Zazzle has updated their category (formerly product lines) structure to allow shopkeepers to more easily manage what is going on within their shop and implemented the ability for these categories to be displayed on the main page instead of just single items.

You’ve been asking and we’ve been listening. Zazzle now offers:

1) Improved Category and Product Merchandising for Store Owners Create categories (formerly called product lines) and display them with personalized icons on your storefront. Set the display order of all categories and products within your store with easy drag and drop tools, or choose quick sort defaults. Easily feature your best products in your “front window” with drag and drop. Display categories fully expanded or as a scrollable list. Learn more here.

Now when you enter categories you see only the items in that category also making it much easier to manage what is going on instead of having pages and pages of designs to scroll through while managing your shops. However one thing that I have found annoying is that apparently you also get a display of items that are in all the sub categories of that category too. For example, if you have a Category A with sub categories B, C & D when you are looking at Category A you see everything in B, C & D too. Maybe there is a way around this, but I have not found it yet and if there is not it is still inferior to the systems implemented by Cafepress, Printfection and others. However it is a major step in the right direction to making more user friendly shops and helping shopkeepers in an age where some PoD’s don’t seem to care all that much. I’ll let you guess as to which one I am referring to with that comment.

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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.

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

Land of the Free Studios, Inc., my company, relies heavily on online t-shirt and gift sales to keep going strong. But we do not use just Cafepress. We have products at other sites too such as Printfection and Zazzle. While Printfection has the versatility of CP when it comes to ease of designing a store and Zazzle does not, Zazzle outperforms Printfection for the products we have available on those site. Those revenues have also been growing while receipts from CP have shrank in large part to new pricing and bonus structures. Sure, the economy has something to do with that too but with growth at other sites it is hard to see that CP could not be doing things better on their end.

Another tool we use to generate revenues if Google Adsense. Many of the sites we operate are monetarized to generate revenue from ads that Google serves. This revenue stream has also been grown in the last year to help take some of the sting away from changes at Cafepress and further illustrates how being diverse in your revenue streams can keep you afloat when changes that are not of your own doing come a calling.

As each egg you hatch grows and matures it will slowly replace revenue lost to another source.

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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.

His reference is of course to the fact that no matter how big you think you are, someone else is always able to take you down a peg. Or in this case, have you over dinner as the main course.

Cafepress has been doing a lot of things to shopkeepers that have done nothing to help us make money using their system. We are like our heroes in Star Wars and they are like the Huge Gooberfish that has latched on, making us squirm. Well, not much has changed on that front except that a bigger fish has risen up and taken a bite out of them it seems.

That bigger fish? None other than Google.

Here is the email I received today from the Death Star that is Google Headquarters:

Hello,

We’re happy to let you know that as of September 3rd, individual sellers on marketplaces no longer need to submit feeds to Google Product Search. Going forward, marketplaces will be responsible for submitting a feed of all their sellers’ items, so we will be retiring your account to avoid duplicate entries on Product Search. Cafepress will also be responsible for ensuring that your feeds are up-to-date and compliant with our policies.

In most cases, marketplaces already submit feeds of their sellers’ items. If you have any further questions about your items or Google Product Search, please contact Cafepress. We look forward to continuing to display your products, and hope you enjoy the new streamlined submission process.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Base product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

With one swipe of their hand, and with no notice (ala Cafepress) Google has removed my products from their database leaving only the few that Cafepress has chosen to include in their own product feeds. My understanding is that Cafepress is not allowed to submit their entire product database to Google so the number of those products are limited. In the past before I started submitting my own product feeds I never had all of my products showing up in Google’s shopping database so I must still work under the assumption that this is true.

And while this sucks for me, do not think for a moment that it does not suck for Cafepress too! Because one of the ways they were able to get more products in the database was for individual shopkeepers to submit their own feeds which in the past Google has explicitly told me they had no problem with. Now things have changed and it looks like thousands, perhaps tens of thousands and maybe even hundreds of thousands of CP based products are gone. If my assumptions are right, while I might loose some sales multiply those losses by thousands of shopkeepers and think about how much money Cafepress stands to loose.

