Cafepress Refuses to Learn Its Lessons …
Cafepress is at it once again. Here come the major changes designed to screw shopkeepers. No, I will not mince words. Gee, you would think that they would have learned their lessons after the whole Volume Bonus fiasco. But no. They are determined to not learn from history.
Cafrepress announced, in email, several new changes that are designed, if you ask me, to make the marketplace they own and operate more profitable and take money out of the pockets of those that make them successful. With not even so much as a courtesy call to get the opinion of the top shopkeepers it is the same old same old from Cafepress.
DISCLAIMER: Before going any further I want to make it perfectly known that I have been called by Cafepress and talked with them about this change. As usual they are very polite after the fact, which does little to sooth my nerves. Despite this conversation, which contains some propriety info I cannot share, I am still not pleased and I think I communicated that well to CP.
Now … back to my thoughts …
First up, Cafepress is refining their search platform and algorithm. They lead off the announcements with this because they can promote it as something positive to help deliver more relevant search results … something successful shopkeepers have been begging for.
But then it goes downhill from there.
Beginning June 1st: We’ll start setting prices in the Marketplace, and Shopkeepers will receive a 10% commission off the final retail prices from all Marketplace sales. This change provides our shoppers with consistent pricing that’s competitive with other online retail stores. It also allows us to better invest in a quality retail experience and continued growth.
Yep, you have heard right. Cafepress is telling shopkeepers how much they will sell their hard work for and is making a major change to the ToS by doing this. Pardon me Mr. and Mrs. Cafepress people, but setting the price of a piece of crap white t-shirt with a single word on it in Arial font the same as a meticulously designed piece is not only insulting but it is down right stupid! Now every white t-shirt will cost the same when viewed through the marketplace? Gee, first you take our commissions away from marketplace sales and now you are setting our prices for us PLUS telling us how much commission we will receive?
I think the response to this is rightfully, “Screw you!” And I will not begrudge any shopkeeper that responds as such.
Oh, but don’t worry. Cafepress will still, graciously, allow us to maintain whatever markup we want in our own shops!
These changes DO NOT impact the pricing, markup, or sales you are driving in your own shops. By separating our Marketplace pricing from the prices you set in your shops, we’re able to preserve shop base pricing and continue to support Shopkeepers who drive their own sales.
Thank you massah!
Let’s put the pieces of this puzzle together. First, volume bonuses are reworked to eliminate marketplace sales and now prices will be set for shopkeepers on the items that they are selling through the marketplace! See a trend here? Cafepress is working to make the marketplace (which it owns and operates) the best place to buy from and also the most profitable place for them to sell from. Now that means that shopkeepers will have to again work extra hard to make up for lost sales while competing against themselves!
Gee, where is someone going to buy from now? The second they see that little Cafepress logo at the top of the Cafepress hosted user store front they will click through and buy from the marketplace if they know that they can save a couple bucks once word gets around as to what Cafepress’ market place prices are and that they are lower?
But what happens even if they set them higher? Cafepress wins that way too. Think about this. I maintain an average markup on t-shirts of about $4.00. Why? Because I can sell them at that price and after a lot of trial and error and testing found that $4.00 was the optimum markup for maximizing my profits. Now I am being told by Cafepress that in the marketplace instead of selling a white t-shirt for $18.99 and making $4 they might decide to sell it for $19.99 and pay me only $1.99? Maybe they will set the price at $22.99 and give me only $2.99? This is insanity! I loose money both ways and the customer gets confused as to what the price is and possibly upset if they later find out that the Cafepress marketplace price is higher than directly from my shop?
Oh sure, Cafepress will say that all these changes will lead to more sales. It is in their best interest to make that claim. However, once again, I have already tested my own markups versus total price and found that my optimum rate is much different than what they will do for me by forcing my prices to a certain level! Boy Cafepress, you really want me to keep increasing the size of my Zazzle, Printfection, et al stores and give you more competition don’t you? Who is running your company and where did they leave their brain when this steaming pile of stupidity was dreamt up.
Month after month, for example, my Zazzle storefront (selling the exact same items as I do through Cafepress but with a more limited selection) keeps selling more and more product and my markups are higher than on Cafepress for many items. With the thousands of new items I am going to add because of these boneheaded decisions on your part I hope you enjoy the increased competition you are bring down upon yourselves!
All you have to do is keep the people that make you successful, your shopkeepers, happy in order to keep them from fleeing to the competition. Yet you seem completely incapable of doing such a simple thing. Cafepress, you are your own worst enemy. Now if you will excuse me as I have some major expansions to my other storefronts to take care of. Because for every dollar you cost me I will be adding 100 new designs to these other stores.
That is my retaliation. So you had better hope and pray to God Almighty that you are right. But as for me, I have run the numbers several different ways and to get me back to the point where I was before you dropped the volume bonus for marketplace sales would require you to more than quintuple my marketplace sales. I don’t have any faith based on past performance that you will be able to do that.
