Zazzle – Review 2020 – PCMag Asia

Zazzle is well known for printing images, logos,
and slogans on a vast array of objects. You can get mugs, T-shirts,
skateboards, and phone cases, and even face masks. But the top choice under Office category on Zazzle’s
well-designed website is business
cards. The service offers a good selection of sizes, shapes, and paper
stocks. It offers novel magnetic business cards and does
a fine job with traditional card stock, too. It’s a bit pricier
than some of the competition, however, and it also lacks some design features you might want.

Pricing and Starting Up

Standard 3.5-by-2-inch business cards on pleasantly thick
17.5pt stock start at $20.95 for 100 pieces, and that price gets you two-sided
printing. For comparison, you only get 50 similar cards from MOO for about the same price
($19.99), though Vistaprint charges $15 for 100 cards on slightly thinner 14pt.
stock; 16pt. from Vistaprint costs $24. The lowest-cost service we tested, GotPrint,
charges just $7.63 for 100 cards, though that’s only front printing
on thinner stock.

To get an idea of pricing for larger quantities, here are
the prices for 1,000 cards from each of the services PCMag has reviewed:

Designing Business Cards in Zazzle

You get started by choosing whether to create your own card
or use a template based on Style (professional, unique, minimalist), Shape
(standard, square, folded, mini) or Profession. The designs range from glitzy
to elegant and subdued, but they’re not quite as hip as MOO’s. If you choose a
predesigned template, you can simply change the dummy text with your own;
alternatively (and unlike with MOO) you can mess with the design itself, moving
objects around and resizing them, if you poke the Click to customize further
link.

If you choose Create Your Own, you start with a blank
palette, with the ability to add images, shapes, clip art, backgrounds, and of
course text, willy-nilly. The interface is quite good, showing guidelines to
line up an element you add with existing elements and with the card borders
themselves. You can also optionally overlay gridlines for alignment help.

Text-entry is in a pop-up box rather than WYSIWYG right in
the card image, similar to Vistaprint,
though the latter’s implementation feels less clunky. Zazzle lets you make a template from your
custom design for later reuse. Unlike MOO, Zazzle’s card designer lets you use
Ctrl-Z to undo actions—something I find indispensable for error-prone design
work.

You get a choice of over 200 fonts, a lot more than MOO’s 38.
Some of Zazzle’s fonts are quite zany—Horse Puke, Mudshake 83, Lobster, and
Laundromat 1967 are just a few. You can
also fine-tune the color, size and justification.

When it comes to images, you
can crop, scale, fit, fill, rotate, and apply filters to them. You can even
overlap images and send them to the foreground or background. One
disappointment is that Zazzle doesn’t include a QR code generator, something
that adds a cool touch to your card and can make it easier for contacts to get
your digits, social account, or website. Another is that the site doesn’t offer
professional design services, as EliteFlyers and Vistaprint do.

Once you’re happy with your design, you choose a card stock.
The dozen options range from the 16pt Standard Semi-Gloss (better than the
cheapest, thinner 14pt stocks used by some printers) through 32pt Premium Thick, which adds $18.95 to an order of 100 cards. In between are 18pt Signature UV Gloss, Matte, or Cream (a more off-white paper); and Premium 21pt Silk, Linen,
Pearl, partially recycled Kraft, or Grey. The Signature
papers add $5 to an order of 100, while Premium adds $10.

Other Zazzle Printed Products

Without any further designing or image uploading, you can
get a mug—as well as a postcard, a button, keychain, magnet, tee shirt, or
luggage tag, among many more items—with all the same content from your card
printed on it. Why not go even further and get blankets, pillows, or a doormat
emblazoned with your logo and name? Zazzle offers those, along with everything
else you can think of as a canvas for your images and text.

Delivery and Quality

Zazzle offered one of the cheapest shipping costs for my
test order of 100 cards, at just $4.96. What’s more, you can sign up for a Zazzle
Black account, which lets you pay $9.95 for a year of free shipping. The order
arrived in five business days—my shipping option had a range of four to seven
days, so it was well within that. It was packed in a padded plastic bubble-wrap
envelope emblazoned with a Z. Inside that was a plain thin cardboard box that
didn’t hold a candle to MOO’s elegant sleeve box.

The cards themselves are excellently printed, with accurate,
fully inked colors. My scans of them don’t really do justice to the actual
cards, unfortunately. You’ll have to take my word for the true quality, all of
which are better than what appears here.

Put Some Zazzle in Your Business Cards

Zazzle offers lots of prebuilt templates suited
to various business types and a flexible card designer, with lots of unusual
font choices and clip art. The choices of card stock is also admirable, and the service
delivers pleasing print quality. On the downside, it’s more expensive than most of the card-printing
services we’ve tested, and it doesn’t offer professional design services or a
QR code generator, as many do. For a terrific value and fuller features, check
out our Editors’ Choice business card printing service, Vistaprint.

Zazzle Specs

Best Business Card Printing Picks