Being Irish I wouldn’t want to miss out on a contest such as this: a Saint Patrick’s Day design contest. The prizes seem pretty lame but if you are making St. Paddy’s Day designs anyway why not. If you win you will get a nice bump from the Spreadshirt newsletter. See details below.

We’d like you to create a St. Patrick Day design, submit it to the Spreadshirt Marketplace and tag it with STPATTYCONTEST. We will then select 3 winners and award the following prizes:

One of three 1st positions in the Bestseller category in the Spreadshirt Designer between February 25th and March 17th (One of our most trafficked areas on the site)
One of three 1st positions in the Holidays & Occasions/St. Patrick’s Day category in the Spreadshirt Designer February 25th and March 17th
Winner’s design featured in a Spreadshirt St. Patrick’s Day Newsletter sent to Spreadshirt’s house list (Date TBD)
Design will be featured in the main teaser on Spreadshirt.com homepage
One coupon for a free product ($35 value + free standard domestic shipping)
Basic Rules

Contest officially starts on February 5th and ends on Feb 19th, 2010. Spreadshirt will announce the winners on February 19th, 2010.
Your design must be submitted to the Spreadshirt Marketplace and tagged with STPATTYCONTEST during the above period.
Designs should be closely or loosely related to the themes surrounding the idea of the St. Patrick’s Day. Be creative. A generic green clover will definitely not win you the prize.
The winners will be picked by Spreadshirt staff based on following criteria:
Creativity and Originality (New and previously unsubmitted designs have preference)
Versatility (Invites customization – provokes thought for adding text or multiple designs)
Market Appeal (Immediately attracts attention from the viewer)
Applicability to Apparel (Design can be used on a wide variety of apparel items)
Production ( Vector designs are preferred )

As you may or may not know by now, Cafepress has an agreement with the ABC Network that will allow Cafepress shopkeepers to make fan merchandise and sell it in the store. This is pretty awesome for shopkeepers because, as I have mentioned before, your designs will have a ready made market. People are already searching for Lost merchandise so you just have to design some quality stuff. (Note: there are rules regarding the designs so please read them.)

You can win a $200 CafePress Gift Certificate, LOST seasons 1-5 DVD box sets, and a t-shirt signed by some of the LOST cast (cast members tbd) – one prize package will be awarded for each category.  AND, one Grand Prize Winner will be selected by a LOST producer from the 5 category winners!  The Grand Prize is:

• A trip for 2 to Oahu, Hawaii for 4 nights (round trip airfare and hotel included)

Sounds like an awesome prize and it is. Oahu is amazing, I just got back from there a few weeks ago.

Contest is open to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 years or older at time of entry.

Read more: Cafepress

I believe that Cafepress had a PayPal option a long time ago and removed it. I forget the reasons they gave for removing it but anyway it’s back. Shopkeepers needn’t get too excited though because while they are considering using PayPal to pay shopkeeper earnings in the future they have been saying that since I joined. Anyway, there may be a possible sales bump from people who want to use their PayPal account money.

Via: Cafepress

I love to see the PODs make and effort to improve their stores and while these are minor improvements by Spreadshirt all improvements are welcome.

• Product Detail Page now features a tab info box, so your customers can view details about the product, printing methods, and the size chart!  Need more information or details?  Read more on the Forum!

• Digital Designs have option for grey thumbnail background:  Under the Design Tab in your User Area, you can activate a grey background for your digital designs…ideal for white digital designs.  Choose the detail link for the design and check the ‘Display grey background’ check box and Save.  The design will have a grey background wherever the design thumbnail appears!

• Premium Newsletter now offers feature to display the promo banner:  Alert your customers not only of new products added to your shop, but also of any sales going on!

See original article on Spreadshirt.

Cafepress are looking for people to donate designs, the profits for which will be sent to UNICEF and used to help the people in need. For those of you that have been living under a rock Haiti, already one of the world’s poorest countries has had a devastating earthquake. Below is the information from Cafepress:

CafePress is helping raise money for Haiti’s earthquake relief efforts.

