Apparently Zazzle are having deals for the 12 days of Christmas and they have announced their first deal today. 50% of the net greeting card, note card, photo card, and invitation sale price will be deducted when 10 or more of a single product type is purchased and the coupon code 12DEALSCARDS is applied at checkout. The net sale price is the price of the product (excluding shipping and taxes). If a volume discount applies to your order, you will receive either the discount set forth in this offer or the standard volume discount, whichever is greater. Offer is valid from December 3, 2009 at 12:01am PT through December 6, 2009 at 11:59pm PT. This offer does not apply to past purchases and may not be combined with any other Zazzle promotional or volume discount offers. Offer valid on Zazzle.com only.
Just got an email from Zazzle telling me that there is still a sale going on for people who missed the Black Friday sale. Same deals but with different coupon code. Check the previous post about Zazzle’s Black Friday sale for details of the great savings on offer.
Use this promo code to get these great savings:
MISSEDFRIDAY
Retro Yo-Yo t-shirt from Rude Retro at Zazzle
Zazzle are starting their Black Friday Sale early so if you are a Zazzle shopkeeper now is the time to let all your customers and potential customers know. Post about it in your blog with details about the sale and examples from your store and then use Twitter to tell your followers about your blog post and how they have save a lot of money if they shop today.
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Use this promo code to get these great savings:
ZAZZLEFRIDAY
The Avery & Zazzle Photo Album Design Contest is over and the winner is KrispysKingdom who will be receiving a check for $2,000 for the 1st place entry Family Tree Photo Binder! You can see the winning binder below and as you can see it is a very creative work of art that allows customers to customize it to their hearts content.
Family Tree Photo Binder by KrispysKingdom
As far as I know, this contest was only open to legal residents of United States or the District of Columbia which is pretty slack as I have just noticed that Zazzle have opened French, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian and New Zealand versions of their site on top of the already existing US, UK, Canad, Australian and Germany sites. Also I noticed a recent contest at Cafepress that allowed users from several countries to participate. (Not Japan, where I live, though.) It’s time to step up to the plate Zazzle.
In the previous post I mentioned about my fear of Zazzle taxing international shopkeepers 30% which would hurt. Well, it seems that this may not be the case although I am not really sure either way at this stage because I only have rumors and second-hand information such as this email that was posted in the Zazzle forums.
Hello Zazzler,
Thanks for contacting our support team. Yes, we are asking that all of our contributors follow the directions in the previously sent email and fill out the information requested. We are not applying taxes or fees, we are simply required to keep track of this information and report it to the IRS.
Please follow the instructions in the email and respond accordingly.
Thank you for your cooperation and we appreciate your patience.
For frequently asked questions, or to email us, please visit www.zazzle.com/support?CMPN=cs.
Best Regards,
Matt L
a
I received this email from Zazzle this morning:
Hello International Zazzle Seller,
We recently reviewed our records and have determined that your account is now subject to reporting to the United States Internal Revenue Service. In order to receive all pending and future Zazzle earnings, you must complete IRS Form W8-BEN, and return it to us.
Download the W8-BEN and support documents here:
Instructions: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/iw8ben.pdf
Form: http://www.irs.ustreas.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8ben.pdf
Once complete, please send the signed form back to us via email, FAX or US Mail.
Email: zazzle-w8@zazzle.com
FAX: 1-650-362-2199
Company Address: Zazzle.com, Inc. 1900 Seaport Blvd
4th Floor
Redwood City, CA 94063Thanks for your cooperation.
- The Zazzle Team
I am not really sure about the details yet or how it works but it doesn’t look good. In the first form that they sent it says
Foreign persons are subject to U.S. tax at a 30% rate on income they receive from U.S. sources that consists of:
• Interest (including certain original issue discount (OID). (OID));
• Dividends;
• Rents;
• Royalties;
• Premiums;
• Annuities;
• Compensation for, or in expectation of, services performed;
• Substitute payments in a securities lending transaction;
or
• Other fixed or determinable annual or periodical gains, profits, or income.
Again I am not sure but I guess Zazzle shopkeepers are in the Royalties category.
As a confirmation of what Printfection told us about yesterday I received a letter from Google about my Zazzle feeds. Other people received them about their Cafepress and other POD feeds.