RSS feed for comments on this post. | TrackBack URI
April 25th, 2009 at 9:52 am
I was wondering how soon you would write about this!
So basically – if I get this right – there is no practical way to have more than a 10 percent markup on a Cafepress item after June 1. Sure, you CAN have a higher markup, but everyone will soon figure out you can go the marketplace and get your item for less. Right?
Or am I missing something?
This is simultaneously stupid AND depressing.
April 25th, 2009 at 10:46 am
I actually wrote the first draft right after I got the email but I decided to wait 24 hours to see if I, as a top shopkeeper, would at least get a courtesy call. I sent an email to Dafna to try to poke that process along and later that night I indeed did get a phone call and had a long talk with Cafepress.
Basically the gist was the same as always. They knew what they were doing and were moving ahead. However when I brought up specific issues like how 10% on bumper stickers made those worthless to create it was clear that they did not have an answer to that obvious problem.
So I cooled down and touched up my article before posting it.
My understanding is that items in the marketplace may not be less than in the private shops depending on what your markups are. But as to what those exact prices will be I have no idea right now. But no matter what they are, at 10% it is not worth it to sell in the marketplace unless they really massively increase my sales.
April 25th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
[No Advertising Please]
April 26th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
CP sucks. There’s no other way to put it. It will take a lot of work to transfer my designs to Zazzle, and close my CP stores, but the company’s greed leaves me no alternative.
April 26th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
CP doesn’t “suck” it just isn’t the best option for PoD T-shirts, etc anymore.
April 30th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Hi -
Great advice here, thanks for sharing your story. We’re just starting to get our work out online and I appreciate knowing about the trends and pros and cons of the various providers.
Since we don’t have a CafePress store I can’t comment, but I am looking to set up on Zazzle, and notice this about a 5% transaction fee on anything over 20% royalty.
Can someone translate this for me? Does that somehow mean that if you had a 21% royalty that they would in effect pay you 16%? And, why are there additional credit card and royalty processing costs due to someone charging a higher royalty rate?
Am I losing my logical marbles here?
Best,
Vicktorya
ZaVi, on Printfection and RedBubble (so far!)
http://www.zazzle.com/sell/products/nameyourroyalty
Transaction Fee
For any sale with a royalty in excess of 20%, we will deduct a 5% transaction fee from the amount you earn. The transaction fee helps us to cover additional costs we must pay for credit card and royalty payment processing.
May 14th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Boy, I am glad I am not the only one peeved by their email. I too waited to cool down before posting on several of my blogs. Unfortunately the only thing that happened in that time was I started realizing even more problems with their policy.
It no longer matters if you have the same price as the marketplace, because users will go to the marketplace to try and find a better price and when they see the same price they will just buy and it will most likely be counted as a marketplace sale because that is where they came from last.
I am going to attempt a lower price strategy (but we will see what they price the shirts at). Since $2.00 markup is better than 10% of $19. This is theory at this point though.
As the owner of a shop whose stock is mainly “piece of crap white t-shirt with a single word on it in Arial font”, I am absolutely 10000% behind you. There is NO WAY in @(%* my “designs” are worth the same as anyone who puts any amount of effort into theirs.
Making great designs is a lot of work and shopkeepers who do them should be able to benefit from that increase in quality. My only hope is that someone sees your design & my “design” next to each other and you get the sale since they are the same price.
I am right with you, and know a lot of others who are as well in moving on to other PODs. I have had a shop in other PODs for a while, but just never populated them much. Starting population on Monday.
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:38 am
I am so pissed at cafepress, I had a great thing going with them, I was making 50-75 bucks a month. Now i will be lucky to clear 20. I do not understand how in the marketplace my items are now 2 dollars more expensive but my commision is so MUCH less than it was before. Screwed again. I have dabbled with zazzle I will have to make the move now. I hope a lot of people leave cafepress! This kind of action should not be tolerated. It is the people that provide content that make them who they are!
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:46 pm
I have several cafepress stores and a premium shop, I can’t even believe what I’m reading here. I just logged in to my account and saw the news release… OMG WTF it’s not April fools so this must be real. I only make between $50 and $100 a month but I guess I can kiss that goodbye now. I have never had a store at zazzle or anywhere else and for the most part thought I had a good thing going at cafepress; what a disappointment. I guess the only way to continue making money on sales is to pull my designs and set up shop somewhere else, which really sucks because everything was working so well like it was:(
Cafepress shame on you, hope this greedy move costs you big time!
June 4th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
I just now noticed this abomination, too. The only word to describe it is “wow”. I sent Dafne the following letter and I’m going to patiently wait for a response:
Hi Dafne,
Hope all is well.
I suppose I should just get right to the point… The recent change to the Marketplace pricing is an absolute abortion. Shopkeepers collectively spent thousands of hours creating their designs, and they did so because they were able to choose their own markups. Myself and other shopkeepers feel that this is dishonest at best, and downright fraud at worst. I realize this will — in theory — help you make slightly more money, but this will only happen in the short term. The pricing change also lessens (or even eliminates) the motivation for shopkeepers to spend any time coming up with new designs for their CafePress shops. This is especially true for low cost products, such as bumper stickers.
