Anyone Making Money with Cafepress?

Hey Lynn,

To answer your question about competitors - I would like to recommend spreadshirt.com to you. We are new in US, just started a couple of months ago, but developing very rapidly, we are a leader in Europe though, what gives you access to the whole EU market in a blink of an eye. I think you will also be surprised by the wide selection of colors that we carry and the ability of printing on black and dark colors. And it is free to set your store and add as many designs as possible - we take care of everything providing highest quality for your products. I hope that you will use our services and recommend them to others.

Bartosz

 

Hey Lynn,

To answer your question about competitors - I would like to recommend spreadshirt.com to you. We are new in US, just started a couple of months ago, but developing very rapidly, we are a leader in Europe though, what gives you access to the whole EU market in a blink of an eye. I think you will also be surprised by the wide selection of colors that we carry and the ability of printing on black and dark colors. And it is free to set your store and add as many designs as possible - we take care of everything providing highest quality for your products. I hope that you will use our services and recommend them to others.

Bartosz


ps. I think I posted this somewhere else as well, sorry for that...

 

The bad thing is that: speadshirt supports only limited countries!

 

I have a client keen on this for their site.. never heard of it before myself - shows how much I know.

So my point in resurrecting this thread is... is there any new news on the game with cafepress or is the consensus still: poor quality / high prices / slow shipping times / low turnover?

 

There is another aspect of CP that has not been discussed here. This is how I use them:

I have a store on CP that has a few products related to my main site that would be too much hassle to offer if I had to do all the work making and shipping them myself. I used SEO principles in designing my store look and link to and from it with nice anchor text. I now have a PR5 store that is an extra link to my site. This PR5 link not only costs nothing, but it also makes a modest profit. Furthermore the CP store appears in the SERPs as a separate listing, in addition to my main site for similar keywords. The result is:

1) I make a few dollars from CP.
2) I get a nice PR5 link to my main site.
3) I get an additional "funnel" into the SERPs that sends me extra visitors to my main site where I make additional sales.

I would recommend everyone start a CP store on the theme of their site for all the above reasons.

Main site - http://www.japanese-name-translation.com/
CP site - http://www.cafepress.com/japanese_names

 

I think that their t-shirts are overpriced. Does anyone another good company to design t-shirts with that aren't so expensive?

 

Great posts here!

I've been looking for a way to help my wife earn some extra cash and I thought a Cafe' Press shop might do the trick. I'm glad I didn't waste my time and money on a project like this! It looks like the amount of time required to make this work is more than we have... Thanks a bunch!

 

I have to argue this point
I make my living at Cafepress Zazzle and Printfection look at my post in the thread ...
General Business Anyone making real money with Cafepress, Zazzle, ShirtCity, etc?

 

Zazzle has come a long way in the last year and have great new promotional avenues!

 

I recently posted how I make a good income from Cafepress and suggested others to try it BUT I am retracting my suggestion and if you are interested in working with t-shirt design you are FAR better off going to Zazzle and Printfection - Read below to see why: This announcement in today is causing quite a rukus at CP among the serious people who sell at Cp for the main income and I for one will be leaving.
(Let me ADD that Cp makes it next to impossible for a sale to remain a shop sale- if a customer shooses a shirt and then decides to change the color or size by calling CP- it then becomes a marketplace sale- so it is not that we do not drive sales from outside the cafepress marketplace there are ways they undo our shop sales which until now was not too big a deal except last year they took away our bonuses. )

 

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?

 

chick this out for hilarity on a shirt http://shops.cafepress.com/stupidobbles

 

Are people still making money from Cafe Press? I'm curious.

 

Those guys are on the verge of bankruptcy.
Starbucks has gone from scaling down its expansion plans to closing down stores. Howard Schultz (starbucks founder) should have stayed in business; instead of planting his nose into politics.
The future belongs to coffee machines; not starbucks and not cafe press.