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ZAZZLE has been pretty busy in the past 10 days. Last Wednesday ZAZZLE extended its reach across the pond by launching a localized offering for United Kingdom Zazzlers, www.zazzle.co.uk. The site is essentially the same in terms of functionality (the products & galleries on the main site show up on the UK site), but there are some differences that make the site fine-tuned for its UK audience. The most visible difference is that prices are shown in British Pound Sterling (£) instead of US Dollars.
The hope is that more British users will be willing to shop on the UK version of the site with the pricing in their own currency (with value-added tax and custom duties already included). Also the product search results, featured products and Gift Centre will be different since the types of products being purchased on the UK site will be more UK-focused (something tells me that very few Obama bumper stickers will be sold).
Having a UK-specific domain is also beneficial for shopkeepers because of the search engine optimization (SEO) benefits. ZAZZLE galleries off of the UK domain should rank higher for UK web surfers who use UK versions of Google, Yahoo! and other search engines because local websites generally get a higher ranking.
There's also other cool little things to help the British users feel right at home, like spelling things in their funky way (centre instead of center, personalise instead of personalize, basket instead of cart, etc). ZAZZLE has a special UK Launch promotion going on until November 30th where you get FREE standard shipping to the UK and EU for all orders over £30. Enter UKZAZZLESHIP in the shopping cart to redeem the promo.
In order to help improve the relevancy of the products available on ZAZZLE.co.uk, ZAZZLE has launched a design contest around the following categories: British politics, humor, pop culture, sports and history. The overall winner receives £2500 (that's like $3700!) and the winner of each category receives £500. Check out the contest entries.
As of this Tuesday, ZAZZLE is also now fully integrated with PayPal. This means that users can now make all of their purchases using PayPal in lieu of credit cards. Contributors have been able to redeem their earnings as PayPal credit for some time now. So now the money you make hawking stuff on eBay can be applies to cool stuff on ZAZZLE!