You can get involved by donating your designs to our Haiti Relief Effort shop. We will be promoting the shop through marketing efforts, and proceeds* from the shop will go directly to UNICEF to aid families from Tuesday’s devastating earthquake.
Help the children. Donate designs to our Haiti Relief Effort.

CafePress is helping raise money for Haiti’s earthquake relief efforts.

You can get involved by donating your designs to our Haiti Relief Effort shop. We will be promoting the shop through marketing efforts, and proceeds* from the shop will go directly to UNICEF to aid families from Tuesday’s devastating earthquake.
UNICEF is targeting these funds to provide safe water, temporary shelters, medical supplies and other essentials to displaced children. The money will also be used to help orphaned children reunite with families.

Please donate designs now, as time is critical. To submit designs, send them to: HaitiRelief@cafepress.com (note that proceeds* will be used for Haiti Relief Effort fundraising, and sellers will not receive commissions).

Also note that only proceeds* from the official Haiti Relief Effort shop will be donated. So we prefer that you not offer them in your shop or in the CafePress Marketplace so we can be sure that proceeds go directly to Unicef.

By donating your designs to the Haiti Relief Effort shop you agree that you will not receive any commissions from the sale of products with your design made through the Haiti Relief Effort shop and you grant CafePress a limited license to create and sell products with your design solely through the Haiti Relief Effort shop.

Cafepress are holding another design contest and this time the task is to create a design for a gym bag with the theme “Get in shape”.

WIN a $500 AMEX gift card plus a SIGG water bottle AND a Flip Mino video camera. Submissions will be accepted between December 18, 2009 and January 6, 2010.

Open to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 years or older at time of entry.

Details: Cafepress

Not being a developer myself I don’t really know what this means but from what I hear Printfection’s API is miles ahead of other POD stores. And now it seems to have gotten even better.

Unfortunately thought, the thing that is really holding Printfection back is not the lack of tools because there are plenty, but rather the lack of an affiliate program. If Printfection had an affiliate program there would be more promotion and developers would be clamoring to test out their API. We live in hope.

“The Printfection API just got a whole lot simpler. Using our new API wrapper, developers can focus on their code instead of dealing with the integration between their application and the Printfection API….(read more on Printfection)”

The Smithsonian Institute has just joined Cafepress and this is a great opportunity for affiliates as there is a ready-built market and huge brand recognition. I am Irish so I don’t really know much about the Smithsonian but I believe they are historical curators or such like. Anyway, I thought I’d let you know so you can add this brand to your affiliate sites. It should at least pull some traffic your way.

It has come to the attention of several Cafepress shopkeepers that some Twilight inspired tees produced by Cafepress using designs created by Cafepress shopkeepers are on sale on eBay. This is an excerpt of a post by Cafepress shopkeeper, Hope, who noticed her designs being sold on eBay for prices lower than she charges.

I found a lot of Twilight t-shirts that appear to be cafepress shopkeepers designs. I don’t know if this shopkeeper below has permission from Cafepress or the shopkeeper, but I did find a few of my designs on t-shirts being sold without my prior consent and much cheaper than what I sell them.

Here is the link to the eBay seller.

Cafepress are not really sure what is going on yet but they are investigating and have put their legal team into action. Hopefully we will find out more soon.

The thread has been closed in the Cafepress forums but you can still read more about this issue there and if your designs are being sold on eBay you should contact Cafepress or any other POD that you may be using.

I have no idea why Cafepress has done this or even when but from what I hear it is a recent development. It wasn’t all that long ago that the link was removed. To be honest I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it were taken down again soon. You can see the image below to find out where the link is. There are two similar links on the page. The one on the left is to see all the shopkeepers items in the marketplace but they are unsorted and probably don’t lead to many extra sales for Cafepress. The problem now is the price disparity. The Cafepress marketplace items are generally (not always) cheaper than in the shop. In some cases the marketplace prices are even lower than the base price for the shopkeepers so it is impossible to compete on price (and pretty difficult to compete on marketing). Anyway, it’s better for the shopkeepers to have this link than not to have it.