Promotion ideas & advise for online business.

December 16, 2005 1:20 AM

Has anybody had any success making good business out of an online business such as CafePress?

I opened an account recently, selling rock climbing shirts and apparel. Started some promos on the rock climbing forums and managed to get a couple of sales, but it has flattened since then. There are only so many climbing sites that I could promote at.

Would gladly appreciate some ideas / advise / tips on promotions, especially if you've done something similar and seen some success out of it.

Thanks!

posted by arrowhead to computers & internet (14 comments total)

The political t-shirt company Demockratees, run by Ryan Red Corn, a Lakota Indian, has been a smashing success.

I think having great designs helps a lot. But he also was pretty savvy with his production deals and advertising. The second link also talks about some other successful shirt businesses.
posted by dhartung at 1:59 AM on December 16, 2005

I've heard some bad things about the quality of cafepress t-shirts. I don't know if they're true or not, but that might be stopping some people who are interested from dropping ~$20 on your tees.
posted by clarahamster at 2:16 AM on December 16, 2005

I've only had success with Cafepress when the promotion has been tied to a specific thriving community. Even then, only while the community is hot will your sales be hot. When all is said and done, everything evens out, however, and people move on.

If you're opening a store like that and promoting it in communities with which you're not directly involved, you're probably having some issues with which I've never dealt. Luckily, the upside of a store like this is that you don't have to maintain your own inventory of the novelty items, like in the pre-internet "I walked to school uphill both ways" days.
posted by thanotopsis at 4:45 AM on December 16, 2005

Yeah, unfortunately I can tell you that at least me and mine will not order from CafePress. They're little more than glorified iron-on's, and for the cost the quality just isn't there. Which is a shame, because they have some fantastic shirts on occasion.
posted by KirTakat at 4:50 AM on December 16, 2005

[removed link to cafe press store in post]
posted by jessamyn at 5:04 AM on December 16, 2005

i have to toss in an opinion here - while cafepress shirts are akin to iron-on decals, i have been very impressed with the quality. i have a couple cafepress shirts that have been washed at least 30 times, wiht no special care, that are still in great shape.
posted by chr1sb0y at 5:59 AM on December 16, 2005

I agree with Chrisboy. The shirts seem cheep (i.e., shiny ink, shiny parts of the shirts where there is no ink), but they really do hold up well. After a while, they're indistinguishable (or almost) from a screen-printed shirt. And I'm pretty discerning.

That said, I don't usually order from Cafepress shops. I have ordered from threadless, though.

With your specific audience, I think you need to be pretty targeted: Outdoor websites (not just climbing sites), outdoor stores, and colleges (maling lists or forums) sound like good places to start. Good luck. Climb on!
posted by zpousman at 7:01 AM on December 16, 2005

A friend of mine started a last year and he makes decent money now, however he prints all the t-shirts himself (and originally made his own transfers as well). He probably spent between $10 and $20k before becoming profitable, although I'm not sure of the exact number.

I've never heard of anyone making money off café press
posted by delmoi at 7:10 AM on December 16, 2005

I think the cafepress (and zazzle, etc.) approach is best suited to a web site with traffic that wants to sell t-shirts, etc., to it's existing reader base. Trying to drum up a customer base for a stand-alone cafepress store seems like a pretty tall order to me.

On the issue of quality, from what I understand, these sites use a process called dye sublimation to print the shirts one at a time. This doesn't provide results as good as screen printing, which has set-up costs and isn't economically feasible for doing shirts one at a time. The person who taught me this runs printmojo.com which is similar to cafepress but uses screenprinting so you have to commit to a minimum number of shirts (I think it's twelve?).
posted by winston at 7:48 AM on December 16, 2005

I've never heard of anyone making money off café press

Of course people make money with Cafepress... Just as people do with any other online business. Some sellers can make a living with sites like CP and eBay, but it's extremely difficult and requires hard work. Would that be a surprise to you? Isn't that to be expected?

I've heard some bad things about the quality of cafepress t-shirts.

