CafePress Premium Store Updates

It has been an exhausting week. First off, today is the day of Mongo’s birth…..which I’ve been trying to fly under the radar with but still people find out and wish me a Happy Birthday. Not that I mind, but I try not to be too outgoing on this day because I may not be in a good mood and why dash someone’s well wishes with my wishy washy well being?

That being said, my wife thinks that I am obsessed with the new store. Well, it’s hard to get up and running, especially during a trial period, so that you can maximize any selling opportunities before they start charging you for your premium store.

On a positive note, I sold another shirt. This little number was inspired by those Spencer Gifts tees with 13 different pictures depicting an act or emotion of the character like Anger, Hunger, Happy, etc. Mix that with the Zombie theme and you basically get the same picture for each mood.

I had to include ennui as it is just too funny to think of a zombie that way.

Now, I added that design on March 3rd and within 2 days, I sold one. Again, I don’t make that much off of each shirt, but it helps boost the visibility of the design early on and will maybe generate more sales. It came from the “Marketplace” which means someone searched a keyword that led them to my shirt, rather than they stumbled into my store and bought something off the rack, as it were.

In that regard, I’ve done some rework on the store, finally. I used the basic template and structure to get things up and running, but as I add designs and products for those designs, I find myself having a hard time managing all these products in one place. Now, being in the job I currently am, I am very conscious towards scrolling and clicks to the center of a tootsie pop. If someone searches CafePress for keywords that lead to my items, so be it, but that is only half the battle. You might also get people wandering into your store and the further they are from a selection means the further you are from a sale. If you have some good marketing skills you can drive customers into your store from outside CafePress’ website. In that case, the better your organization is, the better you can fight a two front battle.

When I first opened the store, I wasn’t thinking ahead. Oh, I’ll throw up a couple of designs and add some shirts and that’s it. But what I found was that you need to constantly be thinking and working ideas to see which produces results. If you have a niche store, selling unique designs, you probably don’t have to do as much work. Simply add a new design every so often, throw it on some products and wait. But, if your brain is constantly going, like mine, you want to try and capture everything. Hey, I just thought of a funny design, I need to go work on that. Soon, you have 15 designs. Oooh, I want that to be in different colors for the dark shirts. Take those 15 designs and multiply by that by how many colors you want to display.

Here’s a prime example. I have a store section called, “Insert Coin.” This is basically where I’ve put all my designs that are based on or inspired by video games. Being a child of the Atari Age, I thought it would be cool to capture some of those pop culture kernels of cheesy goodness and “make some shirt.” I had three ideas which I thought were clever. So far, I’ve only gotten to one. The other two are going to be awhile, because my first design spawned three more related designs and three colors for each.

Based off the old Adventure game, I put the dragons on individual shirts. Clean and simple recreations drawn on a transparent background should be easy. Let’s face it, the Atari was not that advanced, recreating a blocky dragon that looks like a duck is easy. However, there are three distinct dragons in the game, Yellow – Yorgle, Green – Grindle, and Red- Rhindle. Now, I have three colored designs on 15 or so shirts. Then, the other two designs I had for the dragons had to be produced the same way. Now, my section was very crowded with all these dragon shirts and my poor Keytar Hero shirts were lost in the shuffle. Rearranging the store to stagger the designs on each style shirt style caused any customer to have to scroll through a lot of dragons to find a Keytar Hero shirt that they may want.

Rhindle, the meanest of all three dragons.

This is where my work experience comes in to play. If I break up the section into designs. I can then have the front of the Insert Coin section showcase the individual design. If they click on that design, they can go to a section of those products and instead of scrolling through multiple designs, now they are scrolling through multiple products with the same design. In essence, I’ve created a basic shop all over again and imported it into a premium hierarchy. Remember, in your basic shops, you are allowed one design per product but multiple products per one design. I can’t believe I didn’t see this concept sooner. If I were to create different basic shops, like I used to, I would follow the same pattern. So, if I follow that model, managing my products will be a lot easier.

Now, whenever I come up with an idea for a shirt, I build the section, first. Add a design to the section and then import all of the shirt styles from another section. This keeps me from having to go through and choose each one the list. Then, I can now check all and change the name, description, and image on the shirts in bulk. With each section devoted to a design instead of a theme, this frees me from having to scroll down through 30 or so shirts checking which ones I want to change. It also makes it easier to manage the markups and color choices. Some designs don't work well on dark shirts, so I have to go back and choose those to change the image to an inverted color scheme so that they'll show up. This came into play with my Wii-knee shirts. Apparently, there is a report that Wii related injuries have been cropping up involving gamers' knees. How could I resist?

The drawn outline shows up OK on a white t-shirt.


But it would have been lost on a dark shirt, so an inverted image is used.


Just in case, I also included a design with just the phrase.

