When it comes to the Cafepress community, us shopkeepers are an impatient bunch. We want it all and we want it now. Fortunately Cafepress is growing at an astounding rate, but that also means the addition of new features to their service happen slower than we'd like.
So what's the solution? Third party tools. If you're a web developer yourself, then you can probably create a lot of the bells and whistles for your shop on your own. For the rest of us, we need to rely on others to design these tools for us. Luckily Cafepress supports and encourages non-Cafepress programmers to develop tools for the Cafepress community to use.
I wanted a search box for my shop, I asked, and I got one.
Finally, I have an easy to use search tool for my premium Cafepress store. But it's not from Cafepress, it's from a bright young bloke from the UK, who's happy to sell it to you for a small annual fee (thanks, Adam!)
Adam's site, Search CP offers an account with your own subdomain, code to plug a search box into your shop, and a coupon feed (shows the latest Cafepress coupon codes) with search results. I like it because it was easy to set up and it doesn't dump shoppers back into the Cafepress marketplace. It keeps them in my store. You can try out my search box here on my store, BusyBodies.
His tool searches a common image tag that you have to place on all of the images you want searched in your stores.
If you want to buy it, he has it set up so you can pay for it with CafeCash, too.
Now, if you're a developer, there is money to be made creating third party tools for Cafepress! Visit CafepressDN.com to learn more about the Cafepress Developers Network.
Technorati Tags: cafepress, search, web, developer
