Well, December is wrapping up and the Christmas shopping season is for all intents and purposes over. Several months have passed since Cafepress decided to rework its volume bonus structure and then abruptly dumped the news on shopkeepers that marketplace sales would no longer count when calculating it. The furor was terrific as Cafepress was caught with their pants down.

The outcry was so huge that it forced Cafepress to push back the full implementation of the new structure until after the Christmas shopping season and, despite their claims to the contrary, push back their plans to reap bigger rewards from holiday shoppers by not paying out the same bonuses as in previous years while keeping the money for themselves.

Since that announcement, the furor has subsided and shopkeepers, myself included, have redoubled our efforts at other PoD sites to make up for lost revenue and teach CP a lesson that competition brought on by their own actions can hurt. But now as December comes to a close and top shopkeepers notice paychecks $500, $1,000, $2,000 or more less because of the the new bonus program, it will be a bitter reminder that Cafepress really did take those that have helped them grow over the years and bend us over a table and forcibly have their way with us.

I fully expect to see another redoubling of the prior efforts by shopkeepers to once again prepare to make up for lost revenue and give Cafepress much more unwanted competition that could have been avoided by a little common business sense.

Hey, it’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

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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.