Present Your Products - What kind of shop should I use?

CafePress.com has 2 types of shops available for you to use. Basic shops have a uniform look and are free to set up and use. Premiums shops have extra features and a few extra products available for sale. The cost of premium shops is $6.95 per month, less if you prepay 3, 6 or 12 months in advance. Pretty reasonable for all the extra features, as you will see. Basic shops however, include all you need to be able to make and sell your products.

Basic Shops
CafePress.com Basic Shop
As I said, basic shops are free. There isn’t any html allowed. You can type in a url and it will convert to linked text, so if you want to point your basic shop to your main website you can do so. But statcounter scripts and other html controls are not allowed. The basic shops include all the same order processing and customer service as a premium shop, and you can make as many basic shops as you want. Perhaps you would create all basic shops and use one of the custom scripts, like cpShop, to pull them into your own site. One other limitation is that you are only allowed one of each product per shop. So one mousepad, one large mug, one sweatshirt, etc. For additional images you would create additional shops.

Premium Shops
CafePress.com Premium Shop
Premium shops have several major advantages over basic shops. Once they became available I switched immediately. I currently have several. You can have as many products as you want in your shop, you create sections that can include for example, all the t-shirts with cat images on them or all the mousepads with your various designs. The example shown here illustrates the use of html to customize the look of the shop and create a custom landing page. Each section has an html area available where you can add heading tags and text, or even tables with links to other sections, your other websites or highlight particular products. You are limited only by your imagination.

Custom Shops
CafePress.com Custom Shop #1 using cpShop
Cafe Press.com Custom Shop #2 using PostNuke and cpmodlite
The option I think most affiliates would be interested in are the custom scripts to pull the CafePress.com merchandise into your own websites where you control the template and complete look and feel of your site. CafePress.com as a company does not support the use of offsite scripts, but has a section in their support forum for discussion of them. Many people have written their own code to pull in the information from the CafePress.com servers. There are scripts in asp and php in addition to cgi scripts. I use both the cpShop cgi script and a php module for PostNuke, cpmodlite.

Here you can see a basic shop on the CafePress.com site and the same shop called using cpShop on my server. The custom script links to the CafePress.com shopping cart, so it is good to have a notice somewhere for your customers alerting them to this. But if your site is already set up for affiliate marketing, your visitors are used to being sent elsewhere to make their final purchases.

Here is a product specific premium shop and the same shop , again using cpShop. Why would you use both? The CafePress.com hosted site will pull traffic using the CafePress.com Marketplace and their built in search tools, and your own hosted site will give you more SEO control and even more template control. You are also able to make your custom shop a subdirectory or subdomain of a current site to grab onto existing traffic.

Whether you choose a basic, premium or custom shop, you can integrate your products into your existing sites and link to the buy now button that goes directly to the CafePress.com shopping cart.
* Sell your products along side your affiliate marketing merchant products
* Sell your products on a site by themselves

Next edition: Text Art vs Photographs
Upcoming Editions:
Optimizing Your Images
Marketing Using the CafePress.com Directory
Fundraising Using CafePress.com

So how does this work?

The process is pretty simple. You create an account at CafePress.com, upload your images, create a free basic shop or a low cost premium shop (we’ll talk more about that in a minute), and start adding your image to the products of your choice. There is a product creation section where you can apply one image to multiple products at once. Each section has a popup preview of how your chosen image will look on that item and you can choose to include it in your shop or not.

Next you decide on your markup. Every product has a base price that covers all of the costs to produce the product. You can set a percentage markup, an across the board dollar amount markup, or individually price each item.

Decide how you want to present your products. You can sell your products via the CafePress.com site exclusively, linking from your existing sites to your shop or to the shopping cart. Or you can use one of the custom scripts that are available, priced from free to about $20, to pull your entire CafePress.com shop onto your own website. There are advantages to each method, and I choose to use them both. We'll discuss those in detail in a future article, so keep watching! For now here is an example to whet your appetite:

CafePress.com Basic Shop
CafePress.com Premium Shop
CafePress.com Custom Shop #1
Cafe Press.com Custom Shop #2
Same products, different presentation!

As an affiliate marketer, why should you bother with setting up a CafePress.com shop? Easy answer, you already are selling products on the internet, why not use your expertise and creativity to sell your own stuff? You have control over your product design and your prices. And you will actually LIKE the 800# for customers.

Click here to download a power point presentation about setting up a shop.

More examples of a variety of shops and sites check this link out.

Next edition: What Kind of Shop Should I Use?
Upcoming Editions:
Text Art vs Photographs
Optimizing Your Images
Marketing Using the CafePress.com Directory

Passion and Profit Part 1

Are you a:
photographer
print artist
digital artist
witty person that comes up with cute or interesting phrases

Would you sell your own products if you didn’t have to stock and ship them or need to set up a costly merchant account and deal with the possible fraudulent transactions that are occurring with increased frequency? And what if you didn’t have to deal with the technical aspect of setting up a shopping cart and maintaining it, plus taking the orders, confirming the information and all the other pre-processing that comes before you even ship the orders?

CafePress.com is a print on demand service, you can add graphic or text images to a selection of over 70 products, mark up the prices and use their website and shopping cart to take and fill orders. They handle all the order processing, credit card verification, order fulfillment and customer service. Customers get a 30 day return window, so you get your cut 30 days after the order has shipped (45 days for international orders). And they fill and ship orders internationally.

What Products Can I Sell?
There are approximately 70 different items available for sale. The apparel selections range from a variety of shirts, including t-shirts, sweatshirts, and camisoles to boxers and thongs. And there is a shirt for the dog too! Then there are Housewares and ceramic products include mugs, steins, tile coasters and tile boxes, Stickers, buttons, magnets and other goodies, Baby and Kid Stuff, Bags and Hats, and the paper items, cards, prints, journals, calendars and posters.

And for the musicians, there are music CD’s, and for graphic artists, data cds. For the writers, there is a publishing division that does print on demand books. Self publishing with NO upfront costs!

What can I put on all that stuff? This is where your passion comes in. Are you an artist or photographer without a gallery? Do you come up with witty sayings and your friends tell you “that should be on a t-shirt!” What sparks you to creativity? You can license clip art and images to use, or you can create your own! Photographs, digital art, text art are all perfect for use on CafePress.com products. If you can create jpg or png files, you can create products to sell at CafePress.com.


Next edition: So How Does this Work?
Upcoming Editions:
What Kind of Shop Should I Use?
Text Art vs Photographs
Optimizing Your Images