So, if you want to hurt Cafepress, the best thing to so is to signup for a premium shop, add your content, and if you run into any problems whatsoever, chargeback the $4.95 and give CafePress a dise of its own medicine. If a bunch of people do chargebcaks, we can put CafePress out of business for good.

CafePress rents web 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 would set a markup and received the markup for each product sold.

However, recently CafePress began competing with its artists, using the artists’ own images. CafePress created a marketplace where a customer can search a keyword. That search brings up artist products. When the customer buys from the marketplace CafePress pays the artist 10% of the price CafePress 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 tells artists to “promote your own shop,” but CafePress buys Google adwords using the very image tags the artist provided.

CafePress justifies this bait and switch of service terms 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 many as 88000 images.

In spite of their sweat-equity, many shopkeepers (content providers) are building shops at other print-on-demand companies and then closing their CafePress shops due to the broken faith and trust, the financial hardship CafePress has delivered into so many lives, and the huge amount of time and dedicated effort all lost in the momentum of their own businesses. Would you keep your AMOCO station franchise if AMOCO built a company store across the street from you?

It is pitiful, I can’t upload an image and have random net users print a poster reliably .. I can’t search on a movie title and watch a movie online .. and about a decade back some “kick arse anti-authority” band called Metallica killed the one usable music service.

If there’s no conspiracy, maybe there should be.

I have washed one direct print Cafepress shirt so far,… inside out, and in warm temp, no dryer. Yes it did age a bit. Shoot, I have silk screen shirts that are 15 years old that still look pretty vibrant. I am surprised there aren’t more complaints on the web.
Have not tried washing a black shirt yet.

I think they might have less fading with a cotton poly blend shirt.

I’ll post comments if anything comes up. If something does go wrong, I can try Zazzle and see what happens. I’ve been watching CafePress for awhile, but have only heard one complaint (from MegaTokyo), but I can’t recall what it was.

The only other self-publication site I’ve seen besides the three you’ve mentioned, is Lulu.com, but they don’t appear to offer printing on clothing items or such.