The cafepress experiment as yet another method of marketing as been a failure. Being an Amazon Associate has worked out reasonably well. People regularly buy things from amazon via my site. Adding google ads has worked well. People click those ads regularly and while many of the ads attached to the game reviews earn .01 each, some of the ads on other parts of the site bring in much more money. But the cafepress site earns nothing.
Part of that was that for a long time, you simply could not find my cafepress store from the main cafepress site. You could find it by searching for "Doodle monsters" in google quite easily. But it never came up when searching or browsing the cafepress site.
At some point, this changed. So from here on out, it's simply that no one needs doodle monsters in their life. I'll just have to cope. :)
Recently CafePress began competing with the artists for whom it acts as printer and shipper.
ReplyDeleteCafePress 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?