Now, before you read any further, let me make one thing perfectly clear -- if you're hoping to find a way to make a ton of money with minimal time and effort, Cafepress is probably not the place for you. Cafrepress is not some sort of "get rich quick" scheme, and the only real secret is that it takes a lot of time and effort to be successful here. But you can be successful if you are willing to put in the required time and effort, and the information contained on this page may help you avoid some common mistakes and focus your efforts better.
And so, without further ado (and in no particular order):
- Have patience . CafePress really isn't a get rich quick scheme. I'm serious. I keep seeing people posting on the CafePress message boards how they’ve had their store open a whole week or a whole month and they just don’t understand why they haven’t made any sales yet. Well, unless you're already a household name (like Dilbert or Star Trek) and there are already millions of people out there searching for your stuff, IT TAKES TIME!
I had some early initial sales with my shop, but that’s only because I had a pre-existing product (a book) that I had been selling from my personal website for years before moving operations to CP, and it was a full month before I sold anything else. And it was another 2 or 3 months before sales of other merchandise started hitting the $100+ per month amount. Remember that no matter how wonderful your designs are, you are but one shop among millions. It takes time for your pages to be picked up by search engines, for your designs to make their way through the marketplace, etc. Some people see no sales for months or even a year, so you really, truly, have to be patient.
- Get a premium shop. This may be the single most important thing you can do. Having a premium shop lets you add multiple designs to multiple products. It lets you add descriptions to various sections that will influence your search engine ranking. It allows you to turn your shop into a shopping portal that will attract customers.
- Diversify. It is possible to be successful on CP by targeting a very narrow niche market, but it’s a lot more difficult. First of all, you’d have to find a niche market that (a) has not already been discovered by 1000 other shopkeepers and (b) actually has enough potential customers to make it profitable.
In my case, I started out with my “Surreality” designs and my nature photographs that I was sure would be an instant hit and make me a millionaire. It didn’t happen. People like my designs, they tell other people about them, but not too many people actually buy them. And so, I decided to add some “Wacky Word” designs and some political statements and some designs aimed at rebellious teenagers and some designs aimed at young children, etc. The one thing all these designs have in common is that they are an expression of my creativity.
Keep in mind that Nobody is going to come out and tell you that your artwork just isn’t very good or marketable, but if it isn’t selling you really need to consider coming up with more things to sell. And what you may find is that as you sell more of the other stuff and your store becomes more popular as a result, you all of a sudden do start selling your original artwork after all.
- Keep adding new designs. Search engines (at least some of them, like Google) give preference to websites that are frequently updated. You can accomplish this by adding a blog to your site and constantly posting new messages, but the best way in my experience is to simply keep adding new designs. Not only will this help you in the search rankings, it will also give customers more variety to choose from.
I am constantly adding new designs and constantly selling new designs. I never remove old designs (since you just never know what will sell down the road), but I also find that many of my “big sellers” from a few months ago are no longer selling at all today, whereas new designs I uploaded a few weeks ago are now selling sporadically. I have yet to find “the” hot design that will make me rich, but I can get there by selling 10-20 different designs every day.
- Tag your images. The CafePress marketplace is your friend. Others, especially those who have been here much longer than I, will tell you not to rely on the marketplace for sales, and they are right. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still take full advantage of it. Yes, if you are looking to make the big bucks you will likely never get rich via marketplace sales, simply because not enough people (yet) shop the marketplace, but you can certainly make good money from marketplace sales. And the only way to make sales via the marketplace is to add as many relevant keywords to each of your designs as possible. Don’t spam the marketplace with keywords that don’t actually apply to your images, but be creative and add as many as you can think of.
- Add product descriptions and names. Every product should have a description and a name, and every section should have a description of the design or designs in that section. This allows the designs and products to be picked up by the search engines. Nobody is going to search for “white t-shirt” and, even if they did, they'll find approximately 1.5 billion web pages with those words on them.
And remember to make your descriptions keyword-rich with the words and phrases people are actually likely to use when searching for that particular design! If your design depicts a cartoon cat playing with a ball of string, for example, don't just describe it as "a whimsical and cute design that would make a great gift for children." Be sure to actually mention that it depicts a cartoon cat playing with a ball of string! If your entire shop is made up of tattoo-themed designs that are meant to appeal to bikers, be sure to mention that the designs are based on tattoos and are designed to appeal to bikers. You get the idea.
- Increase your markups. Most new shopkeepers look at the high base prices that CP charges to begin with and are afraid to mark up their products more than a buck or two. The thing is, anybody looking for a bargain is not even going to pay the base price in the first place! If somebody really likes a design enough to pay the base price (plus shipping), they will likely also be willing to pay an extra $5-10 for it.
I started putting a $10 markup on most of my shirts back in August of 2006, and sales have actually increased each month since then. If you’re not making any sales with low markups, try raising them dramatically for a month. If you still get no sales, you’re no worse off. But you may just find that people equate high prices with high quality.
Every once in awhile, when my store has hit a particularly slow patch, I think about cutting my markups in half and seeing what happens. Every time, though, I realize that I would need to double my sales in order for that to happen, and that's just not likely to happen. If I could cut the entire price of my stuff in half, maybe. But dropping my markup on, say, a regular t-shirt from $24.99 to $19.99 just isn't going to be a big enough price drop to suddenly cause people to swarm to my shop. And sure, I might make more sales if I dropped the markup all the way down to $1 and sold them for only $15.99, but then I'd have to make 10 times the sales in order to make up the lost profits. Invariably, however, sales pick up sooner rather than later for me, and I kick myself for even thinking about lowering prices.
As with everything, though, your mileage may vary. You need to consider what type of designs you have (e.g., are they unique enough to stand out from the crowd, or are they the same type of designs offered by thousands of other stores?), who your target market is (e.g, do your designs appeal to baby boomers with lots of disposable income or to cash-strapped army wives living on a budget?), and what you feel comfortable with. At the same time, keep in mind that "a thing is worth whatever somebody will pay for it" and never sell yourself short as an artist. If you've put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into your designs, you should be entitled to make a good profit from them.
- Tell everybody about your store whenever you have a chance. Make up cheap business cards and hand them out like free candy. Don’t be obnoxious, but try to work mention of your store into every conversation. Wear your own designs proudly wherever you go. Put fliers up at the local laundromat or other places with a community bulletin board. Remember – if nobody knows about your store, how can they buy from it?
- Have patience. Yeah, I covered this before, but it bears repeating. The Internet is vast and you are competing against millions of other shopkeepers. Success takes time and effort and time and good designs and time and good marketing and time and luck and more time. Oh -- and did I mention it takes time?
Still have questions? Check out my Answers to Frequently Asked Questions page!
