October 29, 2008

Why do you suggest that people should vote with their mouse and not with their dollar? Many designers who use Zazzle and Cafepress have continuously complained that Zazzle's rating system is taken advantage of and rather pointless. (I agree). If you like a design then buy it (which is basically rating it). Don't leave it up to people who have a mouse and have never even purchased the design before. It's not a gallery, it is a store.

As far as the differences in the designs between Zazzle and Cafepress there really isn't much. Over the past 6 months they have grown in similarity (not a good thing). Zazzle's poaching and bribes lured many Cafepress shopkeepers to add their design there though many are finding the promises made by Zazzle are not bringing them the income they were promised.

Don't rate...BUY!

Cafepress has been around for a while. The company i deal with now offers products by way of Cafepress and they are quality products.

A ratings system is a weak way to rank designs over 60 billion other designs. Like TT said the best way is to vote for your dollar.

Zazzle is a bad example. The Zazzle Marketplace is not a good place to shop - their Marketplace doesn't benefit from a ratings system. What happens is SKs abuse the system - rank competitors lower and comment on high ranking designs.

Yes is "fun" for the community but in this industry it hasn't proven to sell more designs.

A better algo is what CafePress needs. They need to add more factors into the mix to whittle out the crap tht outranks the quality art.

Adam and T-shirt Talk, I appreciate the comments, but it's hard to vote with your wallet when you can't find a design you like in the first place.

It's difficult to place art into an algorithm, but it is possible to recognize patterns of ratings abuse and put *that* into an algorithm.

Sellers shouldn't rely on either company's site search to sell their designs. They need to focus on their own separate marketing, including SEO, paid search, social media marketing and a variety of traditional marketing methods.

I do agree that the quality of designs is about equal on both sites. I've also tried my hand at selling on both sites and had equal success.

However, as a searcher and a buyer, I find what I'm looking for much better on Zazzle.

Zazzle doesn't have to "lure" people away from CafePress. Sellers can have designs on both sites, and it's a good idea to do so.

I'm sorry, but the 'ratings' at zazzle don't do a thing to help with finding designs. Cafepress has a search algorithm that works much better than the much-abused ratings system on zazzle.

Recently CafePress began competing with the artists for whom it acts as printer and shipper.

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 much 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?