Cafepress Templates for purchase

So you can design a shirt but can't for the life of you make your Cafepress premium store look good. Or maybe you just don't have the time. Or maybe you're just not thrilled with the templates Cafepress has available.

You're in luck. I'm so happy to see more and more people coming out of the woodwork and building businesses out of the need for good-looking Cafepress templates that shopkeepers don't have to build themselves. There's definitely a need out there and as Cafepress grows, I can only imagine the more templates available, the better.

Audrie from Peonproductions.com has recently launched a great new site offering Cafepress templates for purchase, starting at only $39.99 each. Available now at CPLayouts.com

For ultra-simple to install templates and a few more designs to choose from, visit Kriten's site, Art of Fox Vox for $12 templates.

Here are a couple more Cafepress Premium Shop Template sites to check out:

Cafepress Shop Templates Nice, textured backgrounds, $10

Dark or Light Denim templates Nifty...looks like blue jeans, $12

Now you have no excuses. Go make your store look great!

My nomination for Cafepress Voice community council

I got a letter from Angela and Britta of Cafepress last week asking if I would accept a nomination for a seat on the first-ever Cafepress community council. I was honored by the nomination and have accepted! Voting begins May 1st at Cafepress.com and will run for about a week. Winners will be announced on May 9th, and the kick-off meeting will be May 19th.

What's Cafepress Voice?

It will be a commnunity council made up of 15 shopkeepers that represent different customer segments (top shopkeepers and smaller shopkeepers alike) and categories (Merchandise, Shop management, etc.). The function of the council will be to represent the Cafepress shopkeeper community by being part of the process of weighing in and helping to prioritize features, services and programs proposed by Cafepress.

There are three categories with five seats each. Here are Cafepress' descriptions of each category (I was nominated for the Shop Management category)...

Shop Management:
This committee focuses on how to run a successful shop from both a business and a technical standpoint. This includes making the most of existing tools and identifying areas that can be improved. Is there a way to upload images easier and faster? How can we improve services for basic and premium shops? How can you grow your shop with available or new tools? These are the kind of questions the Shop Management committee will be exploring.

Merchandise:
The Merchandise committee will examine the merchandise line to see where there are opportunities for new products and ways to improve existing ones. What’s selling? What’s not? What are customers asking for? Do Shopkeepers have the tools they need? This committee will also discuss the marketing around merchandise launches to understand which strategies are most successful.

Quality:
Quality is a top priority at CafePress, whether it’s about merchandise, customer service or website performance. This committee will have the important task of studying levels of quality in all these areas to help us make sure that all customers have a positive experience when buying from a CafePress Shopkeeper. Committee members will provide valuable customer feedback and look for ways to maintain the highest quality standards across the board.

So if you're a Cafepress shopkeeper, be sure and stop by the polls at Cafepress on May 1st and cast your vote!

Cafepress nominated for 2007 Webby Award

Cafepress has been nominated for another Webby Award! Thanks to Rasael from The Reader's Shop for spotting it today. Cafepress won the award in 2005 for best retail website. If you're a Cafepress fan, be sure to stop by and cast your vote. The winner will be announced Tuesday, May 1st, 2007.

To vote for Cafepress, you'll need to register for an account with the Webby Awards folks (takes a second) at the Webby Awards web site. Click on "vote for your favorites" to get to the registration page.

Then find the category, "Retail"

Then click on the vote button for Cafepress & you're done!

But before you leave, be sure to browse through the other nominations in other categories. There's some brilliant stuff out there and it's always inspiring to check out.

3 reasons to cross link your Cafepress stores

I've been wanting to cross link my Cafepress shops to one another for a while now and finally have. Since they've been added, I have already seen an increase in traffic and sales in all of my stores.

What did I do? I made several little footer graphics with my shop logos in it (see above), brought the JPEG images into Dreamweaver, made an image map over it, and copied/pasted the HTML from Dreamweaver into my the footer section of the "custom HTML" section of the shop manager for each shop. I made each shop's graphic a little different so it would be consistent with the look of it's shop.

Why did I do it? Here are three reasons why I put cross links in my shops and why your own self-contained web ring might be a good idea for your Cafepress business:

1. To use a little corporate speak: you're leveraging your traffic

By far, my most successful shop has been BusyBodies. And I have yet to define exactly who my customers are in one, nice little definition. They are scrapbooking women, Dads buying Christmas gifts, cancer survivors, kids on a swim team, surgical technician students, dog lovers...and the list goes on.

Because of this diverse audience, it only makes sense to offer up links to my other shops, in case one of these visitors is interested in T-shirts with geocaching humor, signage for their mother's room at work, a shirt sporting their favorite food, or a stylish, modern pillow for their apartment. Without the cross links at the bottom, none of my BusyBodies customers would know I have other shops with more products to choose from.

2. Objects in the footer are larger than they appear

By putting your cross links in the footer of your store, you're not only ensuring they won't interfere with your store's layout or confuse shoppers, but this will also ensure easy navigation to your other stores, from EVERY PAGE in your store. The same holds true if you put your links in your side bar or any other element that will appear on every page in your shop.

