So you want to ditch corporate America, work for yourself, be your own boss. You want your commute to be a trip to your downstairs office where you can work in your pajamas if you want to. Nice thought, but what on earth would you do to make this dream possible?

Maybe know some witty sayings and thought they would look cool on t-shirts or maybe you are artistically talented and want to sell some of your creations on t-shirts. I personally went this route a few years ago when I started selling my own creations online. I overcame a few stumbling blocks along the way and can share what I wish I knew at the beginning.

Where do I go?

There are many websites where you can sell your designs but the three biggest are Cafepress, Printfection and Zazzle. Each company has its own line of t-shirts and gifts. These companies are best bets for first-timer to open a shop and be successful.

Cafepress is the leader by far. You can open a free shop with limited products or you can open a Premium shop for about $5 a month where you can have an unlimited number of products and designs. You can also personalize the shop any way you like. In addition, your designs are available in the Cafepress marketplace, where the buying public can find them with a keyword search. Cafepress makes it easy to put your images on many products at once with their bulk upload tools. You pick a product name, description and image and put these on all the shirts and all the other products you select at one time. None of the other online vendors have this feature.

One drawback is that Cafepress has become a victim of its own success. As it has grown, the marketplace is crowded and the print quality is spotty. Sometimes the site is down, or slow.

Another company, Zazzle, is giving Cafepress a run for its money and with a $16 million investment from Google investors may blow Cafepress out of the water.

I first discovered Zazzle years ago when my husband custom-designed a motorcycle shirt at the request of the local Harley dealership for the top executive at Buell motorcycles. My husband, a graphic designer, was impressed with the retail quality of the printing. I didn’t initially open a store with Zazzle because I could not name my markup.

This has changed. You can not only custom design a t-shirt or gift but you can put the creation in the Zazzle Marketplace and in your own Zazzle Gallery for sale to the general public and name a markup up to 50% of the product price. Each image is featured on a model rather than just on a boring old t-shirt stock image. Your customers can then further customize the products before they purchase them. I have tested the Zazzle features myself and am very pleased with the results. The images upload quickly and the products are available almost immediately in the Zazzle marketplace. The only thing lacking at this writing is the bulk-editing tools available on Cafepress. Those tools are coming to Zazzle as of first quarter 2008. And this isn’t a pie-in-the-sky promise. Zazzle is a serious competitor. I have had the opportunity to beta test one of the bulk tools, the bulk uploader for images. I recently uploaded 100 images in about 10 minutes to a folder of my choice with no downtime and no connection drop-off. All I can say about this tool is WOW!

Printfection is the third online vendor. It has a nice selection of shirt styles but no infant apparel and a limited selection of gifts. Printfection probably wanted to combine the best of both Cafepress and Zazzle but has not grown in the past year. There are no bulk editing tools for putting your design on multiple products at once, and none seem to be on the horizon. Opening a shop is free and the owners are enthusiastic and listen to their shopkeepers, but without a big capital investment, market visibility for this company is limited. Customers visit Cafepress and Zazzle websites more often.

What do I sell?

So what the heck do I sell, is one of the first questions people ask. What kinds of designs do people like? The most successful sellers find a niche. Popular niches include life changes such as birthdays, weddings, moms and babies. Also popular are international and ethnic designs, politics, holidays, and awareness designs for breast cancer or autism. Photography and very arty designs such as fractals do not seem to sell very well unless you already have a following before you open your shop. It does not mean that your art is not very good; it just means that the buying public is looking for something else. That is the most important thing to keep in mind. It will save your ego!

How much can I make and is it worth it?

How big are the checks? The simple answer is that the more unique designs you have, the more you earn. Some people earn as little as the minimum check amount, which is $25, but others earn as much as $3000 a month and some others even make Cafepress’ 20% bonus category, which is $10,000 in base sales.

The most important advice for success at any of these websites is to keep adding new designs. Equally important is to give your products good titles and descriptions using words that a customer might type into a Google search. And do not even think about copying somebody else’s design because your products will be removed. Read the message boards on each of these sites because they are an excellent free learning environment with tips for building your shops and trends in the business.