Now the rumor is that Cafepress worked with Google to accomplish this feat because shopkeepers were pulling their products from the Marketplace and then submitting their own feeds. My understanding is that Cafepress was caught off guard by this sudden move and caught unawares. While I find it hard to believe that Google would make such a change while not consulting and contacting one of the largest retailers using its services, I sort of can believe it based on the general arrogance that oozes from Google at times. The fact that the email came from a do not reply address and specifically tells us to direct our questions to Cafepress without notifying Cafepress is just typical Google. Couple that with the arrogance of dropping this major change right before a holiday weekend as Google employees are heading out of the office only further shows how arrogant Google is.

Also it should be noted that this applies to other PoDs too! That includes Zazzle. So it does not appear to be a CP spearheaded effort.

But what is done is done. Looks like Cafepress will have to have a chat with Google to find a solution. But in the meantime let me run down my thoughts directed at Cafepress.

First, how does it feel to have a bite taken out of you by a bigger fish? Hurts doesn’t it?

Second, now that you have have this bite taken out of you will you think though your actions that take bites out of smaller fish (like shopkeepers) before biting them?

Third, if you go whining to Google what are the odds that they will care? And if they don’t care and make you feel like you have made shopkeepers feel will this affect how you treat us in the future?

See, right now you have a bunch of us talking to Google trying to get them to understand our predicament and how some of the prices are different between our shops and the marketplace and how by doing this Google is not letting people find the best price! But we are not on your side Cafepress. We are not on your side because you’ve kicked us in the babymaker too many times for us to be. We are on our own side.

So all you are getting is even more negative press. Whereas if you hadn’t grabbed our nuts and twisted so many times over the past year we would be signing your praises and on your side in this fight.

But like I said, we are not doing that.

Would you like some ice for your own babymaker Cafepress? We’ve got a lot to spare because ours are very sore. No thanks to you.

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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.

* CafePress may help determine what products your designs will be available on in the CafePress Marketplace and may automatically add your designs to additional products for you. For example, if a customer wants your design on a sweatshirt, and you don’t offer a sweatshirt we can add your design to a sweatshirt.

* To improve the printing quality, CafePress may automatically modify your designs. For instance we may clean up JPG artifacting, adjust colors for optimal printing on different printers and products, and adjust placement on different products.

Lots of red flags are popping up in my head all day as I have been looking at it off and on thinking that if I just let it sit and then look at it again I will be less annoyed/concerned. These two items alone just bother me on so many levels however that each time I read the email I do not get any peace.

First of all, I can understand and wholly agree with Cafepress that their marketplace is their marketplace and that they can put the products someone has created and submitted to appear there up as they see fit, even choosing to not show certain ones if that is their preference. But what I certainly DO NOT agree with is Cafepress taking carte blanche liberty to put my designs on products I have expressly NOT put them on for whatever reason.

For example, many of my old designs (before the whole dark t-shirt option) are simply not suitable for display on such products and would have obscene white space showing. I honestly DO NOT care if a customer wants one of these designs on a dark t-shirt, I DO NOT WANT THEM ON DARK T-SHIRTS! The customer might be perfectly fine with the awful presentation but I, as the owner of the design, would not be and if it reflected badly on my company you can bet I would get pissed!

Also, can you imagine a shopkeeper trying to run a family friendly shop and establishing such a reputation having Cafepress begin slapping their images on thongs? Yeah, I do not think Cafepress has thought this little maneuver through very much. But hey, what else is new?

The second change is equally disturbing in that I have placed my designs as I want them on the product. If Cafepress starts moving designs around because, let’s say, someone wants an image centered on a mug opposite of the handle but I purposefully design so that it is on one of the sides what happens when someone else sees the mug, likes the mug and goes to my storefront because, I assume Cafepress will not crop out my address, copyright info, etc., and finds it a different way? Then I start getting emails asking for the product different ways and spend time hunting through my image basket to find that design and make another version? Or what? Tell them to go directly to Cafepress and I get only 10% commission?

