POD: Wordans
Yes, another POD review. I am a POD shopkeeper after all, so these things do interest me. The guys from Wordans contacted me to let me know about their site and ask me to do a review. Reviewing a POD is not like reviewing a regular t-shirt store. You really have to get in there and get your hands dirty. You need to play around with all the features and try to figure out how it works. It’s fun but time consuming. Well, I better get down to it then.
Wordans is a fairly new enterprise having opened in October of 2007, if I am correct. I had come across it a few times before but it didn’t make much of an impression on me. I imagine they have made some changes though since I had last looked at it because it is a pretty reasonable POD with lots of potential. By potential, I mean potential for shopkeepers like me to make money.
For the shopper it has an interface more like Spreadshirt than Cafepress or Zazzle. Maybe that is where they drew their inspiration from. First you choose the design and then are give the opportunity to choose the shirt it goes on and you can even choose the print location and add text if you want. They have a neat little product designer to help you do this. Unfortunately though, you can only add one image per design. Also you can’t be sure if your design is centered and the text function is pretty weak. You can’t control spacing between lines or curve the text and there are also a very limited number of fonts to choose from. The good news though, is that they are aware of these issues and hope to resolve some of them soon.
The center option + more fonts should be up next week, and the text placement does need work.
One really good thing about Wordans though is that it looks like you can print almost anywhere on the shirt. Although I imagine because of the limitations of the designer that you might get some unexpected results. The print area looks large too but I don’t know the actual specs. I find that sometimes it just looks large on the screen.
I think they should totally re-organize their front page and perhaps change their strategy too. The front page does a lot to promote their product designer and not enough to promote shopkeepers designs. Whatever the reason for this is, the fact remains that most shoppers are too lazy/nervous/busy to create their own t-shirts. They want something that has already been designed and made and preferably by professionals. Another thing to note is that people are attracted to images first and text later. When you look at Wordans front page it is mostly text. In fact only ten designs are shown above the flow and I have a 21 inch monitor at 1280×1024. Some people may not even see those 10 designs.
If you are a POD shopkeeper or if you are considering starting out in that business you will want to know if it a good place to start and I have to admit that I don’t think it is and for many reasons. One reason is that is slow to even upload your images. It says it takes up to 24 hours but both times I uploaded images it took much longer than that. The last image took 43 hours to become live. It was just one image. I wonder how long it would take if I had uploaded hundreds of images. They do know this is an issue that needs to be looked at though.
The 24 hour validation is a bit long I agree, especially come time the weekend. We are working for a faster turnaround, but we have to validate and clean up all the designs for them to be suitable for production.
Another point to look at is the fact that we are not given an opportunity to add descriptions (read SEO) which added to the fact that they don’t really promote the designers and their designs it will be very difficult for people to actually find your shirts. You could release your designs into the Wordans marketplace and hope for the best but they will only give you $2 every time someone uses it. I wouldn’t waste my time with that. And even if you you were happy to get $2 per item sold I don’t think they have really optimized their marketplace for search engines either. They say they are quickly improving their ranking in Google but I wonder for which search results and how well they convert to sales. I imagine that the shopkeepers stores don’t even rank at Google as apart from the title of the shirts they are almost identical.
I would also worry about scalability. I haven’t uploaded enough designs to worry about it at this point but I don’t see any options for categorizing your products or designs or to search within your own store. We can’t expect our customers to browse through pages and pages of designs in the hope that they might just find what they are looking for. Of course they would have to find the pages first.
In my communications with the guys at Wordans they didn’t really want to be compared with Cafepress, said they were less square. I think they were referring to the fact that can print almost anywhere on the t-shirt but if you look at their site as a whole they are totally square. Their stores can be customized but the core is very strict and very badly arranged. It’s even worse than Zazzle with a lot of space wasted with unnecessary fluff. Take a look at these three Rude Retro stores from Wordans, Zazzle and Cafepress.
http://ruderetro.wordans.com
http://www.zazzle.com/ruderetro
http://www.cafepress.com/ruderetro
You can clearly see that Cafepress offers the most regarding customization and branding of your store. (If you really want to have your own brand store while still using a POD you should definitely check out MyBrand at Printfection.)
