I just added a number of new products to our Zazzle store that I wanted to tell you about. I had to create a couple new categories for these products:
- LDS Greeting Cards
- LDS Postage Stamps
- Added several products to our Home Decor Posters category
- Added several products to our Accessories category
Recently, Zazzle increased the percentage we can earn for referring people from LDV to our Zazzle store, or to any other products sold on the Zazzle website. This has made the whole Zazzle system more attractive to us. The more we sell, the higher the percentage we earn. Pretty simple marketing technique. So for the first time, I decided to browse the Zazzle website for other products I thought our visitors might be interested in, it now being worth the time it takes to create a new product if we can generate some sales. I did a search for LDS products. There were 34 pages of products with probably 10-15 items on each page.
I have to admit, most of them were not that great. T-shirts with silly phrases and no added images. I figure anyone can design their own custom t-shirt with whatever message they want. They weren’t very professional or clever and I wasn’t going to bother with them. But I did find some items I liked and thought you might like as well. So I have put them in our store.
- LDS Postage Stamps -
these are so cool! They are actual USPS Postage Stamps with custom images on them. The ones I found had beautiful photographs of temples. These are great for wedding announcements! These designs have to be pre-approved by Zazzle according to some rather strict guidelines by the USPS. They come in sheets of 20 in three different sizes. - LDS Greeting Cards - I found several different photographers who had a variety of nice cards, including beautiful temple photos. These are high quality greeting cards that come with an envelope. You can add your own personal message inside. These are sold separately or you can save by purchasing in quantity.
- LDS Temple Posters - There were more, but I chose the ones I liked the best. These are really beautiful and high quality posters. With Zazzle, you can select the size and the type of material you want it printed on, and you can, if you desire, usually add your own text.
- Young Women Values Totebags - I found a set of very fun canvas totebags with a big fun image and YW Value on each one. I thought the designs were cute and would be appealing to YW and their leaders.
Warning - Zazzle is a big public company that has certain standards of non-discrimination they both must and choose to abide by. What this means is that on the one hand, they cannot allow inflammatory, discriminatory products to be sold, but on the other hand, they cannot discriminate themselves against any vendor who may have differing political, social, religious, gender etc views.
They enforce this not by pre-approving all their products - they do this by randomly reviewing products and by answering complaints that may be sent to them. I found an anti-mormon vendor with products that were clearly anti - not just pro something I disagreed with. I reported the vendor and the products and explained why they were discriminatory against latter-day saints. Zazzle has removed those products from their site.
You have to understand that many valuable services that are available to one group, are also available to another group. The same printing company may print political campaign posters for two opposing candidates, for rival businesses, and so on and so forth. A bookstore may sell both pro-life and pro-choice books. It is called freedom of the press, and though sometimes that means people with very different views than mine have a public platform to express themselves, if I remember right, our constitution protects their right to do so, as do our 13 Articles of Faith.
A visitor to LDV recently filed a trouble ticket with us stating that they were about to purchase one of our beautiful New Testament posters from our Zazzle store until they discovered some offensive products sold by Zazzle. I did a quick search and found a vendor selling anti-mormon products, wrote to Zazzle who has since removed those products. But I cannot ask them to, nor would they be bound to remove other products that may offend but are not strictly discriminatory. I hope you understand the difference.
Zazzle offers a service that we have been looking for, at prices that are better than most places, and we are happy to be able to now offer many more of our designs on a wide variety of products than ever before, thanks to Zazzle’s custom / print on demand service.
If you see something that is clearly discriminating against your religion, you can inform Zazzle. But you have as much right to find and purchase products that please you as any other consumer. So I hope you will. And wholesome products will become top sellers, rather than impossible to find.
~ Debra
