Cafepress, Spreadshirt or Zazzle
I often come across people who want to know which POD service to use. It is a difficult question because there are many options. Unfortunately there is no right answer to this question. You could choose one of the big dogs namely Cafepress, Zazzle and Spreadshirt or you could chooose from one of the many smaller or newer POD sites that are available. In part it depends on your aims and what you hope to do.
While I have looked at many PODs, apart from Cafepress and Zazzle, I haven’t really invested time in them. I can recommend these two sites because it is relatively easy to set up shop and get the hang of things. I can’t say that it is easy to make money but money can be made if you make an effort.
I think that the important thing to look at when choosing a POD is how these PODs are going to help you make money. What do they put on the table? One of the most important things is traffic. How many people will actually get to see you products? Of course the more people that see you products the better. From the following graph you can clearly see that Cafepress is by far the most popular site and that Zazzle leads in terms of growth.
Unfortunately we can’t really judge from these statistics which on will drive most traffic to your store. Cafepress has far more stores and far more products than Zazzle so it is only natural that they get more traffic. Your share of the that might be very small though. An equal share of traffic from Zazzle may actually bring you more visitors. Spreadshirt too. Who knows? What we do know though is that growth is good. Cafepress has to grow in size but only slightly in unique visitors whereas Zazzle has seen phenomenal growth in visitors along with its physical growth. Looking at these stats alone, I would bet on Zazzle but there is a lot more to consider when choosing a POD. Hopefully I will be able to help you make your decision in the future.
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I think it would be nice if you would investigate PODs besides the big 3 that we already know about. People are asking you for this info because this is called “POD helper.” So why not help the lesser known PODs to get known and help SKs know what other options are out there. That would be a valuable service to provide and probably up your readership/subscription rate by 1000 percent.
This site is a side project for me as you might notice from the no. of posts. And until I use the other PODs I can’t really give advice about them. At the moment I don’t have time to maintain my own POD shops so even though I have given the heads up about various developments in the “big three” and a few others, I haven’t had the time to act on them myself.
The site is called POD Helper but is about helping the shopkeepers rather than the PODs. They are big boys with marketing teams. They don’t need me. At the moment I think that if you want to make money at a POD you need to stick to the big three so perhaps I am doing what I set out to.
I do see you point though.