CafePress Review
Make Money Blogging with CafePress
CafePress is a Web site that makes it easy for you to sell custom products and merchandise through your blog. You can either upload your own designs to be printed on products like T-shirts, mugs, bags, and more, or you can sell items with designs offered through CafePress. Since items are printed on demand (when people order them), you don't have to worry about inventory management. You can even set up your own online store and fill it with the items you want to sell through CafePress.
Positives of CafePress
CafePress is an established site that is very popular among bloggers who are looking for additional ways to make money blogging. It's free to register for CafePress and you can create your own online store (with some customization). CafePress offers a large selection of products and designs. You can add up to 80 products from CafePress to your store. You can also upload your own designs or use designs offered through CafePress. CafePress handles all orders, production, shipping, returns, customer service and payment processing. In return, CafePress keeps a percentage of the money you make on each product sold. CafePress also offers mailing list tools to make communicating with your store customers easy. In addition, you can add your custom items to the CafePress Marketplace and sell them through that site as well as through your store (or instead of through your store) and earn 10% on all products sold through the Marketplace (current details are here).
Negatives of CafePress
With CafePress, you can only add up to 80 items to your online store and only 1 item from each product type. You can create as many stores as you want, but if you want one large store, the 80 item limit can be a problem. CafePress offers a paid account where you can pay a monthly fee to open a premium store. A premium CafePress store can be highly customized and include an unlimited number of products. Furthermore, the pricing policies used by CafePress can be a bit confusing. In order to make money on the products sold through your store, you markup the base price of each item. You keep the markup, but there are some restrictions related to how high you can markup items and your earnings. Read the current policies here.
Bottom Line
Overall, CafePress offers a great option for bloggers who want to sell merchandise and make money from their blogs. While there is some debate over the quality of the items offered through CafePress, the same could be said of most online merchandise sites. While CafePress's basic store options are more limited than the free options other online merchandise sites provide, the product selection is larger and more diverse. Each blogger must decide if the trade off is worth it to them or not.
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