I don’t mean to be so negative about Wordans but think of me as an investor who thinks that Wordans would have to improve on many levels for me to risk investing my time and energy. Even though they have very cool features like a designer that you can put right into your website ( see here) and the fact that they will manually try to make all your images t-shirt ready it all comes down to the question of whether I can make more money with Wordans than at my current PODs and the answer is that I don’t think so.
On the other hand I wouldn’t be surpised if great things happened at Wordans very soon and hopefully it will push them up to the level of Cafepres or Zazzle. They talk the talk. Hopefully they will also walk the walk.
We are actually in the process of upgrading our site, and we will bring some great changes that will make this version look primitive.
The Washington Post on Cafepress
Sales of pro-Obama t-shirts have been so great this past year that I guess they even be comparable to sales of anti-Bush t-shirts in the past 8 years or so. It’s good to dwell on positivity though. In Cafepress the Washington Post have a shop where, on top of some pretty crap t-shirts, you can actually get your hands on a newspaper, a Washington Post commemorative newspaper. It is, of course, commemorating Barack Obama’s victorious election campaign.
Commemorative Edition Paper includes front section and election section from the paper published 11/05/08. Be a part of history with this limited edition Washington Post newspaper today.
It costs $9.95 for the paper or you can get a t-shirt with the front page printed on it. I’m guessing that Cafepress don’t actually print the newspaper but just arrange the sale and shipping. It makes me wonder what other non-standard items you can get through these PODs like Cafepress and Zazzle. If you know of any please leave a comment below.
New POD: Ninja Zoo
There seem to be new PODs opening up almost as often as T-Shirt Competition sites these days (slight exaggeration). I think breaking into the POD market will be much tougher though as the service expected from a POD is huge. Zazzle and Cafepress which seem to dominate the market already provide so many features and functions but keep adding more and more at a seemingly accelerated rate.
A few days ago I received an email from a friend of Ninja Zoo saying that it is a better alternative to Zazzle for UK sellers because according to my previous article “uk sellers are still being paid in US Dollars and items are delivered from the US”. (I think Zazzle will pay the UK sellers in Sterling though the items will still be shipped from the US.) So, I thought I better check it out. To be honest I had already come across it and bookmarked it for future mention but this email made be get my skates on.
Ninja Zoo is a pretty small site but it is in beta so I won’t hold that against it. They seem to have only 9 styles of t-shirts with from 2 to 8 colors each. Mostly on the lower end of that range. All except one of the items available to sell in your store are Hanes products. I was going to do a similar test to the one I did with Yerzies but there are so few options with Ninja Zoo that I decided to upload one of my images that I designed to sell on Zazzle. The first thing and perhaps the only thing that really impressed me about Ninja Zoo is the print area. It is huge compared to what Cafepress, Zazzle and probably nearly every other POD has to offer.
The designer itself gives you the option to add text, your own images and, for a fee, images that other users have decided to share. I think the fee will be added to the commission when you put your t-shirt on sale effectively making your t-shirt more expensive, but hey, it’s not your art. The add text function is pretty lame with only 9 fonts to choose from.
I think the fact that you can add other people’s images to products and sell them in your own store adds a new dimension that can’t be seen in other PODs. I think it is risky though as you don’t know if those people really own the rights to those designs and you might unknowingly land yourself in trouble. (I saw people have shared images of Audrey Hepburn and Snoopy.) Also, imagine you build your store around other people’s images and they decide to unshare them (I assume this can be done). I also notice that they recommend charging between 10p and 25p when you share your images because if you charge more other people might not use them but I say if you are only getting 10p or 25p when someone uses your image it is not worth it. I would charge the same commission for the shared design as you would charge for the design on a t-shirt in your store. It is to me the same thing in both cases. You are selling someone the right to print your image on a t-shirt and sell/purchase it.
We would suggest you set your charge between 10p and 25p - if you set your charge too high do not expect anybody to use it!
They have it set up so you can create a store (a type of widget) that you can use to promote your t-shirts on MySpace, Facebook or on your own website. When you click an item on the widget it will take you to the product on the Ninja Zoo website. You can test it below with my Vintage Tokyo design.