Keeping shopkeepers motivated is the reason why CafePress is so successful. Here you have effectively eliminated that motivation altogether. I really hope your company reconsiders this horrible mistake.
June 20th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
The fact that CP claims to “know what they are doing” can only mean that the company is being taken in a dramatically new direction– as it is nearly impossible to imagine that they don’t see the consequences to their heretofore loyal group of shopkeepers. At first I was astounded by the greed and stupidity. Now I figure that they already estimated approximately how many shopkeepers will bail and go straight to the competition.
They could lose maybe 66% of shopkeepers and still hold steady on their bottom line profits. I’d expect to see in-house designers and CP corporate run shops sporting the best selling designs always on page one of the marketplace search: they have the stats, they know what kinds of designs sell.
So I think it’s not stupid, just very, very wrong. So far I’m disappointed not to see this story picked up by the mainstream news media, nor have I heard any solid news of class action lawsuits on behalf of the shopkeepers.
September 7th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Wow, I am overwhelmingly disappointed in Cafepress. As a professional designer, I used to recommend them to clients, non-profits, schools, businesses, etc, as a great way to help their causes. Can’t do that anymore (at least with good conscience). In fact, I just designed a website for a company and recommended CP to them. This week, I will strongly urge against it — it’s just not worth it anymore.
On the one hand, I understand this is a difficult economy and business have been forced to become extremely crafty about gathering every penny to stay afloat. However, the latest changes seem so unlike Cafepress. I have had 2 shops with them from the time they started. Usually, there is a consideration and respect for store owners/designers, and the people they hire always seemed to have a high level of professional standards. That said, I’m not sure I understand the context of the recent changes (unless, perhaps, there has been a new wave of management).
For myself, I felt the gutting of my sales recently. It used to be that the yearly fee for 2 shops was waaay more than easily covered with my sales. Now, I honestly make what seems to be pennies compared to what I did before. I never had to ask myself if it was worth it to have a shop, but now I do. With the recent changes, it’s almost like I’m *paying them* to do whatever they decide to with my designs. On that note, I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more uproar about the recent assertion that they can alter the color, etc, of your design for printing purposes. The writing in that clause seemed fairly vague to me and rather over-reaching.
It simply does *not* make good business sense to me to pay a yearly fee to have a shop where I have less and less control over my designs and the amount of profit they generate in order to be included in an over-saturated “Marketplace.” To be frank, it is wiser to take the time and effort involved in putting an image on CP products and use it, instead, to submit your designs for some products at stationary companies, at Target, at Papyrus, etc. You would actually stand to make more money worth your time on licensing or payment of usage for your designs. The original Cafepress spirit of empowering independent design and entrepreneurialism seems to be gone. Right now, no designer in their right mind would agree to these sweatshop-like terms of engagement.
And yes, I understand it is their “Marketplace”, they pay for ad words to advertise the designs, they pay for production and distribution and most likely a host of other business costs that go unmentioned; however, the scales have tipped far too much. I predict that a host of people who pay the premium yearly store rate will take a huge hit in sales from this and consider closing their stores like I am. They will go elsewhere as their profitability hugely drops. The “Marketplace” will become over-saturated with crappy designs and stores because no decent designers will take CP seriously as a business partner. There are so many more options out there worth one’s time.
I honestly miss the old Cafepress. Whoever thought up this crappy idea must be patting themselves on the back as the new profits have been flooding in, but the embers of disappointment on the web regarding these changes are turning into a wildfire. It used to be that you could barely find a complaint in cyberspace about CP, but not any more. I’m so sad to say that I am taking my business and designs elsewhere. You broke my heart CP; now I have to break up with you.
August 30th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
I too have been blindsided by this new policy, but in a quite different way.
I sell my shirts for a non-profit with only a minimal $1 mark-up, expecting that the members of my HOA can buy the t-shirt for $19.99. Today I got a message from one of my customers – who happens to be one of my neighbors and friends – asking why she was charged $25. That was my first exposure to this issue. What’s worse for me – CafePress charged $5 more, but only gave me $1.70 more in commission – they kept the rest!
And what a nice upgrade to the CP search engine criteria! It only finds the items of mine that CP is “scalping” – and doesn’t show customers my lower priced items at all.
So I go online and uncheck the box to have none of my items included in the Marketplace (did ya’ll know you can do that?) – and now not only can’t you buy the $25 shirt – but also you can’t find my shop. Even when searching on the exact name of my shop “BLHA” – you get zero search results.
So now the only way to find our merchandise is if I give somebody the link to my shop.
I’m just as dissapointed as everyone else on this thread – and very happy to hear that I have alternatives like Zazzle – I sure I’ll be researching them soon.
Shame, shame CP!
Chip