A Guide to Cafepress Markup Commissions

Cafepress.com has custom markups that you can set on all your custom made Print on Demand products. This is a familiar territory with competing websites as well.

Unspoken Rules?

Let's get right to it without beating around the bush. This is merely advice speaking through the window of experience and, nothing more. Seasoned veterans at Cafepress who have been around for a while typically have the higher markups than new shops who have just opened their doors.

Rebuttal Alert! Hey, but that's not true! What if you are a great designer and it has nothing to do with how long you've been around!?!

HOT TIP! Ah, it's yet another trick on the mind with the analytical thinking of a person sitting at home or work on the computer shopping. If you have only 10 sections of a few products with $10-15 markups, a potential visitor is going to think to himself, "Who the hell are you?"

If you have been around for two or three years (maybe longer), you now have most likely 200-500 sections containing hundreds of variations, styles, and colors. The potential visitor now sees thousands of products at a higher price. Hmmm, that must mean quality. That must mean you can be trusted. Maybe now he's thinking, "Wow, you've been at this for a long time. Look at this large selection of products! I think I might buy from you." Don't you do this when you shop online? I know I do. What makes my customers any different? They are just like you and me because we are all consumers.

When you start out, you gotta learn the ropes anyway. Take it slow and I'd start with a $2-3 dollar markup. Build up that inventory and fill the store with coupons from this guy. Remember, your free coupons are paying for your Cafepress markups anyway. There is a free coupon feed you can integrate into your shop. Do a Google search for "cafepress coupons" at any day or time to post up new ones. (new window)

Go on, give yourself a raise! You've earned it, 'ol boy or gal...

If you've been around for three or four years, I'd start going higher on the markups. Make sure your Internet presence is strong, though. As long as you are constantly advertising and promoting yourself, I'd go with a high markup tier on your products. Go fer it!

A $15 button or sticker?

Of course, I wouldn't do a $10 markup across the board. A product that is already $2 or $3 at cost is just not reasonable with such an extreme markup. The lower the cost on the product, I'd recommend choosing your markups by percentage. A $2.50 item should be commissioned at no more than 50%. Remember, (usually) these items at Cafepress are for that little "extra" to meet or beat that coupon that's burning a hole into their computer screens.

Oh, while I'm reminded of this - I personally would never pay over $5-$7 for a bumper sticker. Markup your commissions and look at the final selling price to your customers. Would you pay that? If you wouldn't, neither would your potential customer.

Adjust Accordingly

SUPER DUPER HOT TIP ON FIRE!!! Open up your Google Analytics accounts if you got 'em folks....90% of all large successful Cafepress stores reach at least 85% new visitors versus 15% repeat visitors. At least 5% of the repeat visitors are your competitors. Trust me...

My point? If most of your traffic is new visitors, most won't know it if you've made a change to your site or Cafepress store! Change your markups and give them at least 2 weeks. Check your saved email sale reports (if you got 'em). If not, enable email notifications of sales at Cafepress and save every one of them from now on. Now you can start seeing waves of your 85% new visitor reach and whether or not they will pay your price you've set. Sales will go down if they think you're too high.

If your sales slow down, go back, lower the markups a little and wait another few weeks. If you want solid results, wait an entire 45 day period from the 3rd day of any given month of the year.

I have no sales! I only make $10 a month! What gives?

Another possibility of zero or low sales is you are selling a product that just won't sell, low promotion, no advertising, or you just plain suck. Sorry, I have to be honest here!

I've made hundreds of designs that haven't sold at all before. I've made some that have only sold one in an entire year. It happens. It's what makes the world unique and different. One might think your design is crappy, but another peroson will absolutely adore it. Just don't take it personal! It's just business.

What do you do? You make a TON of options for them. Make a blue version, a red version, a blue with orange version, a PINK version for the ladies....give people options and make more designs! You're fishing your castnet of creativity and design in Cafepress's ocean of a marketplace. Maybe somebody will see your vision or humor.

I myself make some rather bizarre or twisted types of what I consider "humor". Call it dry, call it dark, call it what you want - it's KaptainMyke.

