Selling Your Designs on Cafepress

There are many ways to make money on the Internet. But if you have a product that you would like to sell, but limited money to buy your inventory how can you make money? One site that exists for the budding entrepreneur will help you do that.

At Cafepress.com, you can create and sell a variety of customizable products with zero upfront costs and zero inventory investment. Here is what you must do. You can design your own merchandise like t-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, coffee or drink mugs. Once you have something to market the company can help you market the product.

What do they provide? They are the front and back end of your business. They will provide you with a free website to promote your goods. They control the printing to a live on-order process. They only print when there is an order in hand. They will handle the payments, using paypal or credit card transactions. They handle shipping, manage returns and exchanges, provide customer service and e-mail and phone support. Then they turn around and cut you a check on sales.

Product Categories

The cafepress offers a variety of products that you can sell with your own custom design, here is a sample:

Hats and bags, kids apparel, audio and cds, and housewares. You can even write and publish your own book.

Pricing

The mark up is self explanatory. For example a tee-shirt product may sell for the base price of 14.99 with printing on one side. The markup is $5.00 for a retail price of 19.99. Cafepress.com keeps the 14.99 and they send you the 5.00. They also have a page devoted just to products and pricing, so you are not in the dark about what a product will cost and what you should markup.

Community

Cafepress also provides guidance through the use of a community forum and chat room. You can get tips from other Cafépress members on sales, marketing, customer buildup, and even technology help on how to work with search engines and techniques for getting high placement in the results page.

Guidelines

Cafepress also includes a newsletter and a large part of their site to giving you aid on how to set up shop, how to maintain it, and how to setup your payment operations. Tutorials are provided on how to design images on what type of image would best be handled by what products.

So how do you get your product on line?

After you register yourself as a member, the process is quite simple. You choose the product that you want to customize. You upload your design for the product, and you place an order, (no minimum necessary). That is it.

When you register you setup your own personal information. There are two levels of membership, basic and premium. Basic is free whereas premium costs 4.95 a month. One of the main differences between them is the level and quantity of goods available to sell. Thus if you are not sure that this operation will work for you, try the basic package. If after a time you find that you could improve your sales with more products to choose from, then go premium.

The affiliate program

The cafepress also offers an affiliate program with over 55 million products that can be sold. Linking your website or blog to a relevant product line will allow you to earn commissions on the sales up to 15%. In addition they provide a list of best practices for links, portal destinations, market place search destinations, shop destinations, and product pages. All of these features are designed to expose your website to the maximum amount of traffic, thereby building your site to be commercially successful.

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