Ninja Zoo is a very cute and well finished website but I don’t think it is well designed. They are selling t-shirts but on the front page they are only promoting one artist. It is easy enough to find the marketplace but when you get there it seems so empty that you are not sure you have found it. I guess they are leaving it up to the shopkeepers to promote their own t-shirts and attract their own customers which I don’t think is a great strategy. Ninja Zoo should promote their users work and then create incentives (like Zazzle recently did with the introduction of the Zazzle Incentive Program) for their users to do promotion.
The widget is OK but I don’t think it replaces the need for a store. Savvy shopkeepers do all they can to keep the customers in their own stores by tying to entice them to look at various t-shirts and designs. With this widget you are taken directly to the Ninja Zoo website after clicking. You have a designers area but as I created only four items with one design I don’t really know how it will work for shopkeepers with hundreds or more designs. To conclude, I don’t think this is really an attractive POD compared to the big dogs but there is potential. I recommend that they invest more time in CEO and make their site more intuitive, make it so the visitors can’t help but find the products. That will increase the chance of a sale and if you provide a source of sales shopkeepers will come knocking at your door. I know ninjas move unseen and unheard but they probably don’t sell too many t-shirts.
New POD - Yerzies
The guys at Yerzies contacted me recently to let me know about the launch of this new POD. I love to see some competition as this can create more opportunities for POD shopkeepers like myself. I currently have stores at both Cafepress and Zazzle, two of the POD big dogs. Because of this, when I look at another POD I automatically compare it to them. How does Yerzies compare? Well, I am about to tell you.
Before you consider trying another POD it must offer something that the others don’t and for Yerzies that is the different options with regard to decorating your shirts. Until Zazzle’s recent introduction of embroidery (and Infinistitch by Cafepress) we basically just had a direct printing facility. I’m not complaining about it and I would like to say that all the shirts I received from both PODs (and one from Printfection) were of very good quality. But more choices are better and Yerzies provides more choices.
Print-It
According to Scott from Yerzies they have far superior printing quality compared to other PODs which is something I’d like to judge for myself but I did notice something in the description of their printing process that is worth noting:
Your files must have a transparent background. All white areas will print as white ink.
Now this is something that I think a lot of shopkeepers would be interested in. In both Cafepress and Zazzle you can of course print white on dark t-shirts but you can’t on light t-shirts (with the occasional exception) much to the chagrin of many a t-shirt designer. Of course printing white on a white t-shirt is usually pointless but it can be very effective on light colored t-shirts. Kudos to Yerzies on this point.
Press-It
You can add cool textures to your design like glitters, metallic foils, flock (which has a fuzzy surface), and glow-in-the-dark but at the moment you are restricted to their selection of typefaces and designs available on their site. You can’t upload your own designs as of yet but they say they are working on it. Still, the other PODs don’t have anything like this.
Stitch-It
For even more texture you can add sewn-on felt to your shirts. I think this is very cool but again you are limited to what you can do. In this case you can only use the 10 provided typefaces but you can choose the color of the felt and the stitching.
As a test I tried to create three t-shirts with the same designs using the different processes. The first thing I noticed were the differing prices. The following prices include my quite reasonable 20% markup.
- Printed Tee - from $20
- Flock Tee - from $40
- Felt Tee - from $75
While I do like the felt I don’t think it is worth $55 more than the printed version. The flock tee is not so bad. As you can see below, not all the designs look the same. While adding the flock design (left) I wasn’t able to curve the text. I don’t know if this is a glitch or a limitation. The design in the center is the direct print version in which I used their fonts in their designer. The design on the right is the felt version and it looked much better when I made it as you can see below. Scott told me that this is just a bug and they are hoping to get it fixed soon.
Yerzies also has a layer system which I guess is necessary if you want to take advantage of several of these processes on one shirt. I imagine if you do though the cost would add up pretty quickly.
OK, I have pointed out some of the things that make Yerzies stand out from the crowd. There are some things that need work too.
I think that you should be able to personalise your space more to give it your own branding. You seem to have your own space and the ability to create sections but it just looks like a part of the Yerzies site. It is a little confusing too.
Like Zazzle, the commission is percentage based but I think most POD shopkeepers would like to be able to add a fixed commission depending on the shirt. A percentage based system means the more expensive the shirt is the more money you make. The results are usually that you either get too little for selling the cheaper shirts or you turn away customers with the high prices of your more expensive shirts.
