Some improvements have been made at Cafepress regarding branding that should help encourage customers back to your store. I don’t think this will make up for the money Cafepress shopkeepers are going to lose out once their new 10% marketplace commission kicks in but it is something. Anyways, you can read their newsletter below or directly on the Cafepress site. There has been some debate in the forum about how it will work in situations where a person buys from more than one store which url will be printed on the receipt for instance but I am sure the kinks will be ironed out. I wonder if this branding will only occur if it is shop sale rather than a marketplace.
Cafepress Announcement
We’ve made a few changes to help elevate shop branding for Premium Shops, such as moving the CafePress logo to the footer and offering a customized header. Shopkeepers are happy with these changes and would like to see more branding for their shops, and we’re pleased to share two new changes. Customers will receive the following when they place an order from a Premium Shop:
Order Confirmation emails will include the Shop Name, indicating where those purchases were made.
# Receipt will show the Shop Name and shop URL where purchases were made, at the top of the receipt.
At the end of last year I did a review of POD company Wordans over on The T-Shirt Review. I didn’t give it the thumbs up but they listened to what I had to say and hopefully they will make some great improvements in the new version of their site which they say may hit the World Wide Web sometime next week. After Cafepress’s recent decision to pay out only 10% commission on marketplace sales there are lots of shopkeepers looking for a new home and if Wordans 2.0 is user friendly they might just get a whole batch of new shopkeepers. Below is a quote from their newsletter.
Summer 2009 is on the way, and Wordans is ready to celebrate our 2nd year on the web. Now hold your cheers, put those party hats back in the drawer (where you obviously keep them…) and take 3 deep breaths. It’s not time to celebrate yet!
In case your wondering about the rumours, there has been buzz about Wordans working on a new version of the site.
Well, we have been, and we’ve been working hard! We are picky, and very demanding, so our prior launch date has been pushed back… A couple of times.
We’re here to tell you…. Wordans 2.0 is ready to launch for this summer! That means in june… Which hopefully means next week
We’re also launching new products, new printing techniques… New everything! So keep your eyes peeled, and remember to check your e-mails and Wordans.com for the big announcement.
It also looks like they will be starting an affiliate program at Wordans soon too. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with and I have also opened a forum for Wordans’ discussion.
When you first join Zazzle the dashboard can be daunting because there are so many options. This video gives quick introduction to help you out.
Several times a year Cafepress holds one of these special shopkeeper sales. I guess they provide these discounts when sales are a bit sluggish. Whatever the reason though, if you want to buy some of your own shop items this is the time to do it. This sale is only for items in your own store, you can’t use it as advertising for your customers. As it says, starts Tuesday and lasts for three days.
* No coupon required. Discount is automatically applied when you purchase products from your Shop(s). Excludes Create and Buy, Flip Minos, SIGG bottles, CD, button, magnet or mini-button orders (singles or multi-packs), and bulk orders. Total discount available per order for (i) ornaments is $10; (ii) greeting card 10 pack is $15; and (iii) calendars is $24. Cannot be combined with other offers. Sale ends on May 28, 2009 at 11:59 pm (PST). Orders placed during the sale period may take up to three weeks to arrive, regardless of the estimated arrival dates displayed in the Cart and Checkout. For delivery prior to June 5, 2009 a shipping upgrade to Premium or 1 Day shipping is required
Memorial Weekend Sale – Up To 70% OFF at Zazzle!
Sales are not only a great time to get stuff for yourself they are a great way to promote your stores by giving people more incentive to buy.
70% of the net poster sale price, 10% of the net apparel sale price, 25% of the net apron sale price, and 50% of the net sale business card price will be deducted when the coupon code MEMORIALSALE is applied at checkout. The net sale price is the price of the product (excluding shipping and taxes). Offer is valid from May 22, 2009 through May 25, 2009 at 11:59pm PT. This promotional offer may not combined with any other Zazzle promotional or discount offers. This offer does not apply to past purchases and may not be combined with any other Zazzle promotional or discount offers. Offer valid on Zazzle.com only and is not valid on Smilestore.com orders.
This is about the 5th in the Zazzle University series but I will be posting the others when I get time and hopefully the series will continue for a while. In this video Rob rambles on about the fact that you should market your products and while he is right I don’t think this is where to talk about it. Nonetheless this is a pretty good video that shows you two ways to market your items via twitter.
