Zazzle Blog

Hey everyone – earlier this year, we decided to step back and think about what Zazzle is, and how we could make it better. We listened to a lot of your feedback and talked with a lot of users and customers. Based on what we heard, we set out to make Zazzle easier and more fun to use, and most importantly to better feature and sell the amazing products created by our community of artists and designers. In the process, we embarked on a major redesign of Zazzle that has taken us through thousands of design concepts, numerous focus groups and conversations, and countless hours of coding (touching every page on the site!)

Today, we are thrilled to launch just the beginning of some really exciting changes! Seriously – keep checking back because the best is yet to come

So what’s new today?

We’ve revamped the Zazzle website to be better for buyers who are looking for great products. And better for buyers is of course better for contributors who want to sell products!

With our new overall design (we call it the “Zazzle Skin”), we’ve designed a whole new background and color palette, intended, so that products and designs featured on the site will really *pop* on screen!

Our new site navigation should make it easier to get around Zazzle and immediately find and browse to great products from any of the links in the header. And to jump right in and design great products too! (special tip: click the arrows next to the main words in the header and you’ll get lots of handy quick-links into the site!)

Before we get into the specifics, I want to give a huge shout out to the entire Zazzle Team for making this happen. This has been an extraordinary effort and we’ve hand-touched every single page on the site to make these improvements. Huge kudos to every single person who made a difference here!

Even better, the website should now be a lot faster and smoother to load as we’ve revamped the underlying pages. If you are curious, here’s a great explanation of the technology involved in our redesign!

Now on to the new site:

1) What’s Hot - Browse the latest and greatest products and activity from the Zazzle community

On What’s Hot, we’re featuring the top products from a whole set of categories that are *hot* right now. What’s Hot in any category is based on an analysis of sales and activity on the site. Bookmark this page – you want to check this hourly or daily to see what’s currently at the top of the lists, and get it while it’s hot! And we’ll show you what’s being searched, hot deals, and more!

If you want to have our products featured here, simply make great products. If they are getting lots of sales and activity, you’ll have a good chance of showing up!

Check out What’s Hot

2) Categories - Browse through all content on Zazzle through featured topics and all categories.

Zazzle has soooo many products, that it’s hard to feature all of them at the top. We’ve reorganized our categories and navigation to feature the categories that buyers are most frequently looking for.

Designing products for the featured categories is a great way to get noticed on Zazzle. These will be frequently changing based on what buyers are looking for, hot topics, and the current season. (but note, if you miscategorize products in one of the featured categories, your products may be reclassified or removed)

Start Browsing Categories

3) Participate - Get Involved and make $$ on Zazzle by designing products, entering contests, rating/sharing the freshest products, and more.

The Participate section has been set up to help you more easily get started on Zazzle, and to find and meet other great contributors. On this page, you can check out who’s making money (what products are selling), and rate the newest products to influence what’s hot. See and enter current contests, and learn more about our associate and promotional tools. And most importantly, click through and explore the galleries created by your fellow contributors!

We’ve also made some improvements to your galleries and more with this launch. Click here to learn more about gallery updates!

(and most importantly – keep checking back. In the next two months, there will be some even more exciting news on the gallery front!)

Go to Participate

4) Create - Design and create any of Zazzle’s 350+ products with your own designs, images, and text

As you know, Zazzle has an amazing set of products available for you to design, create, and buy. The “Create” section is your area to learn more about our specific products, and get started designing.

We’ve made a number of improvements to our design tools – Change Image: How many times have you started designing a product, got an image positioned and sized just right, but then decided you wanted a new photo? Now, just click the “change image” button and it’ll work perfectly! Multi-select: You can now select multiple images or multiple text objects and move them, click “change image” / “change text”, and more and affect all the fields at once! Title your design: When you are working on a design and want to remember it, set the title now right on the design tool!

And with our Create-a-Product API, we’ve just launched some great new features to dynamically create products with templates! This is TRULY an amazing feature – click here to learn more about templates.

Go Create Products

5) A whole lot more

Ok, there are just so many more more things to check out. For example, we’ve redesigned and reorganized MyZazzle to make it a lot easier to find your products, your images, and your earnings. Browse around the site and keep on exploring. You’ll find great products you have never seen before, and lots of other small gems. And sadly, you may find a few things missing including one of my favorite features – our “search for contributors”. Don’t worry, these are coming back as fast as we can get them into the new design. Just had to put a couple small things into a temporary pause.

And remember, the best is yet to come !!!!

Have questions or feedback? Discuss in our forums

- Josh Elman

P.S. Thanks to the entire Zazzle Team for all the hard work to bring this to life!

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