Fuck you, CafePress! [part 2]

As noted in previous posts, CafePress recently made what will likely go down in history as its worst decision ever. Specifically, they decided to screw their shopkeepers by reducing our commission to a disgusting, appalling, pathetic 10% for products purchased in their marketplace. A mass exodus of shopkeepers ensued, with other print-on-demand (POD) companies reaping the benefits as throngs of us started, or expanded, shops with them.

If I haven't already, I'd now like to officially say "thank you, CafePress!" for making the pricing change. Surprised? Don't be! That change was the catalyst for SmartAssProducts.com to branch out to other PODs, something we had failed to do before. The reasoning was, hey, sales are great!, let's concentrate on adding new designs, adding more products, etc. It was easy...way too easy...to become complacent and bank on one POD.

We're happy to say that our Zazzle shop is doing very, very well in its brief lifetime. (The account is actually several years old, but because of that aforementioned complacency, nothing was ever done with it until a few weeks ago.)

We're even happier to say that--by FAR--our bestselling design at Zazzle is this one on anti-Michael Vick merchandise:



Ironically, our Printfection shop--which has been worked on more and for a longer period of time than the Zazzle shop--has yet to make a single sale! I really have no clue why this should be, as the designs are the same whether they're on CafePress, Printfection, or Zazzle. But, yeah, not one sale yet at Printfection. But the Zazzle shop is doing great, so we'll patiently wait for sales to start at Printfection.

We're still at CafePress, although we're pulling out of the marketplace for good at the end of this month. So any sales we make there will be directly from the shop, not the marketplace, and we'll get the markup we decided on, not a paltry 10% of the selling price as CafePress would have it. The challenge is figuring out how to drive traffic directly to products in our shop, since CafePress has the resources to do MAJOR advertising and, well, we don't! Certainly not on par with them.

Google recently put an end to individual shops uploading their own data feeds to Google Base, and that makes things even more difficult. They're now only accepting feeds from the company itself--such as eBay, CafePress, and Zazzle--for products in their marketplace. Unfortunately, for those of us no longer in the CafePress marketplace, we're screwed. We can't upload data feeds that lead potential customers directly to products in our shops, and since we're not in the CP MP we no longer exist on Google Base. That really sucks. I hope Google will come to its senses and realize that their logic is very flawed. They actually thought they were doing shopkeepers a favor! Little did they know that, in fact, they're screwing us too, just like CafePress.


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