Happy Selling!

Websites:
http://www.iheartswimming.com
http://www.helloworldshirts.com

So you want to ditch corporate America, work for yourself, be your own boss. You want your commute to be a trip to your downstairs office where you can work in your pajamas if you want to. Nice thought, but what on earth would you do to make this dream possible?

Maybe know some witty sayings and thought they would look cool on t-shirts or maybe you are artistically talented and want to sell some of your creations on t-shirts. I personally went this route a few years ago when I started selling my own creations online. I overcame a few stumbling blocks along the way and can share what I wish I knew at the beginning.

Where do I go?

There are many websites where you can sell your designs but the three biggest are Cafepress, Printfection and Zazzle. Each company has its own line of t-shirts and gifts. These companies are best bets for first-timer to open a shop and be successful.

Cafepress is the leader by far. You can open a free shop with limited products or you can open a Premium shop for about $5 a month where you can have an unlimited number of products and designs. You can also personalize the shop any way you like. In addition, your designs are available in the Cafepress marketplace, where the buying public can find them with a keyword search. Cafepress makes it easy to put your images on many products at once with their bulk upload tools. You pick a product name, description and image and put these on all the shirts and all the other products you select at one time. None of the other online vendors have this feature.

One drawback is that Cafepress has become a victim of its own success. As it has grown, the marketplace is crowded and the print quality is spotty. Sometimes the site is down, or slow.

Another company, Zazzle, is giving Cafepress a run for its money and with a $16 million investment from Google investors may blow Cafepress out of the water.

I first discovered Zazzle years ago when my husband custom-designed a motorcycle shirt at the request of the local Harley dealership for the top executive at Buell motorcycles. My husband, a graphic designer, was impressed with the retail quality of the printing. I didn’t initially open a store with Zazzle because I could not name my markup.

This has changed. You can not only custom design a t-shirt or gift but you can put the creation in the Zazzle Marketplace and in your own Zazzle Gallery for sale to the general public and name a markup up to 50% of the product price. Each image is featured on a model rather than just on a boring old t-shirt stock image. Your customers can then further customize the products before they purchase them. I have tested the Zazzle features myself and am very pleased with the results. The images upload quickly and the products are available almost immediately in the Zazzle marketplace. The only thing lacking at this writing is the bulk-editing tools available on Cafepress. Those tools are coming to Zazzle as of first quarter 2008. And this isn’t a pie-in-the-sky promise. Zazzle is a serious competitor. I have had the opportunity to beta test one of the bulk tools, the bulk uploader for images. I recently uploaded 100 images in about 10 minutes to a folder of my choice with no downtime and no connection drop-off. All I can say about this tool is WOW!

Printfection is the third online vendor. It has a nice selection of shirt styles but no infant apparel and a limited selection of gifts. Printfection probably wanted to combine the best of both Cafepress and Zazzle but has not grown in the past year. There are no bulk editing tools for putting your design on multiple products at once, and none seem to be on the horizon. Opening a shop is free and the owners are enthusiastic and listen to their shopkeepers, but without a big capital investment, market visibility for this company is limited. Customers visit Cafepress and Zazzle websites more often.

What do I sell?

So what the heck do I sell, is one of the first questions people ask. What kinds of designs do people like? The most successful sellers find a niche. Popular niches include life changes such as birthdays, weddings, moms and babies. Also popular are international and ethnic designs, politics, holidays, and awareness designs for breast cancer or autism. Photography and very arty designs such as fractals do not seem to sell very well unless you already have a following before you open your shop. It does not mean that your art is not very good; it just means that the buying public is looking for something else. That is the most important thing to keep in mind. It will save your ego!

How much can I make and is it worth it?

How big are the checks? The simple answer is that the more unique designs you have, the more you earn. Some people earn as little as the minimum check amount, which is $25, but others earn as much as $3000 a month and some others even make Cafepress’ 20% bonus category, which is $10,000 in base sales.

