Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Cafepress Makes terrible decision

Most of my lens building customers have been Cafepress shop owners! With the email we all received today, I know all of you are feeling the same pain I feel. For those of you who aren't aware... Cafepress.com is making changes! Big changes, the type of changes that effects a lot of people. They are re branding. Changing algorithms and going with a flat price for products throughout their marketplace.
What does that mean for cafepress shop keepers? They will be giving us only 10% for any sales made through the marketplace. If you want to set your prices higher on your own shop, you can do that, but you compete against your own design in the cafepress marketplace!
The cafepress forums are on fire right now with some very upset shop owners. I am included! Thank God I have the freedom of Speech on my own blog here.
Zazzle is going to over take Cafepress with this move! You can bet on that! So how are your zazzle shops? Do you have them polished up? How about your squidoo lenses?
I tell you what, this deal sucks for us, but if you need a squidoo lens to promote your Zazzle gallery, then consider this my CAFEPRESS SUCKS sale.. Tell me you want a Zazzle lens because cafepress sucks, and I will give it to you for half off the regular package price! Sorry, I can't go any lower on my basic price though, those suckers are just to much work to do that cheap! So this deal is for a 50 or 100.00 lens! Contact me.... thomasc@squidbuilders.com

6 comments:

  1. .
    Cafepress has made a huge miscalculation! Their marketplace will see far fewer quality designs once all the outraged shopkeepers have defected to Zazzle, thus decreasing cafepress sales and decreasing buyer satisfaction.

    I hope there is enough backlash from this that they change their minds. It is an awful business decision. They must be reading from eBay's playbook.

    Thanks for your post. I love that Zazzle made ''Welcome Cafepress Shopkeepers'' t-shirts so quickly.

    --Marianne Dow msdowantiques.com
    .

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  2. In light of recent unpopular changes made by CafePress(tm) (1), we would like to extend CafePress Store Owners warm welcome to E-Shirt.com (http://e-shirt.com).
    At E-Shirt.com, we will continue to let you set the markup price for your designs both in our marketplace, and throughout our retail channels. So, not only are most of our product wholesale prices significantly lower than CafePress(tm)(2), but now you can make significantly more on each and every sale of your design, even in our marketplace.

    Compare two identical sales:
    One-sided White T-Shirt Design price set by store owner at $22.99 in the CafePress(tm) or E-Shirt Marketplaces (3):
    Your CafePress Profit: $2.00-$2.50
    Your E-Shirt Profit: $22.99 - $13.95 = $9.04

    You don’t have to be a Rocket Scientist to see many people have already moved over to E-Shirt.com It all adds up to what we call the E-Shirt.com difference. Come and see for yourself.

    (1) Refers to announcements made on April 22, 2009 (http://announcements.cafepress.com/?p=167)
    (2) Tee (cp:$17.99, e-shirt:$13.95), Womens Tee (cp:$17.99, e-shirt:$13.95), Dark Tee (cp:$18.99, e-shirt:$16.95), Womens Tank (CP: $16.99, e-shirt:$13.95), Womens Dark (cp:$19.99, e-shirt:$18.95), Dark Long Sleeve Tee (cp:$23.99, e-shirt:$22.95), Dark Sweatshirt (cp:$29.99, e-shirt:$28.95)
    (3) Calculated using current CafePress and E-Shirt wholesale prices, and statement made by Cafepress (1)

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  3. I am totally disgusted. I have spent hundreds of hours not just at Cafepress but marketing and a lot of money. And being a poor person depended on the Marketplace and I was doing good. I have made Cafepress $7,000 last year and now to make $10 I have to sell $100? They get their same cut, and we get screwed. That is the thank you we get from them. EVERYONE should bail on them. They charge us monthly and now to pay that fee we have to give them our first $70 in sales. UNREAL

    Where is the Voodo Doll because the need a good lesson in Karma. They have hurt a lot of people.

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  4. I recently wrote a blog post you might like. It's about the importance of SEO when it comes to marketing, how Cafepress enticed us all to build their website and do their SEO for them, and about the money grab they're doing and the impact it has on shopkeepers now. http://healingcommunication.blogspot.com/2009/06/importance-of-good-seo.html

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  5. My revenue dropped 1/5 since this BAD DECISION BY CAFEPRESS and their revenue has INCREASED! BOOOO!!!

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  6. It's very disappointing. I recently get Cafepress half understood. Got several basic shops started now. What few sales I've finally made have come from the market place. I was so excited until seeing my commission. It's hard to remain excited over a little more than $6.

    A lot of time was wasted for pocket change. It's time to rethink the whole thing now.

    ReplyDelete