Hello,
We’re happy to let you know that as of September 3rd, individual sellers on marketplaces no longer need to submit feeds to Google Product Search. Going forward, marketplaces will be responsible for submitting a feed of all their sellers’ items, so we will be retiring your account to avoid duplicate entries on Product Search. Zazzle will also be responsible for ensuring that your feeds are up-to-date and compliant with our policies.
In most cases, marketplaces already submit feeds of their sellers’ items. If you have any further questions about your items or Google Product Search, please contact Zazzle. We look forward to continuing to display your products, and hope you enjoy the new streamlined submission process.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Base product or account.
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
I love the way it says they are happy to tell us, like it’s good news, when in fact most POD shopkeepers and even the PODs themselves will lose out because of this.
Google Product Feed is no more for POD shopkeepers
Printfection made this announcement a few days ago but of course it is relevant to all POD sites as far as I can see.
We were notified by Google today of changes Google is implementing to their Google Base/ Google Product service. Starting tomorrow, September 3, 2009 Google’s new policy will no longer allow non-domain owners to submit products to Google Base on behalf of the domain. This means you cannot submit products to Google Base with www.printfection.com in the URL as you are not the “domain owner” for printfection.com. Furthermore, any products with www.printfection.com URLs you have submitted to Google Base in the past will be removed from Google Base shortly.
Going forward, all products will have to be submitted directly from Printfection, from a single Printfection-Owned Google Base account. Please be patient while we work on a new solution to submit your designs and products to Google Base.
To be honest, because I have been so busy I haven’t been uploading my feeds to Google base recently anyway but this will be a further blow to many shopkeepers, especially Cafepress shopkeepers who are fervently trying to compete with Cafepress itself for sale of their items. It’s hard enough to compete with CP anyway because they have the resources (paid for with our sweat) but this development doesn’t help at all.
In the case of Cafepress, there might be a workaround though. If you have set up a domain with cpshop you may be able to create a feed using that website. I think I have heard of it being done but I haven’t done it myself. If I get time to figure it out I will certainly post about it here. And of course you could opt out of the Cafepress marketplace. I haven’t done that either. When I get more time I will see how to proceed.
It’s been a long time since my last post here. Sorry about that guys. It’s not that there hasn’t been stuff going on in the POD universe. Quite the contrary actually but I just haven’t had the time.
Statcounter now at Zazzle
Anyway there has just been an announcement at Zazzle about some new features and these are two features that people have been really hoping for for a long time. The one that excites me most is the ability to use Statcounter at Zazzle. Zazzle already had a system in place for Google Analytics but that is really for the big boys with thousands or at least hundreds of unique visitors a day. Statcounter is ideal for the small shopkeeper and lets you analyze you traffic in detail. Thanks Zazzle!
We also added StatCounter support to your Store basic info page, the ability to upload PDF and Adobe Illustrator file formats for use on products, and made improvements to the Payment Settings and Preview Next Payment pages.
Categories is another great addition to the Zazzle shopkeeper toolbox. They make it easier for our customers to find what they are looking for because they can browse by design and it also allows us to do improve our SEO. I think there is a bug at the moment wher if you click on the new category icon it takes you to the category but doesn’t show you the category text but if you select the category from the sidebar it does. Perhaps this is a feature rather than a bug? Anyway another good move Zazzle. Thanks.
As an aside I’d like to take a dig at Cafepress. There was a time when Zazzle and Cafepress were competing to add features for us shopkeepers, things that would make us happier and richer but these days Cafepress is just getting worse and worse. Now it seems that every time Zazzle adds a cool new feature Cafepress finds another way to screw us out of money.
A short while ago Zazzle made a blog post about this new widget that they created. You can place it on your blog or website to keep your readers up to date about activity on Zazzle’s blog and Twitter account. But why would you want to do that? Save the space for promoting your Zazzle store rather than promoting Zazzle’s blog and Twitter. In fact I had to stop following them on Twitter because of all the irrelevant garbage that was coming through and if I, a Zazzle shopkeeper, find it irrelevant you can imagine that your readers will also find it irrelevant.
Zazzle, please spend your time building something that we can use to grow our business.