Zazzle Your Stamps For The Holidays

With Christmas right on the horizon, I'm starting to do a little planning as to what I'll be buying for people, who I'll be shipping things to on the mainland and the Christmas cards I'll be sending out. This year I'll be sending out my cards and packages with my own customized stamps.

I found an online service called Zazzle, and it allows you to make your own useable postage stamps. You can use your own favorite photos or licensed images from Zazzle's collection to make your own stamps along with personalized text. This is the first time the U.S. Postal Service is allowing consumers to fully design their own stamps. This whole concept makes sending this year's Christmas cards and packages more interesting than just sending the usual stamps from the post office. It also may be a great gift idea.

To get started with ZazzleStamps you need to create a free account then upload your selected pictures, or use Zazzle's licensed images, which include Disney characters, Harvey Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox's Family Guy, Robots, Neopets, The Pemberton & Oaks Collection, Zodiac Girlz, Build-A-Bear workshop, The Library of Congress and more.

In addition, if you think your pictures are really good, you can become a contributor to Zazzle and make your images public. If your image(s) are selected by other Zazzle users, you earn royalties on each purchase. Zazzle is actually considered a home to individual artists, photographers, designers and creative consumers worldwide. The galleries are growing rapidly, and include over 500,000 unique user-created products available.

ZazzleStamps come in sheets of 20 and you can purchase them in denominations of $0.23 for postcards, $0.37 for First Class and all the way up to $3.85 for Priority Mail. That way, you won't have to worry about standing in a long line at the post office for those boxes you need to send out. The prices per sheet vary depending on how many you order. For example one sheet of 37-cent stamps costs $16.99 ($0.46/stamp), but if you order 2-9 sheets, it will cost you $14.99 ($0.41/stamp), and the prices are lowered with bulk orders. It's a small price to pay for your own real postage stamp!

Zazzle also allows you to create customized apparel, posters and cards. The company has been around since 1999 when it began pioneering new printing technologies, then in 2003 created the website to grow its online community.

Create your own stamps at Zazzle, log onto www.zazzle.com.