The rumor mill is spinning

I heard numbers. I've heard $12-15 markups, even as high as $25 per product! These guys are making some money! Lordy! they also got thousands and thousands of sections, grandfathered in from the recent Cafepress section limits on shops.

If you are a great designer or author, people will pay your price if they want it bad enough. Again, if I want something bad enough, I'll pay that extra dollar myself. So will your potential site visitor.

Be creative

A great and creative example of an extreme markup is the $100 Shirt at Cafepress. Does he sell any? If so, how many? Comment here if you read this, Mr. $100 T-Shirt Guy. I'd really like to know.

The sky's the limit with your imagination.

The SLOW SEASON

The dreaded slow periods of any luxury retail website that sells products (that we all don't really need) suffers from this period twice a year. When? After Christmas and after school's out.

Period one: January to April. Period two: May to July. Things start getting good when grade school and college returns every fall. Then, Christmas comes again!

It really IS the season to be Merry at Cafepress!

At Christmas I'd hike up any markup you got currently by $5 or more (at least!). People will pay anything during Christmas time. Why? I do, why wouldn't anybody else? Consider it your bonus for the year. Everyone typically has received some extra money during this holiday
season at any job. Albeit tips, wages, bonus checks, or "Jelly of the Month" club memberships.

Inflation's a B!7@%!

This is 2008. Gas is high, groceries are high, shipping costs are OUTRAGEOUS, contract work, services, etc., etc., LIFE - everything is going up in price.

Why don't you?

Making money with Cafepress and other Print on Demand Services

Getting Started with Cafepress

A variety of services on the Internet involve "Print on Demand". Print on Demand is a technique that involves using a machine that presses a design or word onto a product with heat transfer, such as a tee shirt, mousepad, calendar, wall clock, mug, hat, sticker, poster, or anything else your heart desires. Print on Demand (POD) is another common term used for digital printing.

There are a vast selection of websites out there that offer this service. Some require a minimum order, which can be costly. I'm going to recommend three of the best sites that offer this service for free. You get to place your own creative masterpeices in their marketplaces and sell for a profit. After a 45 day customary holding period for commissions, you get a check in the mailbox.

Don't worry, the 45 day hold on your hard earned commission check is due to possibilities such as: credit card declined, a return, an exchange, a misprint. This is common for these types of services.

For those of you with limited creative talent and can't draw a stick figure if you tried, you still can make money by selling other people's products. You must have some sort of understanding of HTML and tracking codes for reporting. I'll explain those techniques later.

The first Print on Demand service website that I highly recommend the most to anybody out there is Cafepress.com.

My primary business source of income, KaptainMyke.com, is distributed by Cafepress. A privately owned company, Cafepress has been around for quite some time now, since 1999. I opened my first cafepress store in May of 2005. It started out as a free store, limiting you to just one design across many products. This limitation also includes no customization or anything beyond the free template supplied for your store.

TIP! Free stores can bring in anywhere from $20-50 a month if you are a good designer and offer tee shirts that people want.

SUPER HOT TIP! Stay away from categories that are too popular and overcrowded. I would avoid these categories: Religion, Pets, Holidays, and Cars. Why? There's too many designs, that's why!

You want to find a niche, a topic that not many people have products for, but something people are searching for like crazy. You're probably now thinking, "Okay, then what niche should I do?" That's the part where your brain comes in. You have to find your niche. Look around Cafepress and see who's the most popular shops, and why. This doesn't mean do what they are doing, this means do something like what they are doing.

Niches

While on that subject, the tee shirt business can be stressful and competitive. Others will always use your ideas and either spinoff another shirt from it, or blatently take your idea. It happens, and you just have to accept it sometimes. To combat some of that from happening, Cafepress has made its affiliate program, so others can still profit from the same ideas - equally.

