April 22, 2009
CafePress.com Is Dead To Us (Well, It Will Be, Very Soon)
Another relationship comes to an end after five and a half years.
I’m too exhausted to go into detail — I’ve spent most of every waking moment today in a panic, which has since settled into a stormy, unabating rage.
In short, CafePress.com has screwed the shopkeepers — the artists, the designers, us, me. They’ve pulled massively boneheaded crap (designed to increase their profit margin while decreasing ours) before, but this…
I’ll put it this way: If you recoil at the idea of buying a T-shirt from Wal-Mart because you know some eight-year-old Guatemalan was paid three cents to make it during a twelve-hour shift, you’ll stop buying stuff from CafePress. Including our stuff.
Another way to put it: CafePress shopkeepers are now the unwilling, un-unionized meat packers Upton Sinclair wrote about in The Jungle — and CP doesn’t care a whit how many fingers we lose in the process.
Or: As my dearly departed father would have put it so succinctly: “Kid, you got screwed — without so much as a kiss.”
Again, I’m just too wiped out to go into detail — so these links will cover it for you:
• CafePress’s lame-ass announcement
• CafePress’s B.S. press release
…[W]hat their news release all boils down to is this:1. Come June 1, the print-on-demand corporation CafePress will increase the prices shoppers pay for its shirts and other gear.
2. Come June 1, CafePress will decrease the commissions paid to the sellers who make designs available on CafePress products, especially on non-apparel items.
3. Starting now but especially after June 1, CafePress will work to undercut designers who maintain their own shops and also sell on CafePress’ “marketplace” search engine. …
… Cafepress, our print-on-demand company which does our order fullfillment for our art/photography is instituting an extreme change in policy. The long and short of it– most shopkeepers estimate that they will lose about 70% of their usual income, while the profits for Cafepress (per item sold) will go way up. The announcement was just made today and already a huge number of artists/designers are stating that they will pull their designs, close those shops and go with other print providers such as Zazzle. We’re currently making our own plans– we don’t make much money per printed item as it is, and we definetly do not sell a lot of volume through cafepress so it’s kind of a no brainer for us to switch to a better provider like Zazzle. For others, the news is pretty dire: people who have built up their entire income over years of concerted effort are absolutely devastated. One of the more successful ones stated earnings of $50,000 per year expects it to drop to about $7000. This strikes me as a plausible estimate.Others who make much less money are the handicapped, stay at home mothers and fathers, retired veterans etc. and where they might have made a dollar on an item they’ll now get perhaps thirty cents. Where they might have made fifteen bucks or more on a framed print, they’ll now get maybe three or four bucks– we’re not talking huge profits for the vast majority of cafepress designers ( I think they number in the millions) but in some cases it means a monthly grocery bill, a car payment or a mortgage payment. It’s just greed on the part of Cafepress, but I don’t think they’ll be so happy about the decision if all their best designers/artists pull out at once– and the funny part is that they have now motivated the best-selling designers (who have a lot more dollars to lose) to jump ship immediately and go with their competitors first.
Who wants to support a printing company with no respect for artists and designers? Sheryl and I recently voluntarily lowered prices on a bunch of our art in response to the sluggish economy– figuring if we make it more affordable we might sell more. So far the results are kind of inconclusive, our stuff wasn’t all that expensive anyway. Near as we can tell though, the plan from Cafepress is to both raise prices, AND give less to the artist. Wow, screw the customer and the artists at the same time. I’m oversimplifying slightly– but the trend over the past few years has been obvious: it’s all about a printing company trying to put the squeeze on: more volume, higher prices, lower commisions for the designer; as if the t-shirts, greeting cards, posters and framed prints will sell no matter what material is printed on them. I don’t think so.
Anyway we still retain our own retail pricing for the time being and it’s as reasonable as we can make it, but come May 31st, I think other print on demand companies are going to experiencing a huge increase in new business, and of course there are other alternatives to P.O.D. I’m betting that the exodus has already begun.
With little notice, a friend of mine and many others found out that their livelihood is being played around with. Good people are being shafted; sorry there is no other word to describe this. Hard working people are having their incomes cut by their new comission structures. The same people that trusted and picked CafePress as the platform for their businesses.Scenario:
This would be the same thing if Andy came up to me and said hey Steph, by the way, your salary is being cut in half. What would you do? Would you sit there and take it?
CafePress FAIL
Stephanie Lichtenstein
More:
• Pitchforks and torches at the CP forums (You may not be able to read this forum if you don’t have a CP account.)
• My original post on the subject today:
First they came for our shop referral fees, and I spoke up, but they said, “Don’t worry, it’s good for The Company, so it’s good for you.”Then they came for our in-house affiliate commissions, and I spoke up, but they said, “Don’t worry, Commission Junction will make up for all of that (and never mind that CJ will close your account if you don’t sell anything in six months — and, oh, by the way, forget everything you just learned about optimizing your shop for in-house affiliate sales at all those CP Conference workshops in San Francisco just a few months ago).”
Then they came for our volume bonuses, and I spoke up, but they said, “Don’t worry, we’ll backtrack and transition out your bonus, so you don’t feel the pain quite so acutely (and anyway, it’s really your fault for relying on Marketplace sales, even if you’re consistently a Top Shopkeeper, and 90% of all your sales are Marketplace sales).”
Then they came for our unlimited sections, and I spoke up, but they said, “Don’t worry, it will make things run more smoothly (and don’t you dare suggest that it’s just easier to shift the burden of our inability to increase server capacity onto you).”
Then they came for our commissions, and there was no one left speak up, because we’d all closed our shops and moved to different PODs.
Sign me,
The Frog That Just Realized the Water is Boiling
• Cafepress Jumps the Shark, POD Entrepreneur
• The Day FernGully Stood Still, Gremlin
• When Life Throws You Lemons…, 3 Kids and Us
• Cafepress Makes terrible decision, Squidbuilders.com
• Closing My Cafepress Shop, Caza Creations
And while I still don’t understand what Twitter is about (I swear to God, I just don’t get it, and I probably never will), I understand there is something— er, are two somethings — on Twitter to “follow”:
So, if you want any of our gear before we remove it from CafePress (to its future home, to be announced), buy it now, before CafePress turns us into sweatshop workers.
CafePress will be dead to us long before the deadline of May 31st.
Before then, I have 4,018 — that’s four thousand and eighteen — designs to move.
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Filed Under: Business/Economy
