CafePress Sucks Ass
Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 11:11 amI’ve been toying with the idea of putting my art (the stuff I show no one) online for people to purchase as large prints and whatnot. Well, CafePress seems to be the most chosen store, and apparently, they suck ass.
As noted by this trio of flickrs, CafePress t-shirts suck ass: they severely fade after one wash; however, also noted apparently Zazzle is worth using. I’ll have to check them as a possible printing company to do my art via.
Amen brother!
Especially ‘the f-bomb letter from the bottom of my heart’ part! I’m tire of cafepress.com’s content usage policy too. I wish I had an alternative solution.
Amen brother!
Especially ‘the f-bomb letter from the bottom of my heart’ part! I’m tire of cafepress.com’s content use policies too. I wish I had an alternative solution.
I’ve been irked by them for the last time. Well, sort of. I wish there was a similar company that had higher quality products and cared about quality. I just had a shirt that I designed printed for the FOURTH time, and it’s still wrong. Their WYSIWYG preview is apparently NOT what you get, oh, and the image is off center, again. Sigh.
I want to move all of my art elsewhere, but it seems that they have a hold on the market. They also make it easy to fill a whole shop with items, unlike the others I’ve tried. I’m going to keep looking until I find something better. Until then, I’ll keep my stuff there. People are buying it. I just wonder what they are getting…
I’ve been a shopkeeper at CafePress for about 2 years. Overall, I have been pretty happy with my earnings. I make anywhere from $1200.00 to $2000.00 in design sales per month and then CafePress adds a volume bonus that can range from $500.00 to $1000.00 on top of my earnings, so my monthly check can be as high as $3000.00
While I am fairly happy with my earnings, I am completely dissatisfied with the company and the manner in which they conduct their business.
First off, let me point out that while other POD’s such as Zazzle, Printfection and Spreadshirt ALL have better customer service and better products, CafePress is the leader when it comes to search engine saturation and marketplace sales. This is why it is possible for someone like me to make upwards of three grand in one month. Unfortunately, CafePress is fully aware of their market superiority and therefore they have no reason to accommodate their customers or their shopkeepers. Their attitude seems to be “If you don;t like it, then set up sho elsewhere. See if we care”… and ultimately, they are right. If I shut my shop down tomorrow, they would still make their billions from all of the other successful shopkeepers.
1.) The community forum at CafePress is a complete and utter joke. When I first started doing business on CafePress I would run into the typical snags and pitfalls that anybody who is new to print on demand services might run into. Initially, I would try to find resolution on the forum and was under the impression that the community forum was run by actual CafePress employees. Well, it’s not. The people that answer questions on the community forum are other shopkeepers just like me, so they usually never have any useful information to offer. Secondly, since they are not CafePress employees and they are merely other tenured shopkeepers, they have no motivation to help you with your problem. You are the competition, so typically they don’t want to help because your success as a shopkeeper means less sales for them.
I also have to agree with the person above who stated that whenever you bring an issue to the forum, you are immediately bombarded with “CafePress apologists” who degrade you for not towing the company line.
2.) Copyright Infringement is a rampant problem on CafePress. Whether it is your designs that are being stolen by other shopkeepers, or it is one of your designs that is being flagged for infringement, the CafePress Usage team is NEVER of any useful assistance.
During the Olympics, I featured a “Boycott Beijing” design that used the color scheme of the olympic rings, but instead of rings, I used interlocking handcuffs. On another design, I used the same color scheme, but used skulls instead of rings. Nowhere on the design did it read “Boycott the Olympics” or even the word “Olympics”. Last I checked, you can’t copyright a color scheme. But the International Olympic Committee complained about the designs, and CafePress pulled them.
When I contacted the content usage team about how this could possibly be a copyright violation, that flat told me that while the design itself was not a violation, they removed it out of courtesy to the Olympic Committee and regarded it as “sensitive matter”.
So essentially, CafePress will flag anything as content violation, regardless of whether it is an actual violation if it means not pissing off a powerful entity such as the Olympic Committee.
Strangely, CafePress has no problem featuring crude designs such as “It’s not rape if she can’t tell anybody, gag the bitch”.
After that fiasco (and many others) I decided to take a proactive approach and start asking the CafePress Content Usage Team if certain designs would be pulled before dedicating my time to creating them.
Unfortunately, this didn’t work either. When I sent off an e-mail asking if a certain design would be pulled, I either got no response whatsoever, or I would get a form response that stated “CafePress can not offer legal advice on copyright usage”…
So basically, even though CafePress has a history of deleting designs that don;t conform to what they consider acceptable material, they also refuse to tell you what is acceptable and what isn’t. It’s sort of their fun little way of telling you you’re shit out of luck.
It wouldn’t be so maddening if they had clear guidelines on content usage, but since they have a massive amount of gray area when it comes to what they will allow and what they don’t, it becomes a guessing game.
Most designers realize that it can take anywhere from an hour to a few days to create a design. Having that design yanked by CafePress for no reason becomes a major waste of time. Not being able to give a clear cut explanation about content guidelines is completely unacceptable.
3.) Customer Service is also a joke. If you are a shopkeeper experiencing a problem with one of your shops, be prepared to wait several days to get a reply to your support ticket.
Also worth noting is that the cafepress support service is a separate entity from your shopkeeper account. In order to start a support ticket, you must actually set up a separate account on the CafePress support site and then create your ticket.
Ultimately, I can’t afford to lose the 3K in residual income I make from CafePress. I have shops set up with Zazzle and Printfection, and I have the identical designs in those shops. But I am lucky to make 200-300 dollars in sales from those shops combined. Clearly, the CafePress marketplace is the key to my sales success.
It’s a tough time in this country right now. There’s gas shortages everywhere, the stock market is crashing, unemployment is at an all time high and people are forced to wrok 2-3 jobs to make a living. I am no different. The 3K per month that I make from CafePress is needed income.
But I can tell you that the moment I don’t need the money anymore, I’m going to send CafePress a nice long “fuck you” letter from the bottom of my heart.