The first way is to manually twitter each item from the Zazzle product page, this is awesome. I tried it and it is simple and fast to use. They even give you some set text just in case you are too lazy to write your own. I think it would have been better if they could pull the title from the shirt though. Be sure to be logged into your account in order to earn referral fees. You can also use this as an affiliate tool.
The second way is to set up your twitter account to automatically tweet your new products. Haven’t done this yet but I think it could get messy with the bulk create tool. I recommend setting up a twitter account specifically for your store if you are going to adding significant numbers of products.
By the way, you can follow me @RudeRetro where I usually tweet about new t-shirts, sales and such like.
Spreadshirt have this pretty cool promotion going on at the moment where if you can get a few new customers you they will give you a $20 voucher (£15 in the UK). You have two weeks to do this but it started a few days ago. I’m not too sure what it’s like at Spreadshirt but if this were Zazzle or Cafepress I don’t think that I would have to do anything to get this voucher because I’m pretty sure I get more than three new customers every two week period. (I don’t know that for sure of course but I make sales every day and I can’t believe that they are all repeat customers.)
You can read more about the conditions on the Spreadshirt blog. Good luck.
Some of you may have noticed that Zazzle have now added Canadian and Australian domains to help drive more sales in those regions. What do you have to do? Just sit back and watch the cash roll in basically. All your items will be for sale at these new domains and I am pretty sure that if you are making decent sales now that they will probably increase. Everything is still shipped from the US and production hasn’t changed or anything like that but Canadians and Australians will be able to purchase the items in their own currencies and they won’t have to worry about extra taxes and stuff (I believe).
Despite what I am about to say I think that this is a very good thing for Zazzle shopkeepers and I genuinely believe that we will earn more money as long as Zazzle (or we) does some marketing targeting those countries.
Two points bother me about these localized sites. The first is that your affiliate code (Performics) or referral code will not work across all domains. This means that if you send a customer to zazzle.com and they end up buying from zazzle.co.uk, .ca or .com.au you will not get your commission. To make it clear, even though you refer a sale you may not get paid for it. Basically Zazzle will not pay money that you have earned which amounts to stealing your hard-earned income. On the other hand I think that this situation will not be frequent as if someone from the UK finds their item in the US domain they will probably buy it from there.
The second point that bothers me is the volume bonus. I haven’t studied it closely and I could be wrong but I think at the moment the volume bonus for different domains is calculated separately. If calculated as one account you would of course earn more money as the more you earn the higher the rate of commission. Maybe this is not what is happening but I believe it is and this also amounts to stealing your hard-earned income.
I want to be clear that I am not anti-Zazzle. In fact I think Zazzle it currently the best POD to be working at at the moment but this type of thing does erode confidence a little. Hopefully the extra income generated from these new domains more than makes up for the cash that Zazzle is holding back from us but that is something that will never know.
Sidenote: European customers can now purchase with Euro on the .co.uk site.
New Apparel from Spreadshirt
Spreadshirt have released four new apparel items for the summer which you might want to take advantage of. I have found that new shirts sell well. It is also likely that Spreadshirt will promote these items because they are new increasing your chances of selling them.
- Women’s AA Racerback Tank Dress
Available in: White, Red and Black - Men’s AA Pocket Tee
Available in: White, Black and Navy - Women’s Deep V-neck Shirt by Continental
Available in: White, Peacock and Dark Pink - Women’s Scoop Neck Tee by Bella
Available in: Black, Teal, Plum and Ocean Blue
Some of you may have noticed that Cafepress have launched this service called Cafepress Groups and are probably wondering how this is going to help your business. Well, the simple answer is that it will not help your business. In fact it may even cut into your business quite a bit. There is no benefit that I can see for us POD shopkeepers. You can’t even make affiliate sales from it. In fact it is likely that affiliates will lose some of their income because of the introduction of this new service.
So what should you do about it? I recommend ignoring it and getting on with whatever you are doing. There is really nothing we can do about it. Cafepress has started to aggresively compete with its own shopkeepers and this is just another slap in the face for the shopkeepers that made Cafepress what it is. I wonder if the decision makers at Cafepress are aware of the how disgusted people are with their actions recently. The shameless greed is sickening.