That's all for now. I still have many designs to try and get into the store, but I am just about out of trial time, so the quicker the better. Now, I'm paying $5.00 a month and as of today, I have about three months paid up with sales. Hopefully, soon, a profit will be made. More later.

Flavor Shot of Love on the Rocks

Oh for crying out loud?!? How much more can we endure? I will not go on at length about my already established loathing of reality television but will share my thoughts on some things.

The latest season of The Bachelor wrapped up with a three hour meh fest. The final episode and the “After the Final Rose” or as I call it, “You’ll-watch-this-because-there’s-nothing-on-during-the-10-o’clock-hour-on-other-channels-and-Heroes-is-still-lagging-in-the-9-o’clock-one!” I refused, flat out refused, to watch this season as a captive audience to my wife’s kidnapping of the remote. Luckily, she was turned off after the last offering of The Bachelorette, where DeAnna Pappas chose Spicoli-lite Jessie Csincsak over the current Bachelor, Single Dad, Jason Mesnick. The wife was pulling for Graham Bunn, but he was unwilling to play Deanna’s game. He probably was the best man for the job but since he didn’t fall all over DeAnna and make her the center of the universe, she dropped him.

So,…am I telling you anything you don’t already know? Ok, well, you know that DeAnna and Jessie broke up before the wedding and it had to be her choice because Jessie had some YouTube video talking about it and he was crying about the breakup. Anyway, DeAnna came crawling back to Jason crying, “I made a mistake!”

Obviously, the producers knew or had heard of the breakup between DeAnna and Jessie and made her an offer to come back. What? Scripted reality television, you say? No, you must be mistaken. Yeah, well obviously, Pappas has no dignity because she did just that, she appeared in the season finale. She probably tried to call Graham Bunn, but he’s too busy dating someone else, so what else was there? Again, I didn’t watch any of this season but saw the last five minutes of the finale and a couple of the after show thinking it couldn’t still be on at 10:00 pm. I was wrong.

How can they keep plugging this crap? Is standard television fare that bad? Is this high brow Jerry Springer? Instead of being a voyeur into the trailer park crowd, we get the beautiful 20-30 something professionals in a mansion. And why do people keep thinking that these people will make it? Is it any wonder why the show is two for 13 in successful marriages? It’s obvious that there’s a lot of screwing around going on, so why should anyone, guy or girl, feel that they are really special. They’re just a numbered contestant.

Then we have the cable knock off shows like Flavor of Love and I Love New York, and the rest. This stuff is a steaming pile of poo. Yet people watch with all the fervor of a Smoke Monster centric episode of LOST. On a side note, if the Bad Robot and company were really cool, they’d do an episode like that with Smoke Monster flashbacks. I guess only in my mind, only in my mind.

Where was I? Oh yeah, there was some story that Glen Danzig was going to appear in the next season of Rock of Love. Of course, it would be slanted towards a satanic spin with weird challenges involving body parts and goats. My question is who would be allowed to audition? He already has a built in warning to all the Mother’s of potential contestants telling them not to walk his way or hear his words. That’s probably the theme song. It’d be dumb for them to not use it.

And don’t get me started on that whole Tia Tequila hot mess. This chick was just an asshat and a sellout. Make up your mind…and you want to talk about glass houses, you’re doing about as much for the GLAAD image as Lindsay Lohan. Don’t let this one fool you. This was pure spot light grabbing idiocy. She knew what the demographic was going to be if she played both sides of the field and she was about as big a fake as the Joe Schmoe show. The fact that she even got a second season shows how depraved producers in Hollywood are. You know you can’t play the ambiguity card this time, and in the end, the winner bowed out. She couldn’t commit to her own fame seeking sham image.

How about Tool Academy? Let me get this straight. The object is relationship boot camp for idiots. How dumb does a guy have to be to think they are being entered into a “Mr. Awesome” contest only to be put into “charm school?” They obviously are somewhat in on it because they don’t walk away right after they’ve been let in on the joke that is them. Oh, and then in the second episode, one of the guys replaced his girlfriend. What the hell? The girlfriends signed the guys up for the show and this freak of nature drops her for an ex.

Oh and my personal favorite idiot of all time, The Pickup Artist. First off, take that dumb hat off your dumb head. Next, realize that you are an idiot and regardless of how special you think you really are, you’re just ripping off a sub par Molly Ringwald movie. Kind of fitting, no?

Look, I don’t claim to be anything but me. I’ve never, for once, in my life relied on sex appeal or looks to find someone. I’ve always been the Ducky, the Farmer Ted, or the LIoyd Dobler. I’ve relied on my character and humor and I ended up just fine. Yes, I watched as other, better looking guys, put a revolving door on their bedroom but I didn’t care in the end. I may have slammed them for being assholes or players, but at the end of the day, it all worked out for the best. I’m happy and I have I no regrets other than a couple of bad choices which I got lucky over the outcome. But I don’t get these mind numbingly dumb shows. At least with The Bachelor and Bachelorette, they find someone and they’re done, for a few weeks. Flavor Flav and Brett Michaels keep coming back for season after season. It’s not like they’re trying to find Mrs. Right, but Mrs. Right Now.

