Posted

May 30th 2009

Mood

Frantic

Music

PaganRadio.net

Cafe Press Disrespects Shop Owners

If you haven't heard yet, Cafe Press is about to change the way the Marketplace handles pricing of your items. They are going to make prices the same across the board for each item and then only give the shopkeeper 10% of the final retail price. This means two things: 1) If you have your markup set higher than that, you'll lose money on every sale you get through the marketplace; 2) Lazy people who are just slapping public domain images onto items and selling them are going to be making the same amount for their laziness as you make for working your butt off to make original content. Hardly seems fair, eh? But such are the woes of dealing with corporations. Any sales you make directly through your shop will still get whatever markup you put on them, so I strongly suggest you push the link to your own shop and not try to pull traffic through an affiliate link or the marketplace.

So, what else can you do? Not much. Unfortunately, my own experience is that the marketplace drives over half my sales. However, from now on, I won't be tagging my images and, thus, keeping them out of the marketplace. I just don't think it's fair to price works I've spent hours and months on the same as items people have decorated with public domain images they didn't even create. I've started doing periodic ad campaigns for my shop through Project Wonderful which is a great way to get your art out to specifically targeted audiences. It's super cheap (often FREE) advertising. On the right sites, you can pull as many as 700 click-throughs in a 7-10 day period for a very minimal cost (as little as a penny a day in some cases)! I'm considering marking all images already in the marketplace with a message telling people to please buy direct from my shop (and giving them the URL in the description) so that I'm properly compensated for my work. I don't know how long they'll let that fly if they catch onto that under-handed way of dealing with the disrespect to the shopkeepers they're dishing out. It might be worth a shot, though.

Busy,Busy,Busy!!

Some of you might have noticed that I've been rather absent from SA lately. I'm just so damned busy! It's art show season (always hectic). Pagan Pride Day planning season just kicked in. As their web witch, that means more to add to my schedule of work. Factor in the above mentioned debacle over at Cafe Press and the resulting need to diversify my merchandise to other storefront venues and it just makes for a very frantic season for me. The work is double since I'm also doing the same for Badhead Gadroon that I do for my own retail art sources. I'm basically using my shop set-ups on the new sites as the guinea pigs so Gadroon's will (hopefully) go up faster than mine have been. I tell ya, there are some positively UGLY retail interfaces out there. It's taking a lot more time than I'd hoped to learn my way around some of them. It makes me wish I'd taken the time to learn CSS when it first came out. It might go quicker if I had.

So, being this busy, I'm just here briefly to give an update. I will TRY to get in here and look at everyone's submissions, comments, etc. when my brain gets to hurting too much from all this work. Until then,

BLESSED BE!

Jolie