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I'm a CafePress newbie and I have some designs I would like to customize by city and another design I would like to customize by people's first names. I realize that to make any money with these designs I would need many, many, many cities and names. If I create, say, 1,000 cities and 1,000 names, it would take me years to create all of those sections manually, one at a time with tags and descriptions and a separate image for each one. So, my question is: is there any way, any kind of software or anything which would help me to do it faster? I have seen some shops with 20,000 designs in 20,000 separate sections. All I can think is "How did they do that? It must have taken them years!" and "How can I do that?" Does anybody have any suggestions? Anything that would help me get sections up faster. I appreciate any advice you all might be willing to give. Thanks.
This one has about 20,000 different cities listed. It's really just one design, but technically every city is a separate design because each requires its own section with its own image and ad copy. You know what I mean? Every city is a separate section. And they do it three times!! They do "Hot Cities" "Cool Cities" and "Took a Look" cities. So it's actually more like 60,000 sections. How did they do it? That would take years to do one at a time--you know, create the section, add the details, load the image, etc...I'm miffed.
Hi there!
I checked out the link you were referring to - I think the shop owner must have a team of 5-10 people helping out with the designs. It's fairly easy to come up with a template of, say, "The hottest girls are from [insert city here]" using the layers attribute in Photoshop. One person can be assigned 50 States for example and that person can work on all the designs for the cities designated to him/her.
As for making multiple sections in CP quickly, I don't think it's possible if you're working on your own, but if the team is working from several different computer terminals, then uploading time is quickly cut in half. This is just a guess, I honestly don't know what that shopkeeper's system is but I have a feeling it must be a full-time effort.
I think it is overwhelming and dumb when there are that many designs, yeah there is something for everyone, but wow! I don't want to have to search for it, or sort through that many designs.
I think it is a lot of work for not so many sales.
However if you feel you will sell a ton then go for it. Might be worth it to pay some college kid 8 bucks an hour to sit there and make hundreds of those.
There is a thread going on now in the CP forums about this. Some people who joined in the past have an API key that allows them to upload thousands of designs easily. They are no longer giving out API keys, and some people are upset about the way the bulk uploads flood the marketplace and give other shopkeepers an advantage. You can read about it in the CP forums.
There is a trick to adding sections quickly, yet still manually. You configure a section and use it as your template. I can create a new section in about 5 minutes using this technique. Create your new section, choose that you want to add an image to alot of products, click over to the products tab and click on import. Go find your pre-configured template, import all, change your image, name and description, go to the section details and update it with the pertinent information. The nice thing about this method is all your arrangement of products, pricing, multiples of the same product and image sizing are already set for you.
__________________ www.stuffnthingz.com - "You can never have too much stuff", however, "The best things in life aren't things" is also true. XPS1530 | DK20 | Mighty Press 15 |Chinese hat press | Oki5800 | 88+ | LP24
Could you provide me with more information about the API key and why newer members cannot use it? This sounds interesting and I would like to know what Cafepress and other Shopkeepers have said. I checked the CP forums like you recommended, but I could not seem to find the thread you are referring to.
There is a thread going on now in the CP forums about this. Some people who joined in the past have an API key that allows them to upload thousands of designs easily. They are no longer giving out API keys, and some people are upset about the way the bulk uploads flood the marketplace and give other shopkeepers an advantage. You can read about it in the CP forums.
I've heard of the API keys, but from what I understand they may enable some shopkeepers the ability to upload many images at once, but they don't allow them to automatically create sections quickly. It's a bonus to have that ability, for sure. Right now I can only upload 5 images at a time, but even having multiple uploads, you still have to create each section by hand. It looks like there's no way around that aspect.
Hi there!
I checked out the link you were referring to - I think the shop owner must have a team of 5-10 people helping out with the designs. It's fairly easy to come up with a template of, say, "The hottest girls are from [insert city here]" using the layers attribute in Photoshop. One person can be assigned 50 States for example and that person can work on all the designs for the cities designated to him/her.
As for making multiple sections in CP quickly, I don't think it's possible if you're working on your own, but if the team is working from several different computer terminals, then uploading time is quickly cut in half. This is just a guess, I honestly don't know what that shopkeeper's system is but I have a feeling it must be a full-time effort.
I was thinking the same thing--there must be a team working on it constantly.
Thanks to all for the responses. I appreciate it. There are so many sites like that, I thought there must be some trick to it, but it is probably just long hours of tedious work.
The API Key was given out to all who requested it during its "Beta" phase...
__________________ www.stuffnthingz.com - "You can never have too much stuff", however, "The best things in life aren't things" is also true. XPS1530 | DK20 | Mighty Press 15 |Chinese hat press | Oki5800 | 88+ | LP24
Adding multiple sections quickly? 