It makes you wonder what kind of compensation they give rejected contestants on those shows. You know how Oscar presenters get baskets of stuff from all kinds of high profile designers and confectioners? I wonder if contestants on these shows get a basket from CVS and Rite-Aid pharmacies. How about a lifetime supply of antibiotics and delousing powder?

CafePress Premium Shop Owner Wees and Woes

I’ve been selling or have been trying to sell shirts and other novelty items on CafePress since 2006. In the beginning I had a couple of ideas for some shirts based on the Mongo image I use on my blog. They were a parody of the “got milk?” ads and asked people to embrace their inner “Mongo.” You know, the one who gets angry when the copier jams or knocks over three bottles reaching for one on the table. That guy, the bull in the china shop.... have you read my blog? Ever seen the graphic at the top of the page? Go ahead, I'll wait. OK.

I opened up a basic shop, uploaded my images, and sat back and waited for the money to roll in to my account. Yeah, it didn’t happen. Still, I was hopeful. I thought I tagged my images correctly but when I did a search my items were buried three or four pages deep into the results. So, I did some tweaking and some research on how to effectively tag images. Then other ideas started flooding my brain. I expanded and opened up another basic shop that dealt with Pop Culture parody items. Because the basic shop allows you to have one type of item per design, it became necessary to open up multiple shops to have a basic t-shirt with different graphics on them. It became a little tedious, but I wasn’t selling anything yet, so I couldn’t justify opening up a premium shop which would allow me different sections and multiple designs for the same style of shirt at a price. In all, I opened up three stores and in all, I sold zero product.

I kind of left the shops up and running and used my account to make calendars for my family at the base price. Everything else just sat and waited for someone to stop by and pay for a shirt $3.00 over base price. The markup is where shop keepers make their money. CafePress charges a flat rate to the customer, not the shopkeeper, and then you decide how much of a markup your design is worth. You keep the markup, CafePress keeps the base price. That, coupled with a huge amount of premium customers adds up to money in their pocket.

Lately, I decided to see if it would be worth taking the risk and paying $5.00 a month to aggregate all of my ideas into one shop. CafePress is offering a 15 day trial and if you don't like it, you can cancel it. However, be warned, if you've operated a few basic shops up until now, you may not want to upgrade. Once you go Premium, you can't revert back to basic. You would have to start all over again, so it might be more beneficial to keep your basic shops separate and open a brand new Premium shop and import your items over from your basic ones.

I kept the theme of my own personal logo, “Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash!” and added sections to cover various themes. Some of the features make owning a premium shop more beneficial. I have the ability to add various designs to the same style of shirt, which is nice. I also have the ability to modify and personalize my site with my HTML knowledge. This is going to require some time but I’ll eventually get it done.

So, after four days, how is it going? I’ve made three dollars off of a pin I created.

It was an oddball thing I thought of when I heard that people actually recognize Pi Day as March 14th, which is three days before St. Patrick’s day, and people own pins that say "Kiss me, I'm Irish." Well, you get the idea.

With that sale and a few other sales I didn’t know I had, I have managed to make about $15.00 total. This will keep the light on in my shop for three months after my initial trial ends. Now, I will have to sell about nine more items to pay for the rest of the year, and anything on top of that is profit. But is it worth it? If I can afford to spend $5.00 a month, then yeah, it’s worth it. But you have to think in certain terms.

First, while CafePress is a very nice and affordable site for a shopkeeper, it’s not exactly the same for a consumer. You are paying a lot of money for a shirt designed by an amateur. Granted, there are some talented artists out there among the sea of mediocre shirts. I do not claim to be an artist or designer, I just have a broad and insane sense of humor. My ideas are based on absurd situations or parodies of pop culture ideas. I also have to be vigilant enough to stay ahead of the current trends or someone will have beaten me to the punch. I made a little parody design for a Helicopter Tour outfit based on a popular television show. If you search “LOST” on the main site, you’ll get 11,200 results for designs on a quarter of a million products. Everything from the numbers to symbols from the stations to even character specific tees. Just for the sake of argument, my design is on page...well, I gave up after the first 500 results. Now, if I search the word “Lapidus”, you get one result and it’s my design. That’s not that great. I may have to go back and retag my image. That’s the trick. You have to think like a consumer. What kind of shirt are they looking for? Will they get it? Are your designs or store properly tagged to rank high enough in the search results? Will people be willing to go to page two or three to find your little idea on a tee?

