A reader has sent a few questions that I’d like to answer in the form of a post.

Yong asks:

Do you have more than one shop under Cafepress?

Do you see a big increase during Christmas (Nov./Dec.)?

To answer the first question, I have five premium shops and sixteen basic shops at Cafepress. All are in various states of development/neglect. Most of my basic shops are either for odd designs that wouldn’t fit in with my premium stores, or are acting as placeholders to reserve the name for future premium shops. (I’ve also registered a lot of corresponding domain names for future use with the shops.)

I have three galleries at Zazzle, a shop at Printfection, and a sort of shop at Spreadshirt. I’ve also been looking in to other POD companies such as Comboutique that may be more “shipping friendly” to overseas shoppers, and have reserved some of my shop names at those places as well.

As for the second question, there is definitely a HUGE increase in sales for me in November and December. In fact, those two months traditionally account for more than half of my yearly sales. To illustrate this, I have created a chart that shows how my sales are spread out over the months. These figures are from 2007, so as you can see, my income in February accounted for about 1%, where December was 34%.

Keep in mind that this pattern varies with different shopkeepers. While I am scraping by in February, others who concentrate on St. Patrick’s Day stuff are raking it in, and in the summer when a lot of people experience a slow down, my sales usually start to creep up. But I think that most shopkeepers (as well as retailers in general) will agree the December is the best month of the year!

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