This is important because most people will not enter your store from the home page, they will likely find your shop through the Cafepress marketplace or a search engine search that will dump them in the middle of your store. Hopefully Suzy Shopper will find just what she's looking for, but in the event that she doesn't, a quick glance to other pretty links at the bottom of the page, will gently lead her to browse your other stores before she leaves, all without her having to visit your shop's home page.

3. You're keeping visitors longer

It's a sad fact, but most visitors to your store will glance at it and leave. Web surfers are impatient (I'm one of them!), so every second counts. Think of when you're wandering the mall, walk into a store, browse around, and are on the way out and see some great product near the door that catches your eye. Make your cross links catch the eyes of your visitors and they may stop, click, and browse some more...and, if you're lucky, even buy something!

So why wouldn't you cross link?

There are some instances where you may not want to cross-link your Cafepress shops. For those of you who have an adult-themed shirt shop and a kid clothing shop, cross linking may only offend one group of shoppers, while turning off the other group.

Another reason may be aesthetics. My ModPillows store I try to keep a more "high-end" clean-design look and feel. I don't want the pages cluttered up with anything that looks like an ad, so I deliberately put my cross link section in the "about" section of that store.

If you want to cross link several web sites that are not Cafepress stores, there are theories out there that this could hurt your Google rankings. Say, for example, you had 20 different domains all linked to one another from the same hosting company, this may look bad to Google and have an adverse affect on your rankings. But in Google's eyes, and correct me if I'm wrong, your Cafepress store (or Shop ID) is merely an extension of the Cafepress.com domain, so I can't see cross linking Cafepress stores as having an adverse affect on your Google rankings, and it certainly won't do anything to your Cafepress marketplace rankings.

So use your judgement and don't be afraid to experiment a little. In most cases cross linking your Cafepress premium shops will help your traffic and increase your sales over time. Visits to my Statcounter account and Cafepress sales reports are proof of that.

And if you don't have more than one shop to link together, consider signing up for the Cafepress affiliate program with Commission Junction, link up to a few of your favorite shops and earn money on those sales, too!

ModPillows featured in Daily Candy today!

I love candy. But what I love almost as much as the real thing is my daily dose of what's "the next big thing" in my in-box delivered fresh and free by DailyCandy.com. And today, I'd have to say, Daily Candy's got me more excited than a box of chocolates on my lap!

For the past couple of years I've enjoyed their cleverly written reviews & links to little known websites with fabulous products I often bookmark to buy later. I've often wondered, "would they ever consider featuring one of my products?"

Once again the phrase, "It never hurts to ask" has paid off...big time.

I happened to email the folks at Daily Candy at the beginning of the year to let them know about my new pillow shop, ModPillows.com and had since forgotten about it, continued to build my site and add designs.

Now you can't pay to be in Daily Candy, nor can you bribe them with gifts (it even says so on their web site!), so imagine my surprise when their Dallas editor emailed me a couple weeks ago, saying Daily Candy wanted to do a story on my ModPillows. I just about fainted on a nearby ModPillow!

So after a nice phone call from one of their fact checkers last Friday I was excited to know my creations would be featured in the Dallas edition of Daily Candy on Monday, April 16th, 2007. Today's the big day and I want to shout out a big thanks and virtual hug to the folks at Daily Candy. I'm honored ModPillows was chosen to join the ranks of your past picks.

Featured artist of the week at ImageKind.com

I was excited to receive an email today, letting me know that ImageKind has decided to feature me as one of their artists of the week on their home page!

Many thanks to the kind folks at ImageKind for the free press.

And to other creative folks out there who are looking for ways to sell your art and design, check them out! They offer a great service, quality prints and a really nifty online framing tool to try out tons of different frames on artwork before you purchase.

Cafepress' migration to Commission Junction

I mentioned earlier this week that Cafepress is going through some...well...crazy times.

I'm not even sure where to start.

Maheesh's recent post on the Cafepress message boards at least conveys what he's going through.

And numerous posts on Great Gear sum up a lot of us shopkeeper's opinions on the matter.

So what is the matter?

The recent announcement by Cafepress that they would be terminating their existing in-house affiliate program and replacing it with an outside network called Commission Junction.

It's been a messy few weeks since the announcement. I've had more time to digest this because I heard rumor of this in Jan (Apparently it wasn't a secret at Affiliate Summit). I, too was a little shocked to hear that Cafepress had made the decision to go with Commission Junction. Why? CJ doesn't have a great reputation in the affiliate world because of their practices, mainly loyalty programs and parasites. Here's just one thread on A Best Web Affiliate marketing forum discussing Cafepress' migration to Commission Junction. I admit I still have a lot to learn about affiliate marketing, but I have yet to learn why Cafepress thinks CJ is a better choice than, say Share-A-Sale, an affiliate network with a stellar reputation and loyal members who will tell you all about it. The only reason I see so far is the traffic CJ will pull in. But at what price? I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Cafepress had a couple online chats recently to try and answer questions from shopkeepers, but discussions on Great Gear will reveal all the tough questions were avoided completely and most questions were answered vaguely, at most.