Secondly, and more importantly, can you accept a couple of dollars off of a sale? I tried to be really fair on my prices. I have a flat rate which just makes it easier to manage. However, the base price of a blank shirt is comparable to one in the store, if not more expensive and it has an actual graphic on it. Blogs and forums will tell you to not sell yourself short, but you have to be cognizant of a struggling economy and your competition. Even the most die hard t-shirt, clothes horse is hard up for cash these days. People may not be willing to pay $20.00 for a goofy shirt that looks like a knock off of a real one. If you are trying to capture the mood of the customer for any given topic in entertainment or news, you will compete with tons of other shopkeepers for customers. Now, If you can really design well and have good marketing sense, you may be able to create a niche for yourself in unique shirts and other products. If you’re a pop culture schmo like me, you’re fighting an uphill battle with two strikes against you. You’re only going to make serious money in volume sales. Forget about trying to make it all on one shirt. Create a product that you can move repeatedly, and you’ll see the benefits.

Now, onto my biggest pet peeve. Every so often, you can get nailed by the Content Usage police. Imagine you are in the shower or some other place where you do your best mental work and an idea hits you that is so clever and funny…to you…that you spend an entire weekend tweaking a design to make it look just right. You upload you design, choose your shirt styles and then sit back and wait for the sales to roll on into your pocket. You go to bed after a long day of squinting at your pain program of choice, only to wake up to an email stating that your wonderful and fantastic image has been put into pending status. It pisses you right off it does.

I mentioned in a previous post how I had a design which was tagged...in violation of content usage policy… That’s lawyer speak for, “You are not allowed that design.” I ended up redoing it, which made it look less professional but it’s still live on the site. It sucks, but I guess I really didn’t make my first design unique enough to pass the censors. However, the second design that came into question deserved a reprieve. I spent a hell of a lot of time trying to design this little parody shirt. I found a font called Nightmare Hero which gave me that Heavy Metal Feel. I felt really proud of my Keytar Hero shirt and they nailed me for it!

Further review of Cafepress’ site revealed a few shirts called Cowbell Hero which was a clever take on the whole idea. If I hadn’t seen it on Chuck, recently, I would have hoped my brain would have been able to come up with it. Alas, I did not and I won’t touch it since there is another shirt with the same logo. I just don’t have another weekend in which I can blow on a design. The ones on CafePress are a bit sloppy but similar font style, which prompted me to cry “Shenanigans” to the Content Usage Police. I informed them that I did download a free font and that there were other shirts with similar designs. They backed off and reinstated my image. Now, whether the Cowbell Hero shirts were spawned after the episode of Chuck, where the shirt was visible in a closet, or solely inspired by the hilarious Christopher Walken sketch seen on Saturday Night Live, years ago, is one of the chicken and egg people. My only concern was that if I was going down, so was everyone else. I might still do a redesign and offer it as an alternative on the chance that they may come back and say that I am infringing somewhere. This one is going to be a more 80’s style design with bright neon colors and rounded font style instead of the black and white Heavy Metal font. Who knows, it might be a bigger seller.

These are the things you deal with when you opt for a premium shop. It takes a lot of time to do the work. I spent a good hour rearranging my store so that I could group my shirts by style and then design. You can choose one or multiple items and then move them up or down by clicking on arrows on the side of the page. I added products in bulk and then had to go back and change them by grouping. You have to check each item and then choose from a drop down like “Add/Change Image”, “Change Name”, “Change Description”, "Change Markup", etc. You can only change one attribute at a time and then you have to go back and recheck each product and choose another attribute to change. Shoot me now. However, I did find a shortcut. If I created one product, say a white t-shirt, with a design I want and then realized that I could probably use a bunch of other shirts like a baseball jersey or golf shirt for the same design, I can cheat a bit when it comes to changing attributes. When you go through and check off each product to change, also check off the original item you created. This automatically populates the attribute from the original in the text field leaving you to just click “Apply Changes.” Nine out of ten times this worked successfully. If you have a lot of products in a store or section of store, it can be a tedious task to rearrange. I think they should do some work to update this feature letting you choose your items and then click and drag rather than click an up or down arrow repeatedly. Or they should change the interface all together to allow you a more dynamic feature utilizing AJAX widgets like iGoogle. I’m sure if those features become available I could get my work done more quickly. Still, I managed to get the store rearranged the way I want. Each row was a style of shirt and each column was a different graphic.

So, there you have it. I’m going to try and sprinkle in some more tips and stories from the world of a CafePress newbie from time to time. Hopefully, this will either give you inspiration to either venture out on your own or at least caution you against even starting. In any case, it will maybe drive some traffic to my store. I need to keep selling or it’s going to cut into my own t-shirt fund. Unfortunately, I may be my best customer.