Creating the products with the product designer is painfully slow but once it is on one t-shirt it is on all of them. It is similar to Zazzle’s system and there is also an option to allow your customers to customize the shirts.
There is a built in affiliate program too which is pretty cool and they will pay to PayPal. (Cafepress should take a note here.)
Scott tells me they have a bulk uploading tool in the works to be released soon. Also you can expect them to be “supporting many more product categories, and adding some entirely different production processes - including some that you’ve never seen on other POD sites. We’re just get started, but 2009 should prove to be full of announcements from us“.
I’m glad to see another POD on the scene but I think they really need to make changes in order to attract more shopkeepers. The print, press and stitch options are great but shopkeepers want things to be fast, easy and cheap do these options alone won’t attract them. They also want to be able to brand their own store. Most of all though they want to sell their items and to do that we need a stronger marketplace that presents the items in a more attractive way. Time should improve the power of the marketplace but there definitely seems to be a lack of SEO done. Yerzies are working on some promotional tools though.
It’s really to early to say at this point but I think that unless they make some major changes I don’t really expect this site to take off. I wish them luck though.
Cafepress Revamped
In the last few months there has been a lot of seemingly minor activities happening at Cafepress. I didn’t even guess that they were in the process of redesigning the whole web site but that is what they have done. I think it looks great. The site is clean and easy to navigate. The old site design was very clean too but it had a rigid appearance whereas the new store looks more free. Thankfully, apart from the search bar and the top buttons on the sidebar they have skipped that whole Web 2.0 look that has really started to annoy me and even they were done in such a way as to almost match the new look. A lot of people aren’t so happy with the new logo but I really don’t think it matters. People come for the designs, not the Cafepress label. As long as our designs and items are presented better they should sell better and I think the faded tones and a weak-ass logo (sorry CP) will help the customer focus on the designs.
To celebrate the new look Cafepress has provided us with coupons although you have spend over $50 to avail of the $5 off. There may be other conditions too.
There seems to be a game of one up going on with Zazzle and Cafepress which is good for everybody as far as I can see (with the possibe exception of Zazzle and Cafepress). It should create better conditions for shopkeepers and shoppers alike. Zazzle revamped their image a short while ago too. I wonder what is coming next from the big Z? (See next post.)
Zazzle Community Giving
I came across this when I was adding a new Zazzle coupon in the forum. The coupon was a special coupon for only one store which is interesting in itself but when I went to that store I saw the little logo at the top right of the store. It says Approved Member of the Zazzle Community Giving Program.
I had never heard of such a program but a quick google of it brought me to the Zazzle page which lists the many charities that are selling items through Zazzle. It is great to see that Zazzle is helping out these good causes. Although I have no doubt that they are profiting from the relationship I think it is a win-win situation. It brings more attention to the charities while making money for both themselves and Zazzle. It also allows people to buy some trendy gear while at the same time giving to charity. Make that a win-win-win situation. Head over to get more information.
For Zazzle shopkeepers there is an interesting point to be noted. Zazzle has the ability to provide shops with special coupons that can be used in one shop only. Perhaps shopkeepers will be given the ability to give coupons for our shops at some later point. I think Spreadshirt may already have this facility but I could be wrong.
Talk about crap!
I really don’t think that this is a case of if they didn’t do it someone else would. I mean there is crap and there is crap but this takes the biscuit. Why someone would actually go around photographing what I can only hope is dog poo is a mystery in itself but then to upload the images and sell them as ties on Zazzle is just mind-boggling. Wow! I can’t imagine they will sell but what have they got to lose as it costs nothing to open up a Zazzle store except time.
The store is called Papapats and just uses a generic store front. Most of the ties are titled crappy tie with words (possibly sub-title) like dried, snake and furry1 in brackets. It’s dirty business but someones gotta do it.
