Merchandising. CafePress or Zazzle?
Posted on: June 5, 20094 comments so far (is that a lot?)
For customized merchandising fulfillment , Cafepress and Zazzle are pretty much the only games in town if you consider their range of products and personalized store front capability. So which one? It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. Consider this: The Star Trek franchise is with CafePress and the Star Wars franchise is with Zazzle. Soooo…you decide.
CafePress has been in the game longer than anybody BUT they charge a fee for your customized store front (about fifty bucks a year). I went with Zazzle because I’m a newbie and its FREE. You dig?
- Here’s the process essentially for flooding the market place with your useless crap:
1) Create your store front. Easy.
2) Create your branded graphics per given templates for T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, etc.
3) Upload your images and slap them on the product where you can see how they look in 360 degree preview and adjust placement and size accordingly.
4) Determine what you want your price mark up to be and then put it in your store.
5) Embed the code for “products widget” on your website or blog (see the side bar).
They take care of shopping cart, payment and shipping. Products are manufactured as they are ordered. They mail you your profits.
It is important that I add here, if you are serious about making money from your products none of these full fulfilment services is the way to go. All of their base product prices are fairly high to begin with so your profit margins are going to be very low. More importantly, as you generate sales you’re not getting the direct contact with your “costumers”. This is key. Your sales are being brokered by a middle man who is building their own relationship with the costumer not you.
Soooo…this is only phase one for me to quickly get some products out there. I don’t want to be tripping over coffee cup boxes in my living room and standing in post office lines regularly at this point.
I’ll post results as they come in-Allen
June 5th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Interesting and helpful post Allen…thanks. I’m going to get me a Smigly coffee cup for sure. I can only think of one better way to wake up in the morning. You feel me?
June 6th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Cool, I’ll check out Zazzle then.
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:23 am
Recently CafePress began competing with the artists for whom it acts as printer and shipper.
CafePress 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?
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Well, that’s another reason to do your own printing and shipping if you want to make any real money. As for your AMOCO hypothetical, even if they didn’t build a company store across the street, they’re still the ones who are making the real money not you the franchise owner.