I’ve been meaning to run these numbers for a while but with work being rather intense on getting products loaded up on other PoD’s it has been a long time coming. Anyway, what I did was pull down the data on check numbers from month to month sent to me from Cafepress to see if they were growing their business or not. Obviously the intent of Cafepress is to either send out more checks because that means they are having more successful shopkeepers. They could also want to send out bigger checks as that means that those shop keepers they have are hence making them more money since commissions go up based on numbers of sales.

Well, interestingly, it looks like Cafepress has not grown in terms of the numbers of checks they have been sending out over the past several years. This tends to mean that they were not helping to create more and more successful shopkeepers as time went on. Here is the chart:

cafepress checks month to month

What I did was basically plot each point which is a difference between the current month’s check number and the previous month’s check number to show that over the past two to three years Cafepress has not been sending out more checks month to month. My interpretation of this, again, is that they were not helping to create more and more successful shopkeepers which would in turn means more and more success for them.

Note the large spike four years back. This is an anomaly I think as mysteriously the check numbers bounced from the 50,000′s to over 100,000. It looks like CP simply changed their numbering system. Either that or they had a really good Christmas with a lot of really small checks.

I think it is clear from these numbers that CP hit critical mass sometime ago. More people were signing up for their service but they were not making significantly more sales off those people that did sign up. If they were you would expect to see the chart going up and more checks being written month to month.

This could also help to explain some of the recent changes that have gone on and for the worse if you ask me. Sure many of us prior to the changes were slowly increasing our monthly sales but it looks like CP was not patient enough to let its revenues grow organically with their top shopkeepers leading the way. Instead they instituted drastic changes that added lots of new cash to their pockets by first removing MP commissions then by setting prices in the marketplace and cutting commissions to 10%.

Looks like they needed money and they found their way of making that goal a reality. These are actually typical tactics of a company that fears there is no more room to grow and they see the revenue curve starting to level off.

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J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.