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Sell Products on Cafepress.com

By on December 1, 2007 in Making Money
Thomas Laupstad, a blogger and very gifted photographer put together a collection of 12 photos to represent each month of the year in Northern Norway. He went on to put these together in a 2008 calendar and set up a store at Cafepress where he is selling it for $24.99.

Cafepress is a site that allows you to create your own custom products which you can sell via their site. The good thing about their service is that there are no upfront costs and inventory investment. All you need to do is upload your artwork, pick what you want to sell and start your store. Products that you can sell include apparel, prints and cards, hats and bags, books and audio and data CDs.

When setting up a shop you have two options. You can either start up a Basic Shop which is free or a Premium Shop from $4.99/month. A Basic Shop allows you to sell products in a simple one-page shop whereas a Premium Shop allows you to sell an unlimited number of products on multi-level pages. All shop do provide you with the following services:

-Ability to create and sell over 80 different products including apparel, books, music, CDs and more, produced by CafePress.com
-Reliable online shipping hosted on our servers
-Secure checkout and credit card payment processing
-Domestic and international shipping of your unique products
-Phone and Email Shopkeeper Support
-Phone and Email Customer Service Support
-Ability to list products in the CafePress.com Marketplace for greater visibility
-Promotional Tools to help drive more traffic to your shop

How you make money is pretty simple. Cafepress has a base price on all their products. All fees associated with selling the item are included in the base price. When you put an item up for sale you markup the price from the base price and the markup is yours to keep. For example, Thomas is selling his calendar for $24.99. The wall calendar has a base price of $14.99 so he makes $10 per sale.

All that you really have to do is upload an image, choose what kind of product you want to sell, set a price and wait for sales to come through. You may have to do a bit of marketing to drive traffic to your store which will only work in your favour. You can just sit back and let Cafepress handle producing the item, taking payments, shipping (worldwide) and customer service. It doesn’t matter where you are in world, you can setup shop and start earning.

4 Responses to Sell Products on Cafepress.com

  1. jungl December 1, 2007 at 11:48 pm #

    Thanks for using me as an example 🙂

    Another tip is to buy your own products and sell them in real life. If you buy 15 or more of one product you can get up to 35% discount off the base price.

    -Thomas

    Reply
  2. Gerri December 2, 2007 at 12:37 pm #

    Thomas,

    Thanks for letting me use you as an example.

    Thanks for the tip on buying your own product and selling it in ‘real life’. Its a good way of making that little bit extra.

    Good luck with your sales.

    Reply
  3. blognesdotcom December 4, 2007 at 2:42 am #

    it’s nice post. I knew cafepress 2 years ago but not knowing what to do with them 🙂

    Reply
  4. Gerri December 4, 2007 at 1:33 pm #

    Blognesdotcom,
    Thanks for stopping by. You should give Cafepress a try. There is no harm in doing so and you don’t have anything to lose.

    Reply

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