Printing Online: Customizing Merchandise With Web 2.0

Promoting your business isn’t easy, but as anyone that has walked a convention hall or two knows, the difference between remembering a company and not is sometimes that promotional item you pull out when you’re home. But how do you create customized products without spending a fortune?

The once costly and complicated printing process has been made easier than ever with web 2.0. Web applications such as CafePress, Zazzle, VistaPrint, and SpreadShirt have taken away the high volume, minimum order and graphic requirements to bring printing to you, on nearly anything you can imagine. T-shirts, caps, mugs, calendars, shopping bags, magnets, and corporate gifts such as pens and notepads are more accessible than ever, in quantities so small that anyone can place an order.

Of course online printing is not just for branding. Individuals are able to express themselves, make or buy custom gifts, and create their own selling spaces. As an added value, many applications offer the ability to design your custom product without printing it, which allows you to sell it only after it’s been bought. Unlike a traditional marketplace that requires you to purchase items before selling them, this frees you (or your company) to be creative without breaking the bank. Applications that offer this do ask a percentage of the sale, but in addition to printing your designs and preferred products, they offer you a hosted web page as well where you can direct potential customers to your products.

As we looked at the four applications we found that all of them offered a variety of items for sale, each of them customizable with your design and colors. Each had a design tool to help you with the process, and each was made with an audience in mind. CafePress was designed to handle individuals and corporate needs, Zazzle for individuals and small volume retail, SpreadShirt for individuals, and VistaPrint for the consumer and business stationary market.

Whether dealing with a business or an individual they all could create a promotional product, but only CafePress, Zazzle, and SpreadShirt allowed the creation of an online store. We’ll look into the applications more in the individual reviews in upcoming days, but if you’d like to find them or applications like them, there is the Listio search: customize+merchandise.

Next in this series: Zazzle: Personalizing Merchandise For Fun and Profit

New to Listio? Our tag cloud search offers an easy way to narrow your hunt for the perfect web application or service. No more second guessing of search terms. Just click on one tag, then as many more as you'd like to narrow your search results. It's easy and ensures you get to the listing you want. Finding web 2.0 was never so easy.

Tags: business, create, customize, personal, personalize, print, web 2.0
Posted in: Printing | Respond
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