KaptainMyke.com has released some of the most original, and unique ideas to the movie/television related genre of tee shirts. Some people, even licensed, official tshirt companies, have had movie studios (like Universal Studios) shut down our products due to copyright infringement and produced their own licensed official copies of our ideas. It happens. Some of our tee shirt designs were the first ever, from forgotten 80s movies and tv shows. I know, because I did my research. Surprisingly, waves of variations of the same movies and shows started appearing across the Internet. You can't point your finger to others saying they took your idea, especially if you are in the movie/tv related quotes genre, since you get the idea from said movie or tv show that actually owns the idea in the first place!

Doing fan shirts by fans for fans can be a tricky business to deal with. You have to be careful and know when to back down when dealing with copyrights. Some studios allow it. For example, the 1980 release of Flash Gordon had underground unofficial tee shirts swarming the streets and media. Everyone was free to make "Gordon's Alive?" shirts in order to push and promote the movie's release. The same thing happened yet again, this time in 2006 with the power of the Internet - Snakes on a Plane, the movie. Cafepress partnered with Snakes on a Plane and New Line Cinema and allowed fans to make SoaP fan merchandise, as long as you didn't feature a face or actual images from the film. The name of the movie itself created widespread promotion, like a virus across the web. Cafepress storeowners, including myself, made a decent income during that season of the movie's theatrical release.

Viral fan base is what makes our pop culture so vibrant and different. After all, if it wasn't for the fans, nobody would buy the movies and tv programs on DVD, right? We as a modern society should believe in spreading the love of American cinema by making fan merchandise inspired by pop culture, movies, and television. Support your favorite movies and television shows by reminding others in society of them! Someone walks up to you and asks, "Where is that from? What is that? It looks familiar to me." Mention the movie or tv show it's from and that person walks away thinking, "OH Yeah! Now I remember!"

Most likely, that person will go rent or buy the film. It works. Sometimes movie studios and television studios do not agree.

So what do you do? Keep designing, keep coming up with new ideas and stay ahead of the competitors! Tread lightly. Stay under the lawyer's and studio's radar, follow their rules and accept that sometimes studios don't agree with viral marketing techniques in order to further promote their movies, toys, games, dvds, and related streams of income for them. It takes convincing to let the studios realize they ultimately make the extra profits as well, sometimes way above the "little man's cafepress shop". -Wink.

Back to basics

At Cafepress, for $6.95 a month you can upgrade to premium shop status, with multiple sections and design choices. After you start making money, the monthly fee is paid for itself and you forget there is even a fee.

HOT TIP! One of the biggest recommendations to trying this program out is by getting a domain name, and setup hosting for it. This is because you are going to want to do way more than anybody else with your cafepress store. With it you can have custom graphics, rich, vibrant flash panels, your own templates, your own links and promotional methods...the list goes on and on. Remember the old saying, "You get what you put into it"? It rings 1000% true with Cafepress. If you know a little something about web design and photoshop - you are going to be very, very successful with Cafepress.

HOT TIP! With your own brand new domain name and webspace, you have to get CPShop. You must, must, must get it! Again, I am clearly telling you in blue and white: If you want to make serious money with Cafepress, you must get CPShop. I honestly don't think I could have been near as successful without it. 100% total customization of your scripts and pages. You can add in your own keywords, descriptions, custom shopping carts, and even sell other people's products by making seperate store ids. The fee is $19.77 to get the script. The scripts are easy to understand, and there is a support forum for help. Marty, the creator and site administrator, will help you and even log into your hosting panel to get you up and running. This man has went above and beyond getting other members setup, such as myself. Thanks, Marty! For $15 Marty will even install it for you on your own website.

HOT TIP! Also, for search engines sake, try and make your domain name say exactly what you are selling. If you are selling tee shirts about the sixties hippy culture, make your domain be something like: hippylandshirtco.com or teesfromthe60s.com. This makes you top spot on Google or Yahoo, no matter what.

I did not take this route myself, in setting up KaptainMyke.com. Learn from my mistake. Why didn't I do that? That's because my domain (kaptainmyke.com) started off as a photoshop forum in 2002. We would have photoshop wars against the site admins and owners of 2gnt.com, a car forum community. (hi, Dino!) I formed my company, moved the forum to that site, and because KaptainMyke.com had unbelievable page ranks (at that time, mind you) - I turned that domain
name into my tee shirt company. The rest was up to me, so I got lucky keeping traffic during the switchover of sites.

