I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what to do. Was very torn for a while. I hate giving away my designs for nothing in the Cafepress marketplace, yet if I opt out, I probably won’t make any money at all. I had nearly 1000 visitors to my store from outside the marketplace in June and not one single shop sale. Not one.
My store at Zazzle isn’t doing any better. Everything is buried in the Marketplace of Spam. Check out the Zazzle forums and you’ll see multiple threads on the topic. Stores flooding the marketplace with hundreds of thousands of designs and half of them don’t even make sense.
So what does one do?
Leave the Cafepress shop open and continue to compete with myself?
Opt out of the Cafepress marketplace and see what happens?
Continue updating my Cafepress shop and building my website to drive shop sales? What if their next decision is to start dictating markups within the shops? What if they cut off the shops all together?
What if I spend a lot of time and energy building a store at Zazzle, and a few years down the road they do the same thing? Then I’m back to square one. Again.
Is it time to graduate from the POD world?
The only thing I’ve decided for sure is that my niche needs a complete redesign. I’m just going to leave my Cafepress store open and opted in for now, taking any pennies they throw my way as a bonus. Most of my designs are a couple years old, and rather than move them all over to Zazzle (which I will probably eventually do, it just won’t be at the top of my list), I’ve decided it’s time for a new style and entirely new line of designs. Maybe even a new name. I’ve already got page of new ideas, and I’m excited because they are different. Different than all my competitors at Cafepress and different than my Arch Nemesis who has the #1 spot on Google for “blankity blank shirt”. (I’m at #20, which is an improvement over #74 a year ago.)
So, I’ve got to think of a new name, work on designs, and decide which POD to go with (possibly Skreened) or consider even getting them screen printed. Ugh, I think I may have just confused myself even more.
Good luck man. I am in a similar boat. And have similar ideas although I am doing OK at Zazzle at the moment. I had already established myself over there before the fallout though. I’m going to set up on skreened with my original designs and see how that goes and try my new line with new style at Spreadshirt. I’m going vector for that one. Also thinking of graduating from PODs at the moment too.