I think in the wake of the fiasco involving Cafepress pulling the volume bonus rug out from under their shopkeepers they need to consider doing some things that other companies are either not doing or not doing very well in order to make their service more useful in this day and age and maintain their edge. Adding these features, in my mind would help Cafepress stay on top. And if they aren’t willing to do it then any other company that is could certainly bite into their profit margins by implementing these things.

1 Shop Specific Search Feature

Face it, there is no real way to find items easily in any sizable Cafepress store. Sure, you can institute a third party search feature (like Google) but the results that are returned are not usable because they are just text and not designed for commerce sites like Cafepress. Cafepress needs to offer up as part of their basic premium shop package shop specific search features that return items based on keyword matches and tags shopkeepers are placing on their items. This search should return at a minimum a view of the design, a view of a representative item and the price. Ultimately it would be best if the results would be customizable.

There is no reason this cannot be done since the marketplace is already designed to do this. A few parameters could be added so that it would only return items from a specific shop.

2 Offline Product Development Tool

Shopkeepers designing items while visitors are trying to shop consumes resources. At times when the servers are bogged down it can even be a slow process. Cafepress needs to release an offline development tool where shopkeepers can build items, add designs and tag them and then set them to upload automatically to the Cafepress site. Perhaps Cafepress could set this service to accept uploads at very off-peak times like 3 – 5 AM EST when few people are awake and on the internet.

3 Default Product Order Settings

Shopkeepers should be able to set the order in which items appear in their store and sections by default. You can do this somewhat already by creating sets and then using them to load new items. In theory the items should be created and then displayed in the order they appear in the set. However everyone that uses this feature knows that this is a buggy feature. Many times items do not appear in the order that they were placed in to the set. And it is impossible to reorganize a large shop if you decide that you want different items to show up above the fold than the ones currently there.

The answer is an ordering feature where the default arrangement of items can be set if the shopkeeper wants. I particularly like my items in a specific order and have them the same from section to section so the shopper sees a similar set of items each time. I put the best selling types of products towards the top on purpose.

But, when Cafepress runs promos it sure would be nice to be able to move those items involved to the top of the page and above the fold with one or two clicks. For example, if they are running a sale where Ringer T’s are 20% off a shopkeeper could float that item to above the fold in every section with one mouse click and then return it to wherever they had it before once the promo is over.

That’s just three things off the top of my head. I hope Cafepress is listening. Because I know there are some people from other sites that pop by here every now and again and sure would be interested in these ideas.
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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.