The most important advice for success at any of these websites is to keep adding new designs. Equally important is to give your products good titles and descriptions using words that a customer might type into a Google search. And do not even think about copying somebody else’s design because your products will be removed. Read the message boards on each of these sites because they are an excellent free learning environment with tips for building your shops and trends in the business.

Happy Selling!

The reality of the internet is that many sites come and the vast majority of them go, abandoned to the far corners of the web. Those that survive mostly through the tenacity of their owners are those that stand at least a chance of success.

That’s the reality.

If you don’t want to stick with your site you will never succeed. And even if you do you might not every amount to much. But running a successful site on the internet is mostly about accepting attrition as a way of life.

Many sites start out with a flurry. Updates happen daily. Then they start to tail off. Perhaps the owner thought she was going to make enough off placing Google Adsense on her site to retire, only to realize that it is harder than you might think to take such an approach. Perhaps the owner of another site thought that he had all the answers only to realize that after two years only about 10 people a day visit his blog.

When they give up, those that are actually fighting the war of attrition win small battles. When they give up, those that continue to post opinions, commentary, new products and update their sites become a little more prevalent in the search engines and increase their chance of being found.

Some sites start out with a bang and register thousands of visitors a day within a couple weeks. When they start to falter because people lose interest, if you are a competing site that is keeping your site up to date, you will win another small battle.

Eventually you move up the rankings. Eventually more people find you. And if you have something that people are willing to read or buy, they will keep coming back for more each time you update. You slowly gain more and more readers and customers and after years of outlasting all those that gave up because the money didn’t flow immediately or simply lost interest and moved on to something else, you win the war.

Like most wars, the war of attrition for sites on the internet is a long hard slog. Before you get involved, make sure you are prepared to fight it.

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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.

This comes as part of what they are terming a “relaunch” of their service.

The next generation in on-demand retail is finally here! We’ve just re-launched our site with a fresh new look, a major partnership with MySpace, and an amazing set of new technologies. To commemorate this huge milestone, we are giving away special, limited edition re-launch shirts. So, the first 2,000 people to order apparel today as of 10AM PST will receive this official, Zazzle re-launch t-shirt for free.Zazzle limited edition t-shirt
Be sure to check out Merch to the Masses partnership with MySpace, and see why the #1 Social Networking site in the world chose Zazzle to be its official merchandise platform:

* Exceptional Dark Apparel – Our new printing technology is the first ever on-demand manufacturing of top-quality dark apparel and is available in an endless number of colors.
  * Model Realviews – It’s the real 3D deal. Now you can design a t-shirt and see what it looks like in real life! Zazzle is the first ever to let you design directly on a real person’s curves, shadows and everything.
  * Name Your Royalty – For those of you who are or want to be contributors, you can now make lots more money by easily setting your own royalty rate on your products, from 10% to 99% of the base retail price.

I’ll be considering Zazzle a little more closely if, as they say their new printing technology is as good as it says. Despite claims made in the past, their quality has not been as good as other companies like Cafepress or Printfection or Spreadshirt when I have ordered samples.

—————————————————————–
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.

Not nearly as big as some other sites like Cafepress, but certainly nothing to sneeze at!  As Printfection’s web presence grows so too will sales for those using the service.
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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.

From the latest Zazzle Newsletter:

So how about making some money for doing nothing? With Zazzle, you can do it! All you have to do is post links to Zazzle (any link to Zazzle will do, not just to your own products) with your special referral ID. Just add “?rf=” at the end of ANY Zazzle url (like http://www.zazzle.com) that you have on your blog, website, myspace page or whenever you email your friends. That way, when those visitors buy anything (within 30 days of linking over) you are going to make a referral percentage of that sale. Pretty sweet eh?!

How do I do this?
So how do you *actually* do this? It’s really easy,

• Take any ol’ Zazzle URL like http://www.zazzle.com/starwars
• Then add ?rf=XXXXXXXXXX to the end of it
  (the XXXs are your associate ID)
• So it would look like this: http://www.zazzle.com/starwars?rf=XXXXXXXXX

Easy right? Now if you don’t know your associate ID, just go to your Associate Account page in myZazzle, look at the upper right corner, and voila!! There is the associate ID.

