Uhm… yeah… the photo above pretty much shows the reaction that several Zazzle shopkeepers had lately when they visited their shop and realized that Zazzle now has reviews displayed underneath their products.

Granted, reviews can be very helpful for online businesses. It helps to add keyword fodder for the search engines and helps customers in making purchase decisions.

Amazon, a site that offers a marketplace for a variety of sellers to hawk their wares, is a prime example of a company that utilizes customer reviews in a very efficient manner.

At the top of each Amazon product page itself, you’ll find a little star rating next to the product title so that a customer can tell at a glance what kind of average rating a product gets. That is followed by a link that tells the customer how many reviews that particular product has received.

The customer can either click the link to see all of the reviews, or scroll down to read the item description and find the first three reviews at the bottom of the page. If they decide that they want to read more reviews, they can click a link to find the rest.

Personally, I believe reviews can help Zazzle’s bottom line, BUT they’ve got some problem solving to do first.

Right now, there are several poor reviews showing… from what I’ve seen so far, various complaints about printing and sizing. That tells me that Zazzle needs to work on some quality control issues and conveying sizing correctly to customers BEFORE they start slapping those reviews up.

As a customer, I’d take one look at some of those reviews and head straight to another company, like Skreened or Cafepress.

Another problem that I have with the reviews as they stand right now is that reviews for designs OTHER than the one I’m looking at are showing.

If I’m at Amazon and thinking of purchasing a Hello Kitty calendar, WHY would I want to read a review about a KISS calendar? I don’t care about the KISS calendar! I’m interested in finding out whether or not the Hello Kitty calendar is a good investment for my daughter’s room.

As a shopkeeper, it just looks like one more way of possibly sending customers that I’ve sent to Zazzle off to make purchases with other designers. And I most certainly don’t want my readers who are thinking of making a purchase to assume I am the one who has printing issues.

Let’s take a peek at my “Nurses Make It All Better” coffee mug from one of my shops:

Nurses Make It All Better Coffee Mug by LifeOverHere

If you’ll scroll down, you’ll see that there are no reviews for this product. However, keep scrolling and you’ll find reviews for other products.

When I first landed on the page, I was confused. Like a lot of people, I skim when I read. I wondered why on earth a customer was talking about kittens on their mug when mine had NOTHING to do with cats.

Studies have shown that most surfers notice things on the left of the screen moreso than the right, which is exactly what I do. The words, “Reviews From Customers” was the only phrase that registered in my brain as I flew through the page.

Several confused seconds later, I FINALLY noticed the pictures of the other products on the right of each review and it dawned on me that THESE were reviews for other products… not mine. Everything fell into place then and I understood why the reviews seemed so “off” to me.

As a customer? It’s good to know that there are printing issues with certain products. I’d probably find another company to purchase from for those particular items.

As a shopkeeper? I don’t want those issues reflecting on me as a designer or photographer. I also don’t want one more way to lose sales to other shopkeepers.

It also makes me more choosy about what products I’ll be designing for in the future. If there are a ton of complaints about the printing on XYZ product, I probably won’t bother adding them to any of my shops.

What about you? Like the reviews? Hate them? Share your thoughts below!

According to TechCrunch, Zazzle is launching custom embroidery. Yes…. real honest-to-gosh embroidery.

The embroidery process should be fairly simple for users. Simply upload a design and choose how large you want it to appear on the clothing. Zazzle then uses a fairly complicated process behind the scenes to digitize the images and sew them onto items. Computers are being used to perform 50-70% of the digitization process with human workers manually adjusting the image to ensure the outcome of the design.

Getting an image digitized will take 24-48 hours and generally costs approximately $5 for every 1000 stitches required.

Here is the link for the Zazzle embroidery page… be forewarned…. the link has been spastic…. perhaps TechCrunch was a bit premature or Zazzle is having technical difficulties….

Here is a link to the Zazzle Embroidery Design Guide

So, what do you guys think of the possibility of custom embroidery from Zazzle? Love the idea? Hate it? Give us some feedback!