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.
Recently Cafe Press began competing with its artists.
CP rents shops to its artists. The artist creates a website page and manually loads the desired blank products. The artist imports his image onto each product, arranges the products on the page, describes the products, titles the products and tags the images.
Initially, the artist set a markup and received the markup when a product sold.
However, recently Cafe Press began competing with its artists, using the artists’ own images. Cafe Press created a marketplace where a customer can search a keyword. That search brings up artist products. When the customer buys from the marketplace Cafe Press pays the artist 10% of the price Cafe Press set. Both the customer and the artist lose money. If the artist’s shop sells a t-shirt for $21, the artist makes $3.01. If the marketplace sells the same shirt for $25, the artist gets $2.50. The customer pays $4 more, and the artist gets $0.51 less. CafePress justifies this bait and switch by telling artists they can opt out if they don’t like the new terms; however, many have spent as much as 7 or 8 years creating as much as 88000 images.
Cafe Press tells artists to ‘promote your own shop,’ but Cafe Press buys Google adwords using the very image tags the artist provided.
Would you franchise an AMOCO station if AMOCO built a company store across the street from you?
I hate Cafepress for this stunt. Greedy thieving low lives. I have removed my 300 images from their marketplace in protest – Join me!
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.
So far, cafepress has been ok. They’re not really great at answering questions. I was concerned about how I’m going to deal with taxes at the end of the year. They regurgitated the same answer that was in the forum. My problem is, trying to get a damn example of what my design looks like on their product – you can’t just download them. Although, you’d think they’d let you so that you can use them in advertisements. I don’t know, I’m new to it. I’m trying out Printfection. If anyone has any idea about getting an actual image of your design on their product, feel free to e-mail me. sonnet.gothro@gmail.com
Cafepress is a very evil company. They run only what can be constituted as a “racket” in sofar as their willingness to allow copyright and trademark infringement to run rampant on their site. Why? Because they profit greatly from selling counterfeit merchandise I guess. I accidentally bought a South Lake Union Trolley t-shirt or Ride the the S.L.U.T. shirt from them only to realize it was a knnokoff cafepress or some other person illegally made. I learned from the real inventors of the shirt that cafepress refused to remove the registered trademarked merchandise and just let’s people rip them off. The worst part is tthey said cafepress only gives the sellers one dollar out of the 22 bucks they sell the shirts for? Cafepress sucks! By the way I threw the cafepress shirt out so I never had time to wash it and see if it faded.
I’m not sure about their products simply because I can’t seem to receive them yet. They ship via UPS, then it goes to the US Postal system – and all I know is that 10 days later, I still have nothing that I’ve been charged for. Seems if they just put it into the mail to start with, I would have received my merchandise by now. Very annoying place to order from and no direct email to contact them. I usually have found that any company that you cannot contact without going through hoops, isn’t worth spending your $$ with.
DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH CAFEPRESS!!!!
The quality of their T-shirts is horrible, they don’t enforce copyright protection, and they double-serve AND triple-serve on Google adwords. I’ve had experience with all 3 of these things. This company continues to break all the rules and doing business with a company like would be supporting their conduct.
BUYER BEWARE:
This company (CafePress.com) is as bad as it gets. As if there lack of regard for copyright protection wasn’t enough, they are now double and triple-serving on Google Adwords. For those of you that don’t know what this is, they are somehow getting away with making triple posts for their website under the same terms. I’ve called and e-mailed Google over the last 3 months and they will not take them down even though they admit that it’s going on. This is all documented.
This is one of the most frustrating things ever as I can’t compete with this company when they break the rules! Two mega-conglomerates in bed with one another, both cheating… How can any small retailer compete?!!!
All we have is our voice and our dollar. DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH CAFEPRESS!!!!!
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ALSO…DEMAND THAT GOOGLE ENFORCES THEIR DOUBLE-SERVING POLICY!!!!
- SPEAK UP!
Deb’s right. It’s nothing but breakdown after breakdown at that place. Sometimes it can take days, even WEEKS, for your new designs to show up in their marketplace because it fails to update properly. Just go to the cafepress forums and you can see how angry many shopkeepers are over the crappy infrastructure.
I make a halfway decent check there every month or so, but it’s just a fraction of what it could be if Cafepress would get their act together. There are some people there who actually rely on CP as their main source of income. I’d never take that risk. The place is just too unstable. I’ll have a few days of incredible sales, then all of a sudden nothing at all. The drop always coincides with a site issue, and even if it’s fixed sales can take weeks to pick up again. Very random and unreliable.
People have already mentioned the rather poor quality of their products, so I won’t go into that.
A lot of CP veterans (myself included) are moving their shops to Printfection.com. I’ve tried it out and I can say that their printing is far superior to CP’s. Plus they’re relatively new and still pretty small so they haven’t suffered any of the growing pains that seem to be crippling CP. However, their newness also means lower traffic than CP, and in turn fewer sales. I wouldn’t knock Printfection though, since traffic is steadily increasing. They’re indexed more thorougly by search engines so it’s easier to attract outside customers. Besides, the place is free.
For now though, I’m putting my energy into Cafepress — just not as much. That’s where the customers are, and if they want to pay huge markups for crappy merchandise, more power to them. I’m just there for the money. If I want to build up a quality brand for myself, I’ll go with Printfection. But it’ll probably be a long time before things pick up steam there, so for now I’ll stick with CP.
