I hate to criticize Cafepress because they have been very good to me over the years I have been associated with them. But as an honest man I have to let you know what I think and what I think is that Cafepress is loosing their edge. Maybe even officially “jumping the shark.”

This week, without any warning, Cafepress dropped a bomb that is going to affect nearly everyone that has helped them become what they are by creating designs and letting CP sell them online. This bomb is that CP is changing the way they pay their volume bonus to the detriment of shopkeepers. Not only are they changing this, but the changes are going into effect August 1st. Notification of this change came on July 23rd. Talk about giving shopkeepers no time to adjust!

No longer will shopkeepers get a volume bonus on anything sold from the marketplace. Even though we spend a lot of time properly tagging our designs, and doing a lot to make the marketplace successful, Cafepress has apparently decided that that hard work is not worth rewarding.

To compensate, Cafepress will however be increasing the rate at which bonuses are being paid from sales directly from individual shops and to also eat the 20% referral commission themselves rather than making shopkeepers foot part of that bill too.

However, by Cafepress’s own admission unless you are selling somewhere around 80% of your products from your own shop, you are not going to benefit from this deal. Some people won’t be affected, but most will. I know that I have in particular tried to maintain a balanced approach as to where my sales have come from and now I am being asked to turn a large ship that has been steaming merrily along on a dime. It happens in business, but there is certainly no excuse for such short notice from Cafepress on such a major change.

Frankly, I see it as poor management and poor shopkeeper relations.

This might not be so bad IF Cafepress was doing things to make individual shops easier to SEO and maintain, however the way the service is set up makes me pull out every white hat optimization technique I know just to have my storefronts place high in the search engines. Improvements to this structure would certainly help people like myself drive more traffic. But most people are not so savvy as to be able to accomplish this.

In addition, for years shopkeepers have been asking for tools to make their storefronts more user friendly (such as shop specific searches that we can insert to help people find what they are looking for) and been ignored as well.

Cafepress claims that this move with bonuses is needed because they are spending so much money promoting the marketplace and the revenues are just not keeping up. This is however a polite way of saying, and remember I have done marketing, sales and advertising so I know what I am talking about here, they are not spending their money wisely, need to make more profit and we, as shopkeepers, are the odd man out.

Way to show thanks to all of us that have helped you grow!