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

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

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.

Cafepress have just announced portals for several popular musicians. What does this mean for the Cafepress shopkeeper. It means that you can create designs for bands that already have a huge fan base. The already have people searching for their t-shirts and gift items. Yes, your designs come with a ready-made guaranteed market.  Of course sales are another thing. You should get some sales thanks to the Cafepress marketing machine but if you really want to make money from your fan designs you will need to sell them from directly from your store rather than the Cafepress marketplace. See below for email and links to information about portals and design restrictions:

If you’re a big music fan then you’ll be happy to hear about our new set of fan portals (coming soon)!  We’re thrilled that our partner, Live Nation, is inviting the creative CafePress community to create fan-designed merchandise for some of the most talented musical artists (see below).  You can start now!

Be sure to read the Design Guidelines as there are very specific rules that designers must adhere to in order for their content to be featured in and sold through the artist’s fan portal.  Click on the artist’s name below to view the design guidelines specific to that artist.  Please note that the guidelines may be more restrictive than the CafePress Content Usage Policy, however we need to respect the creative decisions of the artists.

Cheech and Chong
Chickenfoot
Gene Simmons
KISS
Lil Wayne
Maroon 5
System of a Down
The Who
Tommy Lee
ZZ Top

You may notice a lot of these names have stores at Zazzle too but Zazzle shopkeepers cannot design for them…yet. What do you say Zazzle? Gonna make some new deals?

Printfection made this announcement a few days ago but of course it is relevant to all POD sites as far as I can see.

We were notified by Google today of changes Google is implementing to their Google Base/ Google Product service. Starting tomorrow, September 3, 2009 Google’s new policy will no longer allow non-domain owners to submit products to Google Base on behalf of the domain. This means you cannot submit products to Google Base with www.printfection.com in the URL as you are not the “domain owner” for printfection.com. Furthermore, any products with www.printfection.com URLs you have submitted to Google Base in the past will be removed from Google Base shortly.

Going forward, all products will have to be submitted directly from Printfection, from a single Printfection-Owned Google Base account. Please be patient while we work on a new solution to submit your designs and products to Google Base.

To be honest, because I have been so busy I haven’t been uploading my feeds to Google base recently anyway but this will be a further blow to many shopkeepers, especially Cafepress shopkeepers who are fervently trying to compete with Cafepress itself for sale of their items. It’s hard enough to compete with CP anyway because they have the resources (paid for with our sweat) but this development doesn’t help at all.

In the case of Cafepress, there might be a workaround though. If you have set up a domain with cpshop you may be able to create a feed using that website. I think I have heard of it being done but I haven’t done it myself. If I get time to figure it out I will certainly post about it here. And of course you could opt out of the Cafepress marketplace. I haven’t done that either. When I get more time I will see how to proceed.

At the beginning of this month Cafepress introduced a Featured Designers err… feature in which some stores will be featured on the search results page. Some shopkeepers are getting preferential treatment…like me. As you can see below I am the featured designer for the search “offensive humor”. It’s not a bad thing and I guess the preferential treatment will be temporary which is only fair. But of course some designers will never get featured so that is no fair.

According to their blog post they are working on a submission process so I guess you will be able to apply to be the featured designer for a particular search. Below is an excerpt from the blog post at Cafepress:

We’re pleased to announce the launch of a featured designers spotlight, where our talented designers are highlighted in the Marketplace. Featured designer banners will show up for many popular search terms such as “kitten” or “navy“. To start, we have selected 30 designers to feature and plan to feature more in the months to come.

Here’s how it works:

* Shopper types in search term
* If there’s a featured designer assigned to the search term, a banner will display above search results
* The banner links to the designer page with relevant designs for search term

We are working on a submission process so we can feature more designers in other niches. More to come in the coming months!

I wonder what will happen when their featured designers opt out of the marketplace though. Obviously their designs won’t be displayed but perhaps the custom made banner will remain linking to empty search results.