Yeah, not liking this idea very much. Although I do think that it is smart for Cafepress to do color adjustment because this is one of my biggest gripes with their service in that images designed within gamut and that other PoD services print just fine seem to come out a little funky at CP. I have more than a few designs that I have had to adjust especially for CP and their printing style because for some odd reason a color no one else has trouble printing cannot be printed properly by CP.

Stay tunned, and keep and eye on where all this leads.

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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.

Well, interestingly, it looks like Cafepress has not grown in terms of the numbers of checks they have been sending out over the past several years. This tends to mean that they were not helping to create more and more successful shopkeepers as time went on. Here is the chart:

What I did was basically plot each point which is a difference between the current month’s check number and the previous month’s check number to show that over the past two to three years Cafepress has not been sending out more checks month to month. My interpretation of this, again, is that they were not helping to create more and more successful shopkeepers which would in turn means more and more success for them.

Note the large spike four years back. This is an anomaly I think as mysteriously the check numbers bounced from the 50,000’s to over 100,000. It looks like CP simply changed their numbering system. Either that or they had a really good Christmas with a lot of really small checks.

I think it is clear from these numbers that CP hit critical mass sometime ago. More people were signing up for their service but they were not making significantly more sales off those people that did sign up. If they were you would expect to see the chart going up and more checks being written month to month.

This could also help to explain some of the recent changes that have gone on and for the worse if you ask me. Sure many of us prior to the changes were slowly increasing our monthly sales but it looks like CP was not patient enough to let its revenues grow organically with their top shopkeepers leading the way. Instead they instituted drastic changes that added lots of new cash to their pockets by first removing MP commissions then by setting prices in the marketplace and cutting commissions to 10%.

Looks like they needed money and they found their way of making that goal a reality. These are actually typical tactics of a company that fears there is no more room to grow and they see the revenue curve starting to level off.

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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.

Just how much is Cafepress costing me per sale while not increasing sales? With my old price structure I was averaging just under $3.00 per marketplace sale ($2.985). Right now I am nearly half that at $1.637 per sale mostly because I am getting a paultry $0.50 per bumper sticker. I told Cafepress when they called me to discuss this change and told me how it would drive more traffic and increase marketplace sales that I would believe it when I see it and that they would have to double my MP sales to make their service worth my while in terms of vast future updates and new products. Well, I am still waiting…

Oh, and they still would then need to double my sales on top of that too to make up for marketplace commission losses as well.

So far I am right (in that they would not do what they said they could) and CP is wrong.

Yes, that is right … they have smaller stickers selling for more than bigger ones. As if the $0.50 per bumper sticker they had been given us when they were at $5.00 wasn’t bad enough!
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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.

Of course July 4th is the Independence Day here in the United States, but July also has the other following notable events:

July 10: Teddy Bear Picnic Day
July 14: MLB All Star Game
July 19: Hot Dog Day
July 20: Anniversary of the first moon landing
July is National Adopt a Cat Month
July is Candy Month

Just some ideas for those of you with designs that fit into these categories. Use these events and more to help draw people to your site and generate interest in your wares.

Personally I think these things all point to one plan. Each of these moves are designed with one thing in mind – the bottom line of Cafepress. Since we are told that Cafepress is not in any sort of financial trouble, and if they were they wouldn’t tell us anyway, everything mirrors what I have seen many times over.

I personally believe that the owners are trying to position themselves for a sale of the company. Yes, this has been denied, but if the company is not in financial difficulty then why make such drastic changes which will certainly help CP in the short term. But once all the shopkeepers get their Zazzle, etc. stores fully running it will certainly only hurt CP in the long run?

Quick changes to increase cash flow are only done for a couple reasons. The big one is to make the books look so awesome that they can command top dollar at sale. The second one is to try to stave off financial failure.
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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.