I stand by my recent comments that Cafepress is making a huge mistake with their recent actions and farming out the affiliate program.  And they lost me as an affiliate for sure with the move to Commission Junction.

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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.

Are you making the t-shirts yourself and carrying a stock? Or are you using a site like Cafepress or Printfection for one off, on demand production? Because depending on your business model and strategy it makes a huge difference.

When you are carrying your own stock and making your own products it is probably a good idea to limit the items that you carry in stock to only the products you can actually sell. Carrying designs that you sell one of a year or a month can be a huge drain on your finances especially if you have a couple hundred designs with only a few hot sellers.

This means constantly evaluating whether the money you spend on stock is worth it and you are probably much more likely to eliminate older designs and designs that just simply are not moving. But if you are a t-shirt entrepreneur that is just creating designs and using third party sites to on demand print t-shirts as they are ordered you have less to worry about.

I council people that are in this later category to never get rid of any design unless there is a huge problem with it (i.e. misspelling, major design flaws, etc.) or unless you are being charge by the gigabyte for storage. Why do I say this? Because there is no reason to get rid of designs that are old, outdated or otherwise just slow selling because there is no financial expense incurred by you or your business.

One never knows what the future holds. And if there is no financial reason to remove a design I would personally never do it. You never know when someone might come along that finds the design, likes it, and buys it. Sure you might make only a couple bucks compared to your hot selling designs but for most entrepreneurs a few bucks here and a few bucks there is usually welcome and can certainly add up.

But this does not mean that you should keep these designs which have low potential in prominent places on your online site. Outdated designs not selling like they once did (such as designs for a specific event that has long since past) should definitely be considered for a move to the bottom of a page or even to their own section. Label it “discontinued designs” or something like that, but there is no need to take up valuable space at the top of a page that could be better used promoting hot items.

—————————————————————–

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.

Don’t forget that you can also use your earnings to make purchases. Need some more money? Here’s a $5 promo code for you to use with your earnings: JCRJJBHVPCHFUMIZGMSA (expires January 29th). So, go ahead and buy that trendy new shirt you’ve been eyeing!

Also, this year our number one New Year’s resolution is to get more input from our amazing community. Drop us a line at feedback@zazzle.com with areas of improvement, random crazy ideas you have or your favorite post-holiday fruitcake recipe. We’ll take it all.
Lastly, if you want to maximize your earnings, be sure to use the latest promotional tools.

-Zazzle

PS – Don’t forget to make sure that your payment address is up to date.

What it is about bumper stickers in January I do not know. Perhaps it is because they are cheap (generally I sell them at about $4.99/ea) and people aren’t in as much of a spending mood after the ruckus Christmas season. I do not know.

But pulling together some data over the past three years definitely shows that January is the month for bumper stickers.

Jan 2005: 41% of all sales
All other Months 2005: avg 23% (high 31%) of all sales

Jan 2006: 39% of all sales
All other Months 2006: avg 25% (high32%) of all sales

Jan 2007: 42% of all sales (as of Jan 15)

This trend is occurring across all stores regardless of type or focus (assuming the store sells bumper stickers that is). Maybe you experience similar trends and maybe you do not. But it might give you an idea about where to focus your promotion for the month of January and help boost sales in an otherwise anemic month.

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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.

Generally speaking I have noticed about a four fold increase over already accelerated Holiday sales which started around the second week of November. Talking to other online entrepreneurs this seems to be a median number. Some claim their sales only double around the holidays while at least one reported to me that her sales are always up around ten times what is normal during these final shopping days.

If you haven’t seen the bump yet it is probably too late to expect a Merry Christmas but take it as a signal to get on the trail to success and get ready for next year!

Christmas for retailers (online or otherwise) is a huge portion of our business with the holiday season from November to December accounting for 30 – 40% or more of yearly revenues. Miss out and your revenues are a lot lower than they should be.

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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.