A Bad Move By Cafepress.com

Cafepress has announce that they are about to make a really bad move.

If you don't know who Cafepress is, it is a web site where people can upload images to be printed on t-shirts and other items. You can simply order items printed with your designs. Or you can make them available for other people to buy, with some of the sale price going to you.

Currently their business model is to charge customers a fixed base price for any given item, plus a markup determined by and paid to the designer (shopkeeper) of the image printed on it (less a percentage fee for very high markups to cover credit card processing fees.) In order to bring ih sales, they provide free storefronts for designers, with limited capacity and customizability. They also provide paid storefronts with less limited capacity and customizability. In addition, any designer can opt a store's contents into the marketplace, which is the Cafepress.com design search for customers.

What's changing? Starting June 1 cafepress will be setting the sale price and markup for items sold in the marketplace, paying Designers a fixed 10% of the sale price of said items. They will also be choosing what goes into the marketplace, or screening it anway. The latter is something many shopkeepers have been hoping for to combat the scads of repetitive designs some submit with the only variation being names, pet breeds, state names, city names, etc. The former, however, is a huge departure from their basic business model.

Looked at from the perspective of Cafepress it may actually make some sense. The manufacturer gets their base price, the designer gets a percentage royalty, and whoever's running the store where it's bought sets the final sale price and gets the rest. Sounds fair, right?

The thing is, they haven't thought it through completely. There are many designers producing really good designs that fetch a high price. Under the announced plan they would get much less per sale through the marketplace, and have their shop prices undercut. So many of them have already announced in the Cafepress forum that they plan to pull their designs from the marketplace and even from Cafepress altogether as they move to other sites, like fast-growing Zazzle.com. (This is what I plan to do - see my links below at the bottom of the page.)

The effects have begun to show. Thursday the marketplace said there were 9,080,000 designs. Today it is 9,080,000. So people are pulling out already, though many say they will stick it out through the end of May to get what they can under the current model. (I'm among them. I'm hoping Cafepress will reconsider this plan, but seeing as how they've already put out a press release announcing it, I doubt it.) It is also reported that the rate of new designs being added has dropped by a good 2/3, many are already shifting their efforts elsewhere.

The net effect of all this is that many good designs will be gone from the marketplace, and some will be gone from Cafepress altogether.

I have to wonder if they perhaps predicted this would happen, and and maybe even brought this about intentionally in an effort to switch from user-provided content to licensing designs from name brand sources. We shall see.

My own plan is to begin building up my presence on Zazzle.com, building galleries for my various brands, starting with what's currently selling and historically sold well on Cafepress. At the end of May I'll pull everything from the Cafepress marketplace that I've migrated so far, and maybe take it off entirely. Then, since there's no way I can finish it all with the baby coming (due May 15!) I'll continue to migrate the rest, removing it from Cafepress as I go.