Moving on to another POD - you choose which

As you have read from my last post, CafePress’  rules on how they are handling commissions has pretty much killed the ability to make money there.  Calculations from this end of the news put commissions near $1 per sale, and it isn’t guaranteed that if you drive a sale to your shop that it will actually be calculated as such because of their programming.  Over the last week I have written two posts about their commission change, and have read several others.  You can see my other post about their marketplace commission change on BloggersBase here.

I have already given you step by step instructions on:

• how to start a CafePress shop,
• how to load designs into your CafePress shop,
• how to build a section in a CafePress shop,
• how to build subsections in your CafePress shop. 

That is pretty much all you need to know to have a big full shop.  That information was all I knew for the first year and a half of having a shop.  I haven’t done much since except add Google Analytics to it and grab one of their templates.  If you don’t have Google Analytics already, visit my Blogmaster General site tomorrow, as that will be the subject of the post tomorrow.  If you do have Google Analytics, you can find instructions on how to insert it into your CafePress shop on the CafePress forums (either ask the question, or search the forum for a previously asked question, or search the Learning Center for the answer).  I would give you the link, but you need to learn how to find these things by yourself now since the forum and the Learning Center provide such valuable information and should be used as much as possible.

If you already have a “premium” shop, and haven’t paid for the year, and don’t have many products up, you might want to reconsider staying at CafePress.  June 1 is when their new commission structure is due to start, so that means on a monthly pay schedule, you will have to make about 7 - 10 sales a month just to break even.  If you paid for the year, then it will be more like 5 - 7  sales per month.  Unless you are driving your traffic and already have a marketing plan in place, this can be a tall order.  Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of shopkeepers who drive that many each day and some where that would be a slow day.  So it can be done, it just takes a massive amount of designs, and a lot of marketing.  But here is the point - if you haven’t already loaded up your site, and you are going to be driving sales to your site anyway (to reach those sales levels of several hundred to several thousand a month), then why waste your time loading all of those designs and writing descriptions for them on CafePress?  Why not use that time to load them into a different Print-on-Demand (POD) that will actually give you the commission you set for your product?  Then once you have loaded all your designs in that one, you can go back and fill in a CafePress shop in your spare time just to put your products in another “store window”. 

Don’t worry if you already have designs drawn up using the CafePress templates.  Those templates will still work for some of the other PODs.  For instance, I have been using Zazzle as my secondary shop, but am now going to switch it to my primary shop.  For my From Pink Slip CafePress Shop, I have already paid the full year (if they had told me this new commission structure earlier I would not have), so I will still load as many designs as I can there, I am just not going to take as much time doing it.  I am going to use Zazzle as my new primary shop, unless you would like me to start at one of the other PODs first.  Sound off in the poll below, let me know which you would like instructions on next.

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Slippy
From Pink Slip
Quit being a firing stick pinata!