How About Those Changes At Cafepress!
So here I am, tracking the effect of the so-called great changes being made over at Cafepress. You know, where they are going to set the commissions we can make off marketplace sales, ostensively lowering shopkeeper profits and raising their own BUT where they are (they promise) going to make great changes to their market place search algorithms to help out their valued and (previously) successful shopkeepers like myself?
Well, I have been looking at the numbers from last month, before these marketplace algorithm changes and this month after they started to make said changes. This month is not quite over yet, but we can project where it will end up in terms of marketplace sales.
We have two numbers to look at really. First is marketplace sales and second it total items ordered from the marketplace. If we say that last month (April) is a decent base (January, February and March are my lowest grossing months of the year but April and May are pretty similar heading into summer) and if we normalize both marketplace sales and total items sold through the marketplace, from an April standard 1.00 here is how it shakes out so far.
Marketplace sales Total Market Place Items
April 1.00 1.00
May 1.01 0.93
So sales are up 1% but total items are down 7% for this month AFTER these “great” changes have been made. So, the question to Cafepress is how are these changes helping me make more money through Cafepress exactly when soon my average commission on items sold through the marketplace looks to fall by about 50%? I mean, sure Cafepress spent a lot of time trying to convince me that these changes would benefit myself and other shopkeepers but I ever bought that canned line mind you and I have been busy shoring up my revenues at other PoDs.
Numbers don’t lie. And so far the changes at Cafepress do not bode well for shopkeepers like me who have already seen revenues drop by about 40% following the removal of sales bonuses from the marketplace. Now I am looking at another halving of revenues on top of that.
So does someone from Cafepress want to tell me (again) how great these changes are going to be?
Until I see marked improvement my recommendation to avoid Cafepress as your primary (and even secondary) outlet for PoD products remains solid considering that you can still set your commissions at nearly every other service and make just as much, if not more money there.
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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.
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June 21st, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Recently CafePress began competing with the artists for whom it acts as printer and shipper.
CafePress rents web shops to its artists. The artist creates a website page and manually loads the desired blank products. The artist imports his image onto each product, arranges the products on the page, describes the products, titles the products and tags the images.
Initially, the artist would set a markup and received the markup for each product sold.
However, recently CafePress began competing with its artists, using the artists’ own images. CafePress created a marketplace where a customer can search a keyword. That search brings up artist products. When the customer buys from the marketplace CafePress pays the artist 10% of the price CafePress set. Both the customer and the artist lose money. If the artist’s shop sells a t-shirt for $21, the artist makes $3.01. If the marketplace sells the same shirt for $25, the artist gets $2.50. The customer pays $4 more, and the artist gets $0.51 less.
CafePress tells artists to “promote your own shop,” but CafePress buys Google adwords using the very image tags the artist provided.
CafePress justifies this bait and switch of service terms by telling artists they can opt out if they don’t like the new terms; however, many have spent as much as 7 or 8 years creating as much as 88000 images.
In spite of their sweat-equity, many shopkeepers (content providers) are building shops at other print-on-demand companies and then closing their CafePress shops due to the broken faith and trust, the financial hardship CafePress has delivered into so many lives, and the huge amount of time and dedicated effort all lost in the momentum of their own businesses. Would you keep your AMOCO station franchise if AMOCO built a company store across the street from you?