Great blog, I was looking at adding a shop to my site shortly either with Cafe Press or Zazzle…so from your experience it looks like Zazzle might be the way to go!!
Thanks again

Derek

1. Shopkeepers are pulling there higher priced items, like clothes, Siggs, etc. off the marketplace, leaving only the lower priced products, i.e. stickers and buttons. They are selling their higher priced/higher profit products in their own shops. Because of this, the CafePress’ marketplace’s quality of products are diminishing. CafePress institutes a new policy – if your design is in the marketplace regardless of the product it’s on, we can sell it on anything else we make. Effectively negating the shopkeeper’s attempt to control what is sold in the marketplace and what is sold in their own shop.

2. CafePress is hiring salespeople (http://www.cytiva.com/cphire/ext/detail.asp?cphireGBO-002). Why would CafePress hire salespeople to “execute cold calling campaigns into target markets to identify, qualify, and cultivate new sales opportunities.” In my opinion, they are changing their business model to that of a licensing model. The process started in June with their shopkeepers, and now it’s clear that they are targeting businesses/groups that have brand, product or service to promote. They are already doing this with Discovery Channel and Twilight. This is big businesses and these businesses already operate on the licensing model, not to mention having the potential of bringing hudreds of thousands if not millions of potential consumers CafePress’ marketplace. Why do think Zazzle has a “World Famous Brands” tab? Afterall, how hard would it be to put a CafePress shop on a fan website?

3. It costs a lot of money to store billions of images that the shopkeepers upload. So getting rid of shopkeepers that aren’t really producing serious revenue is not a bad thing. In fact, “losing” those shopkeepers is actually a “good thing” for CafePress and increases their profitability, without impacting their top line significantly, and since they’ve increased their profits margins on the marketplace sales, they are in effect increasing their revenue and decreasing their costs simultaneously.

4. Last but not least, and this comes from the cynic in me: I’d be very surprised that their “truly” top shopkeepers, meaning those shopkeepers that are generating six (maybe even 7 figure) figure revenues for CafePress are probably getting a “different marketplace” deal that the rest of the shopkeepers. Why would I say this, quite simply that in the “real world” of business, your best customers always get “special treatment”. Why would CafePress be any different. How much do you want to bet that CafePress made sure that their top shopkeepers weren’t going to leave (and had them sign an non-disclosure agreement). I have no proof of this, but, like I said, I’m a cynic, and that’s what I’d do if I were CafePress.

5. CafePress’s web traffic is down and Zazzle’s web traffic is up. No matter how you look at it, that’s interesting. Not sure if that means Zazzle’s revenues are also up and CafePress’ revenues are down, but I’d be surprised if this isn’t the case. Check out Alexa.com for a comparison.

So what does this all mean, just that CafePress is trying to figure out how stay alive in an industry with increasing competition. They were the POD of choice for so long, maybe not so much anymore.