Complaints of poor communication between CP and it's shopkeepers and affiliates is prevalent and for good reason. Many of us felt there was no warning of this in time to even react. Cafepress pulled their forum discussion board from A Best Web with little explanation. And, true, Cafepress has the right to make whatever business decisions they feel benefit their business and I respect that, but this could've been handled much better. There are affiliates who built many sites around the old program as well as newbie shopkeepers who are now very confused.

The one good recent change they made last week is to allow shopkeepers to cross link to other stores, including their own and still participate in the affiliate prgram. As someone who is a shopkeeper AND affiliate through Cafepress, this is important to me.

So, I'm staying open about it for now. I can't make a final judgment until I've given the new program a try. I'm entering it with caution...I've been warned (thanks, Loxly!) and also encouraged (thanks to various CJ affiliates). I've been asked to be a beta tester for the new program and will let you know how it goes as events unfold. Stay tuned...

Drop shipping, PayPal and Belt Buckles, Oh my! ArtsCafe.com

So you've been wanting to sell your illustration through Ebay printed on a single money clip or key chain that you didn't have to print, warehouse or ship? Well now, it seems, you can with a company I just learned about called ArtsCafe.com.

So far it's the only print on demand website I've seen that offers such a unique array of products to print your art, design or photography on.

It appears they specialize in print on demand and drop-shipping and have a huge selection of products ranging from letter openers to onesies. And with PayPal accepted, this opens up new doors to designers to sell via EBay.

Their site looks nice, but leaves me wondering who they are, and where they came from. Who's behind the site? I'm not sure. The About Us page is nothing more than marketing speak and doesn't give names of anyone who's running the company.
On their contact page, I see they are based in Hong Kong, with a mailing address in Texas. And Google searches won't turn up much of anything on the company.

English is clearly not their first language and is evident by the numerous grammar errors throughout the site. But I won't hold that against them...my grammars ain't perfect neither. And their marketplace must be in beta because I'm not finding products in there.

But criticisms aside, I'd still be inclined to try them out and see if they deliver. I mean, who else out there offers no minimum purchase quantities of things like Itallian charms and belt buckles with drop shipping and PayPal payment options? Seems almost too good to be true.

RedBubble.com: New Print on Demand Company for Aussies

Another POD (Print On Demand) company, RedBubble has popped up and I just learned about them from Great Gear.

They have a great looking site, reminiscent of ImageKind and offer framed prints of high quality art and photography.

The only draw-back? It's just for Aussies! Hopefully they'll expand to the world someday...they are still in beta. I'll still add them to my resources list and will keep an eye on their growth.

Cafepress.com's announces plans for growth

CafePress.com to add 119 jobs, gets $1.5 million in incentives

Yea, that headline caught my attention (thanks to Jen from Lekker Designs for spotting the article)...I had to pass it on, along with my thoughts.

Cafepress.com is a company made up of "the little guy"...over 2.5 million little guys setting up shop, selling and buying their wares through the Cafepress website. But when does Cafepress' good fortune end? Or at least slow down? So far the company has been increasing profits by roughly 75% each year since 2001. Even I, a "little guy" (gal), have experienced similar growth with my Cafepress ventures and I often wonder myself, "when will this growth slow down? Is Cafepress here to stay?" And occasionally, "when can I buy stock in them?"

So far Cafepress has managed to survive the dot-com boom when so many start-ups failed. They've inspired numerous competitors to start up their own versions of the service, and have created a whole new kind of online community where shopkeepers befriend their competitors, share tips, and bond online like no other group I've known. I've made friendships, met the owners and many staff members in person, learned a heck of a lot and continue to grow my Cafepress stores and profits. They've done a lot of things right.

I just hope they can survive this rapid growth period and manage to keep ahead of the competition with their online service. It's refreshing to hear they plan to expand and add so many jobs. That announcement at least seems more tangible than their plans for 2007 announced a couple weeks ago to shopkeepers. Many of us shopkeepers are frustrated with how slow change happens these days because Cafepress' resources seem to be spent either adding more server space to handle the rapid growth or adding new products to their line. In the meantime, us shopkeepers wait patiently for much needed site upgrades, tools, and functionality so we can continue to create our shops efficiently to meet a growing demand.

So far Cafepress' size has proven to be a great opportunity for competitors and third-party developers to fill in the gap. While Cafepress tells us to use other parties' tools (like those found on Cafepressdn.com), competitors are finding success where Cafepress is lagging. Printfection.com, for example offers a similar service, and because they are still relatively small, they have the luxury of resources and time to make changes happen quickly and respond to shopkeepers concerns with more than a form letter and a 'promise to look into the issue.' I have been very happy with their service so far. Goodstorm.com has also come out with a wonderful new Flash-based T-shirt creator, now in beta. Can Cafepress keep up with these innovators?

Though there's a lot I don't know, I still have faith in Cafepress. And in crazy times like this (more on that later this week), I like to wait until the dust clears before making a final judgement. For now, I'll continue to run shops through Cafepress and dabble with their competitors and let you know what I learn as I go.