Operation Bob

Overall: Thumbs UP 

At CafePress a shopkeeper, as they are called, creates a design and then offers that design for sale on a variety of product of their choosing.  Products range from mugs and t-shirts to calendars and other clothing and housewares.  When a customer chooses to have your design printed on one of the products the shopkeeper offers, the shopkeeper gets a cut.

CafePress takes the money, prints the product, ships the product, and handles customer service.  All you do is upload your design, choose the products you want to offer it on and then wait to (hopefully) collect your cut of the money.

I stumbled on this site a few times and never gave it any serious thought.  But one time I thought it was worth a trying and I’m glad I did.  My first fear was that the design requirements would be too strict. I figured you’d need some degree in graphic design or know the inner workings of some special software to do this kind of thing. 

I was quite surprised to find out that the requirements are fairly easy to comply with and a good file can be made from just about any photo editing type software - even a free one.

A look around the site reveals that there’s a market for everything - and I mean everything.  Whether it’s dogs in general or a specific breed shape and size dog - there’s someone with the same interest willing to buy it. 

As far as pricing, CafePress has a base price for each item and then you, the shopkeeper, decide what you want your markup to be.  They have several tools so you can automate this process without having to micro-manage every product.

They pay by check once a month.  Since they offer customers a 30 day refund policy, payment is held out for at least that long.  The idea is that if one of your customers returns something you won’t have to owe your markup back to the company.  Yeah, waiting is no fun, but it’s better than having to give some back.

You can choose from a free shop or a premium shop which runs between $5-$7 pe4 month depending on how far you pay in advance.  The only drawback with the free shop is that you can only have one of each product type in a free shop.  BUT, you can have as many free shops as you want.  So, if you really don’t want to spend any money you can do it with the free shops, but it’ll take a little more work setting things up.

I’ve been on CafePress for a little more than a month and I’m selling about 1-2 items on an average day, some days nothing, but one day 7 products sold.  The best part for me is that once you put the design up there it’s on auto-pilot.  I can completely forget about it and be doing a million other things and get an e-mail that I’ve made some money.  That’s nice!  It’s really fun to go to bed and wake up to several of those e-mails!!

So, if you like to tinker around with designs and such on your computer, and would like to make a few bucks doing it, check out CafePress and give it a try.