I am still here with you. I feel I'm one of the few now. For those of you who are lost and have no idea what I'm talking about: Cafepress.com recently went from allowing all shop keepers setting their own markups to now a measlily 10% markup on products. This outraged the entire work at home force who are artists and create their own designs and sell them at print on demand service sites such as Cafepress. We lost our bonus tier structures, cookie overrides on sales, and trust in our "boss".Let's talk about two key things I want to mention here.
Reshape Your Links
First of all, you should always tell your customers to go to http://www.cafepress.com/KaptainMyke and never http://shop.cafepress.com/sk/KaptainMyke anymore. Replace "KaptainMyke" with "your shopname", e.g. Cafepress makes more money than you do
if you point your visitors to the marketplace at this point. Save the customer money and have them support you instead! Just tryin to help! You can still have a $5 markup on the following products and you still undercut Cafepress: light t-shirt, jr ringer shirt, ringer tee, white t-shirt, yellow t-shirt, green t-shirt, organic fitteds, baseball jerseys. The other products I'd recommend a $1-2 markup on so you undercut CP.Screw those greedy bastards and stop pointing customers to the MP, damnit!!!!
Adwords
Secondly, forget Adwords! You think you can compete with Cafepress's $1, 2, sometimes $3 PER CLICK MAX BIDS on some products? Nevermind my $0.49, sometimes I'll splurge on a good one at $0.56 per click myself. That still costs me over $500-$600 per month on my little campigns for me. I wonder where they got the extra money to pay for these advertising campaigns now? Hmmm. Oh well, I'm stupid and I could never figure out stuff like that, right? Arg!
Recesssion 2009
Yeah, only people with jobs are buying your products, ladies and gents.
Meanwhile,
I'm staying in the marketplace only so I can use Cafepress for their own monopolizing tactics at customer exposure. I have since renamed my shop at Cafepress to "Shop KaptainMyke.com for CHEAPER PRICES! ! !" and that has seemed to send more "shop sales" my way than "marketplace sales".
Just always be one step ahead, people!
My KaptainMyke Brand Skreened Gallery of t-shirts has sales daily now.
By the way, "SHOP http://www.kaptainmyke.com/ FOR CHEAPER PRICES ! ! ! "
bye
-KaptainMyke
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3 comments:
It got even better with the $15 Sale today (is anyone surprised they didn't mention this ahead of time?)
I got my first $1.50 commission on a t-shirt this morning and realized I must have been chosen as one of the "selected designs," (which we can read as, "anything left in the marketplace," no doubt).
My objection is not so much the 10%- that's common in licensing. I object to the fact that there are 2 different prices for many items, one in the marketplace, one in the individual's Shop. In my book, and I have been a professional artist for 30 years, that is just plain unethical. How is it that Cafepress doesn't know this?
I just got sick of the whole situation. I was losing money and doing about the same # of sales.
I contacted my CP account rep and he didn't really seem to care and told me no one else had complained (which is definitely not true from just a simple google search)!
Either way, I've opted out and now my sales have actually went up!
My only regret is that I can't encourage affiliate sales any more.
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