While handmade products are in the works that will be available direct from the artist (there are some finishing issues to resolve--more on that later), Uncanny Drive currently uses online print-on-demand sites for our products.
This is for several reasons. Foremost is selection and availability; there are simply more products, and more colors and sizes available this way.
At the moment we use three different services: Zazzle, Redbubble, and Society6.
We're trying them all out, and in case you're interested, or are setting up your own online shop, here are some of the pros and cons:
Zazzle. This is the biggest of the three we use. Zazzle allows the most customization of an online "store," and has the largest variety of potential products and clothing items. It's easy to group products into categories and subcategories, and there are even options for a customer to
change text and colors on some products.
Zazzle has a worldwide reach, and for our biggest-selling item, the Saab 900 t-shirt, most have gone to customers in Europe and Japan. The amount of sales via Zazzle is much greater than from the other outlets, even though its base prices are slightly higher. They do run a lot of sales and promotions, so it's possible that in the end their prices are similar to buyers, but I don't know.
Its biggest drawback is that it takes longer to post products for sale there; it's not immediate. As a result of this, we tend to post our new and upcoming products on other sites first. We also don't post our photo prints there, as Zazzle will often delete photos that contain logos, and some of our photos must, after all they are of cars that have badges. (Similarly, they remove comics that contain names of famous people,
such as this one.) Until they removed it from their marketplace, the Saab Aero wheel iPhone case was our most popular product (
here's a new version).
Therefore, for photo prints I set up two new stores, Redbubble and Society6, and decided to put the graphics there as well. These other two shops don't print mugs or simple products like that, unlike Zazzle. This is probably fine--even though I want some of these mugs for myself, others rarely buy them.
But one of the biggest things in Zazzle's favor is a combined account for multiple stores. If you feel like creating a new shop on a whim, it's very fast, and any royalties go into your single account for easy management.
Redbubble. I have a bit of a soft spot for Redbubble, since I've used it
for quite some time.
Unlike Zazzle, which charges more for darker clothing due to their printing process, all shirts at Redbubble are the same price, and are fairly inexpensive. The type of shirt they sell is limited, but they sell the one that I personally would select (and have purchased) anyway.
Redbubble also allows store categories, and even though they don't allow full customization of a landing page, it looks quite good just how it is. Redbubble focuses on artwork and on the social network aspect between users and artists, and we have more paper products available for sell there as well.
(Note: We're in progress with renovating this store and currently don't have t-shirts or stickers up. They should be back soon.--
see update below)
Society6. I'm new to Society6 and finding it to be similar to Redbubble, but with a slightly smaller community and a different focus. While Redbubble runs contests and promotions among its users, Society6 works on putting products into other stores, such as Urban Outfitters. We currently have a print
featured in the Society6 marketplace.
It is extremely easy to post items here (just like making a blog post, which you can do there as well), and miscellaneous products automatically relate to the prints that go up first.
They have some interesting iPod and laptop skins, and the only drawback for Uncanny Drive is that most of our shirt designs use the clothing color to complete the image. This usually requires a dark shirt, and they only sell light ones, so I've modified some of the images to have a dark gray background in a square shape. Perhaps some people will like this better, but the intent of the designs was always to be a one-color print on a background of the shirt color.
Each of these sites has different options and we're still trying to figure out which works best for the Uncanny Drive. If you have experience with any of them or preferences to share, let us know in the comments or by email!
redbubble UPDATE - 2/29/12:
We've added shirts to all designs at the RedBubble shop and have made that into a complete store. They have changed their product setup slightly to be a bit like Society6, except they still allow category organization. At the moment, except for two issues, their site is the easiest to use. All products are under one main image, based on an art print. It's quite clean.
The two issues are fairly minor:
1. Redbubble's phone template is a pain relative to the other ones, and requires so much image around the main image that it's hard to use.
2. The sticker is based on the same image as the t-shirt, and doesn't print anything that's clear. This probably works well for most people and looks great for some designs, but since we use the color of the shirt to complete the image, we end up with a bizarrely shaped sticker when it wants to be square. Perhaps we could put a thin line around the design to fix that, but we haven't at this point. So no stickers there!
