Well, I am sure that most of the bigger shopkeepers, myself included, are not happy. Cafepress announced yesterday that premium shops would no longer be able to hold unlimited designs and were going to be instead limited to 500 sections.

The saving grace is that this applies to new premium shops and older shops are being grandfathered in with some additional room to grow.  But not enough room for some of the shops and plans I personally had.

On May 6 (if all goes as planned) we’ll be launching a few new tools aimed at helping Shopkeepers to efficiently manage and build out their shops. The tools we’re launching have been requested by the community countless times over the past year, so we’re thrilled to get them introduced and placed into action!

Along with these great new tools we’ll also be adding limits to the number of sections permitted in each Premium Shop. After all, the more tools offer to help Shopkeepers quickly build and add products to shops, the more important it becomes for us to manage how large shops can become before we have trouble supporting them. At this time the limit will be set to 500.

I knew that later that night I would be getting a phone call from my always attentive account rep and sure enough at 8:30 that call came to find out what I thought about the changes.

I did let her know that I certainly wasn’t pleased considering that I have been stockpiling images and have literally 1000’s of designs that I had planned to roll out into existing shops and did not plan to be opening new shops that would compete with them just to hold the new designs.

Just to be clear I do understand the reasoning behind this move and to be perfectly honest there are a lot of designs in some shops I could prune and this will force me to do so. But this goes along the lines of my long time complaint that Cafepress charges people who own premium shops but are actually selling products a fee every month. I can understand charging a fee to people who just open up mega shops, horde system resources, spam the marketplace and sell very little, but if a shop is making sales why are we being charged?  And by relation why are shops that are making money being limited?

My suggestion is don’t limit those people that are making you money. Perhaps a better approach would be to limit the number of sections based on sales volume … I don’t know. Cafepress claims that the larger shops drain too many resources and harm system performance and are a detriment to scalability.

Now, I’m no genius at computers and networks, but this would seem to be an issue that is easily addressable by proper network design and management. If us top .1% of shopkeepers are being a drain on the current resources then perhaps it is time to move larger shops to a secondary system capable of handling it. Sure there is money involved, but I have a hard time believing that Cafepress is not making enough money to keep their networks running smoothly.

In the long run I see it as a way for them to make more money off fees by forcing more premium shops to be created.

I was however able to put a bug in my rep’s ear to suggest a feature I really wish Cafepress had and that is the ability to designate two different images for products added to sections (such as one for light and one for dark t-shirts). I was pleased when Cafepress update a while back to allow us shopkeepers to use the same designs on white and dark products instead of having to have separate images for both. But still I often have a different design perhaps with white text for dark shirts and black text for white shirts and when I have to add new products for older designs I have to hunt for hours to find where they have been stored whereas with these already specified the system could automatically apply the right design to the right product upon creation.

Cafepress is still my major money maker and I am overall happy with them. But things like the limiting of premium shop sizes for those of us that have big shops and are making sales certainly doesn’t make me happy.