Fukuda ASCII T-Shirt
It seems that Japanese PODs are picking up on the fact that there is money to be made in political tees. In Japan the latest Prime Minister has announced his resignation which was no big surprise really and in a press conference he said 「あなたとは違うんです。」 which translates as “I’m different from you.” I guess this statement riled a few people and the video was posted on youtube and the infamous ni-channel where it is said this gun-toting ASCII version of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda appeared first. Then it was quickly snapped up by ClubT to become one of their best selling t-shirts. The t-shirt is pretty cool and the design is available on a selection of items and shirts.
Zazzle Gets More Attractive
Zazzle gets much more attractive with a new volume bonus system. It’s almost hard to believe that just a short while after Cafepress screws their shopkeepers out of chunks of their VB that Zazzle is providing what seems to be a much better one. I never believed that Cafepress’ story about not making money from the marketplace and I this makes be doubt their story even more. If Zazzle can provide this type of volume bonus and still make a profit on marketplace sales then surely so can Cafepress.
To be honest I am not exactly sure how the VB works at Zazzle and it is clearly not as simple as the Cafepress’ system but it does seem to have the potential to be much more rewarding. Here is the info from Zazzle’s website.
New! Zazzle Seller Incentive Program
Increase your profits with volume bonus and referral payouts!
Get serious about selling and make serious money! You get a 15% referral fee on every product sold, even if it’s not your content! And every sale counts toward your next volume bonus, even marketplace sales. See below for the Seller Incentive Program structure.
* All sales count toward the seller’s Volume Bonus, even marketplace sales
* Earn 15% commissions by referring your products and/or others
* Bonuses start at just $100Seller Incentive Program Levels
(calculated monthly)
It is not quite as good as it seems though as you don’t get the the volume bonus if someone else refers your sale. But even that is similar to Cafepress’ previous volume bonus where we didn’t get commission on affiliate sales. That said, this is awesome and it is great for all the existing Zazzle shopkeepers as well as incentive for joining Zazzle.
Another thing that I wondered about when I first saw this (a few minutes ago) was whether we could combine the commissions from multiple stores and the answer is yes.
Yes! Simply choose a gallery to be your “master account”. Then, login to MyZazzle using that account. On the Volume Bonus page link on the Earnings tab in MyZazzle you can specify all the accounts you wish to count towards your volume bonus. Simply enter the account name and password for each account and they will be linked into your master account. This is a great way to get a higher volume bonus level faster!
I can’t find out how to choose a gallery to be my “master account” though.
You can find out more about Zazzle’s bonus system on their website.
Another new thing that I haven’t worked out how to use yet is the ability to make Google feeds for your Zazzle stores. This is also great news and will mean greater exposure for our products.
This is a big move from Zazzle and with the soon (hopefully) to be released bulk tools and tracking ability I’m sure we will see even more Cafepress shopkeepers migrating over to Zazzle. And this is on top of Shoes and skateboards.
Zazzle.com Release Skateboards
Zazzle have added an exciting new product to their lineup. You can now customize your own skateboard. Hell, you can even open up a skateboard shop. There seems to be eight types of boards to choose from in three categories. They sell for around $60. Below is information from the FAQ about the skateboards which will probably be of interest to skateboarders. I don’t really know much about them.
Completes are outfitted with premium components, including Independent Stage 10 trucks and Ricta Natural wheels on most decks. The narrow Mini 7 1/4” and the Old Skool Cruiser are outfitted with Krux 3.0 trucks and softer Ricta Cloud wheels for a smooth ride on any surface. The Old Skool 8 1/2” is also outfitted with Ricta Clouds. All completes are finished with Bullet bearings, grip tape and hardware.
Independent trucks:
Independent introduced its first truck in 1978, called the Stage 1. Thirty years later, the Stage 10 combines Indy’s often imitated legendary fast-action geometry, hollow body hanger, 4140 chrome molly steel axle, and Grade 8 kingpin. The result is a light, perfectly balanced, ultra responsive and durable truck.Ricta Wheels (depending on deck selected):
Naturals: 8% lighter than other so called “lightweight” wheels. Narrow shapes with slightly wider riding surfaces for increased control and durability. Double-sided raised graphics with smooth conicals that won’t interfere with grinds.Clouds: Perfect for cruising. 78A durometer surface urethane and 78 durometer core! Super bouncy and fast, making even the roughest of surfaces feel like smooth warehouse floors. Modern shaped and not too heavy or bulky.
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