[thedesigner]

I have been with CafePress since 2004. I rarely do anything more than upload designs, so my profits are not huge and 100% of my sales are through the marketplace, stuck in 10% commission land.

I have to say, it isn't like 'the good ole days,' before they changed their payout structure. Anyone could make a decent profit without doing much hehe. Not anymore.

From an inward, production and shop keeper perspective, CP lacks. I am also a digital creative professional. side from their brand upgrade, functionality remained the same for what seemed an eternity. They need to invest in evolving their tools quicker, using better UX and IA people. I know what is possible, and it seems CP is still stuck, functionally, in 2004.

I do use CPShop from Marty and integrate into my own site. From that perspective, the outward, customer-facing one, it i pretty cool to retain users on your domain practically through checkout.

CP's quality is not the best, and their print area is still, after 7 years, 10 x 10. (Sorry XXL and XXXL folks, hope you like postage stamps on your chest)

I also have products on Zazzle and I echo other people's opinions that Zazzle's shop keeper experience is a bit clumsy. Overall I like their toolset better, but adding multiple products or adjusting pricing is cumbersome. They did just release their 'API' allowing you to customize your page, but it is not easy for a non-programmer, or the layperson not familiar with editing code.

I am looking forward to trying out Spreadshirt, as I like their vector plotter and huge image area.

 

[Jerry_Boi]

I am now convinced on using Zazzle. I am a bit confused on where to create my shirts and how much is the final price that the customer is going to pay . On the page where it says "Create your own one-of-a-kind product" which one do I use? Screen Printing Shirts or the third one where it says Men's Shirt? I am new to this so please be easy on me if this is a dumb question.

Thanks

 

[downtime]

Zazzle. Better customer service, better product and they didn't screw over a bunch of people a few years ago like CP did. That's the short version anyway They're way more responsive to shopkeepers wants too, as in, they still realize that the shopkeepers provide the designs that power the biz. CP looks at shopkeepers like cattle....

 

[Zehda]

I recommend Zazzle. Cafepress took away our commission markups & give us only 10%. Why would you use Cafepress only, when you can get your full markup on Zazzle? (yes I know you can get your full markup on cafepress when they come to your shop directly). most people come through the marketplace & they have created a firewall to make sure people don't get directly to your shop very easily.

 

[SebastianW]

I use both. Zazzle seems to sell less but I have more international customers and the commissions are far greater than with CafePress so the bottom line turns out to be the same.

 

[shirtnewbie]

I would go with zazzle. I was not impressed with cafepress at all

 

[CuriousInkling]

I started with CP and did great there but when they robbed me of my markup for items sold in the marketplace I re-directed my website to Zazzle. To me CafePress is the perfect example of a company that grew too big for their britches. Once they got fat and happy, they lost all respect and care for their shopkeepers. I was furious, heh, and still am to a degree I guess.

I think what it boils down to is marketplace sales. Everything else really can be manipulated in Zazzle if you are willing to learn it, but the marketplace is sad compared to CP. At Zazzle I make maybe 2% of my sales through the marketplace. Everything else comes from my website. At Cafepress I still make a respectable amount of sales in their marketplace even though I no longer send customers from my site there.

So, if you are interested in settling for marketplace sales and not into delving into the muck of SEO and promotion, you might be happier at Cafepress...heh, so long as you are willing to live with the measly and in my opinion, criminal markup they pay. But if you are willing to put the effort forth to build your SEO and promote your stuff yourself, you are much better off at Zazzle.

Graphic Shirts

 

[Bonvoyage]

It depends on what you really want
sales? or which one is make u feel more happy when u creating?

I use both. and both are ok. but, CP is more sales than zazzle to me.
since last dec. i only made 2 sales on zazzle.(even i did promote many ways for zazzle.but no CP)

 

[CuriousInkling]

I've been working in Zazzle for about two years now. First I want to say that Zazzle has a terrific system going and if they can only fix these very important problems, they may take over the POD market completely. This is what I think is holding them back.

1. Percentage based royalties: Because Zazzle's royalties are based on commission, you have no control over the price without a TON of work. I have to go into every product I create, limit a customer's ability to change the product and price each one separately. You have to do that or you will either seriously overcharge for high base priced items or seriously undercharge the lowest base priced item.

You do the math. On a value shirt with a base price of say $15 add $25% gives you $18.75 with a $3.75 commission. Now on a black hoodie with a base price of $38 what does that do? Well, you make $9.50 but you have to sell that hoodie for $47.50 which is about $10 more than most other places. So, you have to edit each product, take out the ability for a customer to change the product to something else and change it's royalty rate to something that's marketable. I've done it, it's a TON of freakin' work.

2. Lame product listing page. On any given product listing page, Zazzle only offers the image of the item and the name you give it. So if you have a product listing page showing one design on many different kinds of shirts, you have the title of that shirt repeated over and over again. Very cheap looking but more importantly, suicidal in SEO because search engines will penalize a page that has too many keywords in it.

Even more importantly, the customer is given absolutely no indication of price value while scanning the page for something they like. To see a price, you have to click an item in the list, to see another price, they have to click back and scan for another and click it to see it's price. Web shoppers WILL NOT do that. Most likely, they will see the page with no price info or even a short description of what the product is and click out to another site.

There are other problems, such as the marketplace full of crap that nobody in their right mind would buy and it's so cluttered, you don't have a prayer in the world of getting ranked high. It renders the marketplace pretty much useless to you as a seller.

The two issues above though, are extremely important and to a t-shirt retailer, it's a matter of life and death. I used to hand type the prices in the name of every one of my shirts, thousands of shirts mind you, so that the prices would show on the product listing page. Sales were great when I did that, but when Zazzle raised their prices, I just couldn't do it. I had to go back in and delete the prices off each product because who knows when they will raise their price again. So now my product listing page, on hundreds of designs has no prices and since I was forced to change it, my sales have bottomed out completely. So yeah, it's a big issue.

Funny Graphic Shirts

 

[videorov]

Any comments about spreadshirt Pro's and Con't while we are on the subject of companies and marketing through them.