As noted in this recent post, Is CafePress pulling a fast one?, a new phenomenon has been noted by many CafePress shopkeepers. It's called the "mysterious abandoned shopping cart syndrome." It goes like this (and we're getting this information from various stat/log counters):
- someone arrives at our shop via a search, for example they search Google for pro-choice merchandise
- they click on our link, Pro-choice Main Page
- they pop in and out of various designs' pages, looking at a t-shirt here, a magnet there, and end up adding a few items to their shopping cart; those entries look like this in our logs:
(3) http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts.420450753
(4) http://www.cafepress.com/cp/viewcart.aspx?s=saproducts&keepshopping=/saproducts/802117
(5) http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts/802117
(6) http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts.341422651
(7) http://www.cafepress.com/cp/viewcart.aspx?s=saproducts&keepshopping=/saproducts/802117
(8) http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts.341422651
(9) http://www.cafepress.com/cp/viewcart.aspx?s=saproducts&keepshopping=/saproducts/802117
In the above example, line #3 shows a bumper sticker -- http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts.420450753 -- that the customer added to their shopping cart, as shown in line #4. The customer chose to 'keep shopping' after they added the bumper sticker to their cart; when they did that, CafePress returned them to the parent page the bumper sticker was on, http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts/802117
Lines #6 & #7 and #8 & #9 show the customer adding a button -- http://www.cafepress.com/saproducts.341422651 -- twice, to their cart, then returning to the design's parent page. This customer spent almost 9 minutes in my shop--not an insignificant amount of time--before losing track of them. (Once a customer enters the netherworld of the CafePress fulfillment process, we lose access to their movement.) From YEARS of experience I can pretty safely say that people who spend that much time perusing the shop, carefully selecting items and adding them to their shopping cart are not going to--100% of the time--change their minds and abandon their cart. Yet that's what I'm seeing. Over and over again.
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Showing posts with label CafePress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CafePress. Show all posts
Monday, February 01, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Is CafePress pulling a fast one?
CafePress has always been very restrictive in terms of what it allows/disallows on its message boards, so it's not surprising that they're quashing discussions on certain topics. One of those topics is the case of the mysterious disappearing shop sales.
If you're not a CafePress shopkeeper you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Briefly, CafePress has two distinct parts, its marketplace and each individual shop. The individual shops are where the products in the marketplace come from. Before June 2009, regardless of whether a product was purchased in a shop or in the marketplace, the price was the same--it was set by the shopkeeper who created it. Then CafePress instituted their devastating "10% commission" policy in which products sold via the marketplace would have prices set by CafePress, and the creator of the design would only receive 10% of the selling price. Products sold via shops would sell at the creator's price and they would receive their full commission.
Okay, so here's the deal: Since June 2009, MANY of us have experienced an inexplicable, nearly complete halt of shop sales. This applies to shopkeepers who are still in the marketplace and those of us who pulled out. Suddenly, after years [for some of us] of making regular sales straight from our shops, they're now virtually nonexistent.
Shopkeepers who are still in the marketplace may note greatly increased sales--all of which are via the marketplace--although their profit is a fraction of what it should be, while simultaneously seeing no shop sales whatsoever. Shopkeepers who pulled out of the marketplace may see no shop sales at all, or perhaps an occasional one or two. This is in stark contrast to how it used to be--back before the 10% commission change.
So what happened? Why is it that even though we're getting hits to our shops, even though our stats show people landing at our web sites searching for merchandise we have and then proceeding to said merchandise in our CafePress shops, we're not getting (m)any sales? Keep in mind that prior to the commission change in June many of us had a fair amount of shop vs marketplace sales, and now there are virtually none. Or so it seems...
Writing this on the CafePress forums would result in a swift editing or deleting job from the mods, although a few people have tried. Basically, here's what I--and many others--think: The shop sales ARE still happening. We're just not being told about them. Or credited for them.
Think about it. For years and years we all had lots of shop sales. Last June CP changes its commission policy in the marketplace and suddenly, inexplicably, shop sales go down the toilet--in spite of the fact that our stats confirm that people are arriving at our shops. Weird, huh?
There's more, too. Many of us have noticed "abandoned shopping carts," i.e., we can see movement through our shops via our site logs culminating with a purchase, but then the purchase never materializes. Over the years we've gotten used to seeing the occasional "abandoned shopping cart," which we've chalked up to someone changing their mind or whatever before completing the sale. But, overwhelmingly, when we'd see a line like this in our logs:
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/viewcart.aspx?s=saproducts&keepshopping=/saproducts/1842400
a "You made a sale at CafePress.com!" e-mail was sure to follow in short order. Now? Not so much. So what happened?
If you're a CafePress shopkeeper and you're experiencing the same dramatic, inexplicable disappearance of shop sales since the 10% commission change went into effect, feel free to post a comment. You KNOW you can't speak freely about this at CafePress!
.
