Cafepress.com is , in a few words, an online marketplace where you can sell various kind of customized merchandise with some graphical design you choose. But that’s not all. Cafepress.com is more than just an online shop with some degree of customization, it’s a complete creativity center where you can upload some graphics you like, then create t-shirts, cards, calendars, various kinds of gifts, mugs, clocks, etc. with those pictures and finally sell them through your very own online shop or the marketplace they put at your disposition.

What’s notable about the Cafepress.com service, is that they give you tools that allow you to sell your merchandise without having to maintain any kind of stock. The way they can do that is by their unique print-on-demand technology that’s able to print, package and then send a particular item that was bought by Mr. Unknown, your shiny new client.

So surely, given all the amount of work they put on letting you sell through the internet, their service is really expensive, isn’t it? Not at all, in fact, you always win. Every item you sell (said a t-shirt, or a mug) has a base price, so if you want to earn some money you must raise the price or you won’t get anything. It’s that easy! For example, if your t-shirt has a base price of $14.99, and you choose to sell it for $19.99 then you are making a profit of $5 and Cafepress.com is taking their corresponding $14.99.

How can people find my stuff?

Cafepress.com puts at your disposition two kind of shops: Basic shops and Premium Shop. You choose your alternative when you create your account. Their most important difference is that basic shops are free and allow you to sell stuff but don’t allow you to customize the look of your shop as much as you’d like. In the other hand, a Premium shop has a price of $4.99/mo, you can customize its look as much as you like, and you can classify your products under categories and sub-categories.

Every shop gets an unique URL like http://www.cafepress.com/your_id_here, where *your_id_here* is some word you select to use there. Feel free to visit and sell t-shirts from my test shop at http://www.cafepress.com/silvestre

How much can you get and how much does it cost?

Cafepress.com claims some of their shopkeepers are making as much as $100.000/year thanks to their service. And also claims that their premium-shop shopkeepers are doing 10x more than basic-shop shopkeepers.

So, is this good or what?

Good. In all senses. Although you must be aware that unless you have an already well-visited blog or website you won’t do much out of your Cafepress shop. That’s because, as they said in ther about page, they have more than 2.5 million members selling more than 35 million items. And they say that as a good fact! I don’t know you, but for me, as an hypothetical new shopkeeper, is a little depressing. So if you want to get some attention to sell more than one t-shirt, you must be very good attracting attention from strangers.

Another thing I’d like to mention it’s that they are not the masters of usability. They are in the business since 1999, so I’d expect they will do better in that field. It’s not always easy to find your own shops, create a new product or even set the price for them. As an example I can say that it’s far easier to buy your own t-shirt than find how to create one to sell to others.

Did I mention Cafepress.com is a secure place to shop? They are certified by ScanAlert.com, a provider of security certification services. So feel safe to buy from Cafepress.com shops.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 6:53 pm and is filed under eCommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.