Jul 17, 2009

cafepress: new marketplace policies unscrupulous?

Hi All! Due to recent changes to Cafepress, I've opened some new online gift shops. I found 5 other free online gift and t-shirt shops "POD" that I am quite happy with (comboutique, spreadshirt, zazzle, tshirtmonster and wordans).  
Artist / Designer Kim Hunter
www.kimhunter.ca 
New Posters, Cards, Sneakers, Keychains, Caps, Bags, T-shirts,  Hoodies and much more! 
CHECK OUT MY NEW PRINTS, SOUVENIRS, T-SHIRTS & GIFTS SHOP ON ZAZZLE.

4 comments:

Kim Hunter said...

Please feel free to post your cafepress gripes here. Power in numbers.
Us designers need to stick up for each other. We are the backbone of cafepress.

Caza Creations said...

I just let my subscription run out this month for Cafepress and I have closed it down for good after 5 years. I had already started making the move to Zazzle about 2 years after I found CP. Zazzle had a lot od growing pains in the beginning but I think we can all agree that it has now surpassed CP. It's hard to think of what CP's business strategy is at the moment. I know one thing, I wasn't hanging around to find out.

Since then, I've also opened up stores at a few other places; Spreadshirt, T-Shirt Monster, Printfection and Wordans although I haven't done much with any of them except T-Shirt Monster. I just had a customer place a large order for his entire hockey team to outfit them with long sleeve shirts with a customized logo i made. Got a nice referral fee for that one as well.

I also corresponded with the founder of T-Shirt Monster and he said that they will be re-launching the site in May 2010.

Kim Hunter / Indigo said...

Yup, me too. I've only ever used cafepress free shops but the new format seems to have permanently dwindled sales. I've been spending my time bulking up Zazzle and Spreadshirt, as they have proved to be good venues. Wordans is also a new company that is making a bit of $ for me. I will check back with T-shirt Monster in the new year. thanks for the Printfection tip, I will check them out too!

Kim Hunter / Indigo said...

So... to continue...
I was just asked about my Canadian souvenir caps, so I surfed over to cafepress and did a search for my own products. No matter how hard I tried to navigate to my actual pages and "shop sales", cafepress's new format steered me toward a "marketplace sale" with no opportunity to make a purchase within my own store. HM!