If you're not a CafePress shopkeeper you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Briefly, CafePress has two distinct parts, its marketplace and each individual shop. The individual shops are where the products in the marketplace come from. Before June 2009, regardless of whether a product was purchased in a shop or in the marketplace, the price was the same--it was set by the shopkeeper who created it. Then CafePress instituted their devastating "10% commission" policy in which products sold via the marketplace would have prices set by CafePress, and the creator of the design would only receive 10% of the selling price. Products sold via shops would sell at the creator's price and they would receive their full commission.
Okay, so here's the deal: Since June 2009, MANY of us have experienced an inexplicable, nearly complete halt of shop sales. This applies to shopkeepers who are still in the marketplace and those of us who pulled out. Suddenly, after years [for some of us] of making regular sales straight from our shops, they're now virtually nonexistent.
Shopkeepers who are still in the marketplace may note greatly increased sales--all of which are via the marketplace--although their profit is a fraction of what it should be, while simultaneously seeing no shop sales whatsoever. Shopkeepers who pulled out of the marketplace may see no shop sales at all, or perhaps an occasional one or two. This is in stark contrast to how it used to be--back before the 10% commission change.
So what happened? Why is it that even though we're getting hits to our shops, even though our stats show people landing at our web sites searching for merchandise we have and then proceeding to said merchandise in our CafePress shops, we're not getting (m)any sales? Keep in mind that prior to the commission change in June many of us had a fair amount of shop vs marketplace sales, and now there are virtually none. Or so it seems...
Writing this on the CafePress forums would result in a swift editing or deleting job from the mods, although a few people have tried. Basically, here's what I--and many others--think: The shop sales ARE still happening. We're just not being told about them. Or credited for them.
Think about it. For years and years we all had lots of shop sales. Last June CP changes its commission policy in the marketplace and suddenly, inexplicably, shop sales go down the toilet--in spite of the fact that our stats confirm that people are arriving at our shops. Weird, huh?
There's more, too. Many of us have noticed "abandoned shopping carts," i.e., we can see movement through our shops via our site logs culminating with a purchase, but then the purchase never materializes. Over the years we've gotten used to seeing the occasional "abandoned shopping cart," which we've chalked up to someone changing their mind or whatever before completing the sale. But, overwhelmingly, when we'd see a line like this in our logs:
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/viewcart.aspx?s=saproducts&keepshopping=/saproducts/1842400
a "You made a sale at CafePress.com!" e-mail was sure to follow in short order. Now? Not so much. So what happened?
If you're a CafePress shopkeeper and you're experiencing the same dramatic, inexplicable disappearance of shop sales since the 10% commission change went into effect, feel free to post a comment. You KNOW you can't speak freely about this at CafePress!
.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Fuck you, CafePress (part...hell, I've lost track!)
I thought I'd give CafePress the props they deserve by posting a 'thank you' thread on their member forum. So what did they do? Deleted it. Almost immediately.I thought it was rather lovely, so I'll post it here instead.
Posted 04 November 2009 07:46 PM
As I've said [numerous times!], it wasn't until CP's brilliant idea [the 10% thing] that I finally decided to branch out to other PODs. Once the first one started making consistent sales [which it did in its first month--in fact, I made its first volume bonus level after my first week], I pulled out of CP's MP for good.
Next thing I knew the second POD started making sales.
And then this morning I was SHOCKED by a sale at a third POD--that I had completely forgotten about. Of course I can't mention its name, but it's the one that lets you make your designs available for sale separate from actually placing them on products yourself. I had uploaded a few designs and put them on a bunch of products, even paid for their version of a premium shop for a month--before realizing that they make your PERSONAL, PRIVATE info (name, home address, etc.) available to the public. I shut down the shop and deleted all the products, but left the designs in their MP. And voila! They're now selling too.
And guess what? My markup on them is MORE than the 10% that CP was giving me for all the trouble I went through putting products up. In other words, with CP, *I* upload the designs, *I* choose the products to put them on, *I* put the designs on the products, tweak the sizes so they look right, etc., set up sections, add keywords, write descriptions, and so on, only to make [about] $2 per shirt. At the "other place" ALL I do is upload a design, write a description and add some keywords, give it my markup, done. And I'm making roughly 2.5 times as much as the aforementioned shirt example at CP--JUST FOR THE DESIGN.
When I first heard about the 10% thing in June, when I was recovering from April brain surgery and was physically unable to do anything, I was very pessimistic and depressed about this change. And here I am, GRATEFUL for how it's worked out. I would be remiss not to thank CafePress!
Now, I can't IMAGINE why CafePress was offended by that post, and felt compelled to remove it! But they were and they did. Oh well. Fuck them.
On a separate, but somewhat related, note I have to mention that the other PODs don't feel the need to censor their forums the way CafePress does. I'm not referring to the deletion of my post. I'm talking about the way CP disallows the mention of any competitors by name--even in private messages! Seriously. They'll obfuscate the other PODs' names if you type them in a forum post or private message. How lame is that? Or should I say, how PARANOID is that?
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Saturday, September 26, 2009
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.
.
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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Friday, July 04, 2008
T-shirts now on sale!
As a token of appreciation for our great customers, we've put all our white t-shirts on sale; they're regularly $24.99 and are now on sale for $19.99 through July 16th. Hurry and stock up on your favorites! Click the sale banner to get started.
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