First sales with new Pricing rules

Yes, I Blog

Well folks, I have made a couple sales on my CafePress site in June and here are the results so far:

1 T-shirt – this particular T-shirt is priced at $19.99 on my shop.  If you go directly to my shop, you can get that shirt for $20.  The person who purchased the shirt found it through the CafePress Marketplace.  They paid $22.00 for it.  $2.01 higher than if they would have found my site directly. 

The result for me?  – I got $2.20 on that sale.  If they had gone to my site directly and paid $2.01 LESS, I would have gotten my standard $5.00 commission.  

How is that for a Win-Lose-Lose!  I don’t know about you, but I haven’t ever read any Inc. or Money or Fortune article about any company who provides Win-Lose-Lose opportunities (where the company is the “win” and the customer and suppliers are the “lose”).

I have also had 2 other sales.  These were both buttons.  Normally my buttons are a little over priced since I put the $5.00 markup on all products.  So normally the buttons on my site are like $7.50 or something.  Well, the CafePress Marketplace priced them at like $2.50 or so.  That means I got $0.25 for each of them. 

Now I know what you are thinking – You probably would not have made those sales w/o the marketplace pricing because your prices are too high.  I would not disagree with you.  I probably would not have made those sales.  I have made sales of buttons though.  The biggest problem is that T-Shirts are the BIGGEST seller on CafePress.  I think I read once that 70% + of all sales are T-shirts.  I would gladly give up the potential missed sales on buttons for the actual commission on the shirts. 

Bottom line for the first week of the new Marketplace rules:

A customer paid more for one of my shirts and 2 buttons were sold, and I got about $2.95 in commission instead of having a customer pay less for a shirt and getting $5.00 in commission.  Did I mention this is week 1?  I highly doubt the increased volume of buttons is going to make up for the loss on all sales.  Too bad, they used to have a good business model.  Off to Zazzle for a lot of shopkeepers.  Do you want to learn how to go over to Zazzle?  Head on over to my From Pink Slip site and we are in the beginning stages of learning how to set up a free shop at Zazzle and populate it with your designs.  You heard correctly, it is free.  Where CafePress also charges its shopkeepers between $5 and $7 / month for their “premium” shops, Zazzle lets you load a ton of designs in your shop and offer it on a lot of products for free.

So what are the Positive / Take-aways from this post?

1.  I made some sales on my Shirt shop, so that means efforts from over a year ago are still paying dividends.  This is the Leveraging Time Proposition or How to Make Time Work For You I have mentioned on Click Into Action.

2.  There are a lot of opportunities out there.  If you don’t like the one you are on, you can find another and move your operation.  Depending on one 3rd party application is the same as putting all your eggs in one basket.  Diversification of your distribution channels will benefit you.

3.  You can spend time emailing the large companies when they start changing things that negatively affect you, or you can use that time to build another distribution channel to replace / negate those negatives. 

What are some of the things you took away from this post?  Do you have some insight that I am missing here?

Johnny Optimist
The Other 1/2 is full of Opportunity!

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