Make a Custom Zazzle Quick Create Template

If you have not yet tried working with the general Zazzle template, here are the advantages of using it:

1. You can add the same image on to up to 100 different products.
2. You can type in the text for title, description and tags for all products at once.
3. You can place all products into the same store category at the same time.

In spite of these benefits, there are disadvantages to using the general template. These are:

1. You will often need to spend time to adjust the size and orientation of your image on each of the various products before you can proceed with the final steps of publishing for sale.
2. You will have to delete some of the products as the design just will not be suitable at all.
3. You will have to add your image manually to some of the products that are not included in the general template platform.

The advantages:

1. You can make a separate template for specific purposes, for example: round products, square products, small products, etc. I just made a custom template for electronic products.
2. You can position and size the image on each product in the way you usually use them and new images will be placed in the same position, orientation and size as you set in the template.
3. You can position and size text on each product using a font you prefer and make that a template on the finished product so that the customer can change the wording.
4. You can make a template that uses all the products you like to design, leaving out those that you rarely use.

The disadvantages:

1. The first time you set up a custom template you need to manually add each product and manually set the position and size of the image on each product individually.

That's it - I couldn't think of any other disadvantages - if you can, let me know.

There is no point in me writing down how to do this. I read several explanations and it all seemed so complicated to me. Then I found these video explanations by Shopaholic Chick and suddenly everything was crystal clear.

Sit back and watch and listen and you will have no trouble catching on to the easy steps of making your very own custom Zazzle template that will render your product design so efficient and much more pleasurable.

Before you look at the video telling you how to use your new custom template, let me share with you my experience with it.

It was very easy to do the templates. I did only five to make sure I knew what I was doing before going on and making a large number of them. Practice makes perfect and best to start slowly.

It took the full 24 hours before I had access to my new template. I thought I must be doing something wrong and went through the whole process again just to make sure. I reviewed the video several times more just to make sure.

Remember: It might take a whole day (or more) before you can get your template to load and another couple of hours after the template loads for you to be able to actually use it to create products.

From this point, you work as you are used to working on individual product categories and descriptions, just that now you are attaching the same values to the entire set of products. This shortens your time investment considerably.

I did have to fiddle with sizes of the images. This is how you learn what works and how to fine-tune the creation of your custom templates. When you know how much time you are going to save in the long run, this is fun to do.

Note the stationary - the center product. You can see that the image appears twice, once at the bottom of the page and again at the top of the page. The video showed how to do that. I was so surprised that I actually got it to work!

Once you have made sure all the images sit properly on the products, you click "NEXT" and complete the title, description, category designations and tag words for all the products in one go!

On the custom template tutorial, Shopaholic Chick talks about using PNG image files rather than JPEG. I checked out the difference and there are times you would want one and time you would prefer the other. Just to be aware that there is a difference. For one thing, PNG images maintain their white color when placed over backgrounds of other colors, whereas JPEG does not.

The other thing I learned was if you hold the control key on your keyboard as you use the arrows to move text or image, they move at a smaller increment and it is easier to control exact placement on the object.