SUPER DUPER HOT TIP #1 ! The biggest secret to search engine ranking is STAY UPDATED. If you keep doing updates to pages weekly, no wait - daily, hourly, whatever, and offer very descriptive titles, links, and texts...you are going to soar above the SEO clients that pay thousands of dollars a month for search engine ranks.

SUPER DUPER HOT TIP #2 ! If you are selling a red tee shirt about a flying monkey doing handstands while holding a baby doing the macarena, you better make sure your link and page title are aptly named, "Flying Monkey Handstand Macarena Baby Dark Red Medium Ringer Tee Shirt". It's such a pain in the butt to go back and rename each product at cafepress, but DO IT. Spending that extra hour retyping exact descriptives of your product at Cafepress will make Google and Yahoo find you better, faster...and at page 1 on search results.

But I can't design or draw a stick figure! What am I supposed to do with Cafepress?

Sell other people's products! Cafepress now uses Commission Junction. I have written an article on getting setup with CJ. You may read all about it here. The commissions will start small, as it did for me. After 6 months into the program, you can earn a decent check every month just by selling other's products from Cafepress. You'll have to figure out what works best for you by promoting and marketing products effectively.

TIP! Start a Blog, or a Squidoo Lens, or even a Myspace Page about something and start plugging in people's tee shirt designs with links wrapping through Commission Junction to the marketplace or products at Cafepress. It's easy! 16 year old kids are buying their first car just by blogging all day in their room after school! It costs nothing to start a blog, myspace page, or a squidoo lens, so get on it!

Are you a good writer? Publish Books with Cafepress and sell them.

Cafepress has an inhouse book publishing department. There are no setup fees, black and white books with full page color covers. You can choose from Saddle Stitch, Wire-O or Perfect Bound binding options. There are 5 book sizes to chose from. Pricing includes book production, order management, fulfillment and customer service. You choose the retail price and earn the difference between the retail price and our base price. At $.45 cents a page that is a reasonable rate. You set your markup and make a commission off every book sold.

TIP! If you are a good writer, and you have a major selling book at Cafepress, other people will sell your book for you using the Commission Junction program from this article I mentioned before.

TIP! Recently, Cafepress has changed their volume bonus structure and affiliate percentiles. You now make full commission off affiliate driven sales. This means that when others sell your product for you, you now make 100% commission instead of sharing 15% from the affiliate!

Printfection and Zazzle

There are several print on demand websites found on the Internet. (Google, new window)

HOT TIP! Other "Print on Demand" Services I use are: PrintFection and Zazzle . I receive checks in the mailbox once a month from those two and Cafepress. It costs nothing to get started with any of those 3 companies. Zazzle is backed by Google partners and investors. Printfection is a newer player in the market as well as Zazzle, both providing state of the art printing techniques. Over the past 2 years I have tried to slowly migrate designs from one to another. I started that by accident, with the intentions of contingency, in case Cafepress ever went bankrupt or out of business. What ensued instead was two additional, smaller paychecks in the mail from home. ( edited )

Design Shoes

SUPER HOT TIP! Do you love shoes? Maybe if you can't design or draw, you can be a shoe designer? Zazzle.com has started shoes! As of August 1st, 2008, Zazzle has partnered with Keds Shoes. You can now design your own women's and kids tennis shoes or slip on shoes. KaptainMyke.com will be introducing the a fresh line of eighties (80's) themed Keds slip-ons and sneakers. A launch date for the new KaptainMyke Keds (KMKeds) is currently not available yet as of the date & time of this article.

Conclusion

This article primarily is to introduce to you the world of print on demand services available online. There are many ways you can be successful, but it starts with you dedicating serious time and effort into these programs. For the past three years I have literally made this an 8 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday job everyday in front of the computer. I'm not rich, but I can pay my bills and business expenses. The rest of life such as gas prices, diapers, baby food, electric bills and groceries are yet another story. Your success will show if you can devote the time and discipline.