There are about 11 days left until the new commission structure is put into place at Cafepress. Some shopkeepers have closed up shop already, some are waiting until June 1, or until their shop subscription runs out. Some are going to “wait and see” how it goes, and some have decided to accept the changes and stay.
I admit, I’ve had a few fleeting thoughts about staying in the marketplace. I figured hey, some money is better than no money. But then I looked at the numbers again, and making $50.00 instead of $300.00 isn’t even worth it. Add to that the fact that I would be competing with my own website and my Zazzle shop.
I’m not going to opt out of the marketplace though, I will just be removing my image tags so that my items will not be visible in the marketplace, but will still be available to those who are currently affiliating me.
Meanwhile Cafepress has gone on like nothing ever happened. They’ve announced a partnership with American Idol, new colors for organic shirts, new water bottles (seriously? for $24.99?), and the new Cafepress Groups site. With all these changes combined with their complete lack of response to shopkeepers concerns and complaints, they’ve made it clear that they are taking the company in a new direction.
I’m still working on getting my designs all moved over to Zazzle. After that I will be reworking my offsite shop so that it points to my Zazzle shop. I plan on moving my CPShop to a secondary domain, so that when Cafepress decides to screw over the premium shop owners, I can just shut it down. I’m also going to look into more POD services for use as a backup shop, should something like this happen again.
Tags: cafepress sucks
It’s nice to hear someone else has the same concerns with the changes at CafePress. Every since the 2008 presidential election, I’ve watched them slowly turning the bow more and more left. Once they put in the official blog, it was all over for me. I shut down all but one premium shop and will keep it open until I move all of my designs off. I’m on Zazzle (because they have bumper stickers) but I’m also at spreadshirt and I’m looking at a few others. No more will I “put all my eggs in one basket”. Thanks again for your entry. I will add you to my blogroll when my server has been restored sometime in the A.M. (down now for over 12 hours and I’m about to die).
I’m giving up on Cafepress too…not closing my shop YET (since they JUST took out my premium fees a few weeks ago), but I will be putting all of my time and attention into the store I opened at Printfection instead. I look for lots of growth in CP’s competitors now that so many shopkeepers are fleeing for greener pastures.
Recently Cafe Press began competing with its artists.
CP rents 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 set a markup and received the markup when a product sold.
However, recently Cafe Press began competing with its artists, using the artists’ own images. Cafe Press created a marketplace where a customer can search a keyword. That search brings up artist products. When the customer buys from the marketplace Cafe Press pays the artist 10% of the price Cafe Press 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 justifies this bait and switch 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.
Cafe Press tells artists to ‘promote your own shop,’ but Cafe Press buys Google adwords using the very image tags the artist provided.
Would you franchise an AMOCO station if AMOCO built a company store across the street from you?