms. I will generally just check out what the rest of the people on the website are currently doing. So just a fun site to play around with.
There is a couple of things that I recommend though is look at their guidelines for uploading images to be printed on these shirts, and shoes, and mugs, or whatever, because you don't want to just be uploading a graphic from the web that might be 72 dpi because that's designed for screen viewing, so you don't want to just copy an image from the web because it is good chance, by the time it gets to you on the shirt, or mug, or whatever, it will be really pixelated. What you want is, I would say a minimum of 200 dpi, probably best would be 300 dpi and quite a large image, and upload that, and then bring that in. That can be I think a JPEG or a PNG, they said. And that way, you want to actually printout these items, they will have decent resolution, decent color.
Also, I would recommend using CMYK, although they probably do accept all things like RGB, but CMYK is designed for printing as well as 300 dpi and that should give you a get a quality crisp image. That way if people are buying your products too they are not going to get some pixelated image that really disappoints them in the quality of the product.
So overall, that was a quick look at zazzle.com.
We just took a look at zazzle.com, where you can go there to buy and sell custom merchandise and it's just a cool website to try. Prices are reasonable. Shipping is reasonable. And they make good quality merchandise, so it's fun site. If you have any another website so that I should demo or show-on the website feature, you can email at evan@insidegeek.ca or you can take general tech questions as well, and thanks for taking the time to watch this video and we'll see you online.
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