It's been mentioned to Cafepress many times that they need to address their dreaded "bad print quality" reputation more aggressively -- this thread is an example of that -- but they seem blind to that public perception and/or refuse to acknowledge it. While their printing has improved greatly, their marketing of it has not.

That being said, they've been moving to a direct printing method versus the heat transfer (both still dye sub printing, I believe) -- their quality is far ahead of what they started with years ago.

They also just added black t-shirt printing, which has long been requested -- and the results suggest the quality of black t-shirt printing will need to improve. (Sadly, this will do nothing to help the previously mentioned bad reputation.) But kudos to them for working on it and finally making it happen.

To get back to the original poster -- it might help to actually see the shop you opened in order to offer suggestions, but I don't know if that type of self-linking is allowed in AskMeFi.
posted by jca at 9:25 AM on December 16, 2005

I have a friend who started errorwear.com, and lived off of it for a few years when it got hyped online and on television. He got to the point where he hired an assistant to handle the shipping and order fulfillment. But after that period, and the novelty had worn off, he had trouble keeping sales up and I think he's gone back to other work. He made a foray into t-shirts of a less "novelty" appeal, but I think that market is saturated and requires excellent design and new products to stand out.

So I think the lesson here is that you can make a living off t-shirts, provided you can take advantage of a gimmick. I don't know if a generic "rock climbing gear" site is really going to stand out in a way that will support a person, frankly.
posted by Big Fat Tycoon at 10:08 AM on December 16, 2005

I sell t-shirts and other stuff through CafePress. I've been doing it for about 3 years now, and this year is the first year that I'm going to break the magic $600 mark that causes CafePress to file a 1099 form with the IRS declaring my earnings as taxable income.

I use CafePress because it allows me to offer a much wider variety of things than I could otherwise, and I don't have to bother with piles of unsold stock sitting around my house. Basically, the set it (up) and forget it style of the site appeals to me. I'm not trying to make a living out of it, though, just trying to make some extra cash.

As someone mentioned above, I've had the most success with products targeted to a specific audience, in my case librarians. I also advertised in Bust magazine a few years ago, so I probably got a few customers that way. (Never enough to justify the cost of the ads, though.) I make sure to put appropriate keywords on all my images so that they come up in the relavent searches, make sure the titles mention what the product is about, and let people sign up for a newsletter on my website so I can notify them when new products come out.

I've ordered a few of my products from CafePress over the years and haven't had any problems with quality.
posted by MsMolly at 12:20 PM on December 16, 2005

Hi all, thanks for the comments so far.
With blessings from the AskMefi admin, here's the URL to my site: www.cafepress.com/overhang/

There's still a lot of work to be done still, but I'm looking at learning more about effective advertising & promotion methods.
posted by arrowhead at 7:53 PM on December 16, 2005

Well, the store looks good -- a few things that might help:

• You need to label all your product titles with a descriptive name. For example, the item should be labeled "POSER White T-shirt" rather than just "White T-shirt".

• You MUST go into the Cafepress admin section and categorize your store and categorize each product section -- look under the "Section Info" tabs.

• You also MUST go into your Media Basket (Image section) and tag and categorize each and every one of your images. If you don't, your designs may not be properly picked up by the Cafepress Marketplace and new search functions.

• You need to add a few things to your sidebar -- such as the current Cafepress coupon banner (look in the admin Banners section) and the "Browse by Product" drop-down function. You can look at the built-in Cafepress templates for examples of this.

• Your front page and sidebar could also use a bit more descriptive information about your designs/products and targeted to your audience. (Your site doesn't really mention much about the topic of climbing, as far as the amount of text/headlines/copy is concerned.)

• You also should start linking to other climbing sites, forums, gear, etc. -- and hopefully get some of those sites linking back to you. (Don't "link beg" spam or overdue this.)

• Finally, the best advice is to solicit opinions and advice from the Cafepress Shopkeeper forums, which you can find at the CP site. They'll give you better advice/info.
posted by jca at 8:30 AM on December 17, 2005