Comments on: Cafepress Refuses to Learn Its Lessons …

By: only1chip

only1chip — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:11:21 +0000

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

By: John

John — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 05:07:26 +0000

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.

By: Paul Hood

Paul Hood — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:29:22 +0000

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.

By: Len

Len — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:54:04 +0000

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.

By: Dreamcreeper

Dreamcreeper — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:46:31 +0000

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!

By: mellow yellow

mellow yellow — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:38:02 +0000

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!

By: Slippy

Slippy — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:20:48 +0000

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.

By: Vicktorya

Vicktorya — Fri, 01 May 2009 01:32:50 +0000

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.

By: Dingo

Dingo — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:22:04 +0000

CP doesn’t “suck” it just isn’t the best option for PoD T-shirts, etc anymore.

By: me

me — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:07:45 +0000

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.