Take if from me….CafePress DOES suck. I’ve been a memeber there since 2005 and haven’t even attempted to build a shop for a while, because every time I do, there are server problems of some kind. Over the last few days I’ve tried again and there’s an image issue that has the shopkeepers up in arms and all PO’d right now. So, I walk away from CP once again.
I’ve ordered 4 shirts from cafepress, they all had nice sharp colors and withstood washing well. They also have a no hassle 30 day return/replacement policy.
CafePress is the worst. Steer clear. Not only are the products substandard and way too expensive for the quality, but if you ask questions on their community forums about quality, or complain about how your tshirt hasn’t been properly printed, the moderators, aka CafePress apologists, swarm in and demean the people who want answers and resolution of the problems.
I received a Getfuzzy clock for Christmas from CafePress. Since I have had the clock, I started to notice a line in the clear cover that covers the clock hands. The second hand was cutting the plastic cover becuase it was mis-aligned. I called CafePress and they said they only have a 30 day warranty on their products. I told the rep that the clock looked ok upon receiving it, but this was something that wouldnt develop until a few months later. They said sorry, but we cant warranty it.
I will NEVER purchase anything from CafePress.
I think cafepress offers better control over content and more control in general over your shop.
I got a bit frustrated using Zazzle because you can’t delete items – you have to email a request listing the item numbers. Problem is they didn’t fulfill the request, even after emailing me back apologising and assuring me that they would. So I got left with items in my gallery that I wasn’t happy with.
On cafepress you can delete anything you want; add whatever markup you want; edit multiple items at once and use your own html on your shop.
I haven’t ordered a T-shirt from Zazzle, but they claim that their quality for printing photographs is better.
Another nice thing about cafepress, is that you can buy your own products at cost price to check them out. Zazzle, I think you have to pay full price and then wait to receive your percentage as if it was a sale from another customer.
Um, honey bunny, I used Zazzle with Firefox and had no problems. There used to be some problems a month or two ago, but now it seems as if they’ve been resolved.
i disagree with your assessment of the quality of the cafepress dark shirts. i’m wearing one right now that i purchased about 8 months ago and it looks like it did the day I got it. i have friends who recently purchased one of my designs and they say the quality is awesome. the only thing i don’t like about cafepress is how you can only use .png files on dark clothing. it should work on any color! i also like how you can make some real money using cafepress, unlike zazzle (the “royalties” are PENNIES compared to cafepress).
and lastly, it’s impossible to use zazzle within Firefox. if i want to order/create anything on zazzle, i have to switch to IE…and that’s just not going to happen.
ps) i’m not a plant
i just really like cafepress.
Wow, thats horrible. Also, I’d prefer using ink jet transfers on my Canon printer insted.
Well let me tell you about Cafepress. They are TERRIBLE! I just ordered a shirt for my daughter’s birthday of her favorite character, Miffy. She sat online and ordered it herself and has been waiting for a week to get it in the mail. It came today and she opened it and said, “Someone already wore this shirt.” It was totally faded and too small (they advertised the wrong size)I can not believe the quality of this shirt. I have found nothing good on the web about this company except that my experience is not unique.
If you want a shirt that is better quality than anything this company produces, print it out on your HP ink-jet and transfer it w/ an iron. It will look better and cost much less.
Way to go Cafepress…make a 3 year old cry on her birthday!
Avoid this company!
Oh! I’ m so sorry to hear that! Your little daughter cried for bad shipping??!! This is truly miserable!!!
[...] I earlier wrote that CafePress sucks ass. Well, don’t worry, it still does. I’ve investigated two others, Zazzle, and DeviantArt Print. [...]
Hrm, ifindkarma, you wouldn’t know of any other people having problems with CafePress, with either their product quality or service, would you?
adam and you are both right, 1 problem isn’t a good way of judging a company. However, I can add another item of data to judge CafePress with: apparently, they don’t support any sort of color management, and expect us to print with 8-bit sRGB source images.
For those that don’t get it, expecting any decent sort of printing with such a backwards colorspace at such a low precision is kind of nutty.
I use 16-bit PhotoPro RGB exclusively, and often have a wide gamut of colors, and compressing it down into such a tiny colorspace cannot lead to quality results, especially when printing.
My Canon i9900‘s gamut is actually a tad larger than AdobeRGB, so either Adobe Wide Gamut RGB or PhotoPro RGB correctly encompass my printer’s colorspace, and I imagine CafePress’s equipment being able to do similar things.
Also, the lack of ICC profiles provided for their printer/media combinations is also problematic… I have no way of accurately proofing images on my screen except for using the largely generic CMYK ICC… which never ever ever ever reflects what any printer on decent media can actually do.
However, what I just said is two fold. Not only can CafePress not do this (which I’ve confirmed on their forums), apparently neither can Zazzle (which I haven’t confirmed yet).
I was the guy who posted that trio of flickr photos, and I vouch for the accuracy of the statement that the CafePress ink faded significantly after the first washing.
She bought the same shirt at Zazzle, and the shirt has survived multiple washings thus far.
Note that this is just one data point; I encourage people to form their own opinions.
hehe funny
I use both Zazzle and CafePress and don’t deny I’m pro CafePress. To say they suck based on inaccurate hearsay is just wrong.
Patrick, no one sent me here. I just read your blog that’s all.
My friends, this is what we call a “plant”: someone, sent by CafePress, to sway me or my readership.
Check all the blogs he belongs to in his profile (just click on his name), he obviously pushes a pro-CafePress agenda.
Well, this only solidifies my resolve to use Zazzle.
I have to disagree with that comment. Maybe 5 years ago they faded.. but CafePress use the best printing techology available.