Your Cafe Press Shop Can Be a Huge Success

If you have considered opening a Cafe Press shop but feel like it may be too much work and too much competition for too little money, think again. I've got some practical advice for you that will help you get the most out of your Cafe Press experience.

What I'm about to tell you comes not from a general overview of how to open and run a Cafe Press shop, but from my own personal experience. I own 2 Cafe Press shops and I'll be the first to admit that the first one was a miserable flop for a few years before I finally put some effort into it. Within six months of paying attention to what I was doing, my shop became a success and I not only earned a sales bonus, I was making enough money to open a second shop.

First, we'll look at the difference between opening a free shop and a paid shop. In a free shop, you are limited to 50 products and each one can only have one design on it. Therefore, you can offer different designs but only one product to a design. There is no cost to you to run it. Of course, if the one design you have is truly awesome, you are limiting yourself severely, particularly since Cafe Press has recently added a whole new line of colored shirts that most people would rather buy than a plain white tee anyway.

Opening a paid shop will cost you $6.95 a month if you pay monthly and $5.00 a month if you pay yearly (there is a sliding scale with 3 and 6 month options as well). In the paid shop, you will have the ability to add one design to all 97 products offered by Cafe Press. You can create sections and subsections of whatever themes you may want to offer. If you have no other paid shop on Cafe Press, you will even get a 15-day free trial. This applies only to your first paid shop. You don't get a 15-day free trial every time you open a paid shop.

After you sign up, you can use a template to make your shop look very professional, whether you are handy with html or not, with just a few clicks. You can start building your sections and uploading your designs right away. Being handy with your graphics program is a major plus and you do need to be know how to save your designs in png format if you want to take advantage of the Cafe Press line of colored tee shirts, but Cafe Press has plenty of articles and tips on this subject to assist you in creating the perfect looking graphic for their colored products.

You should also be aware that one size graphic will not fit perfectly on all the products being offered. You will see many stores where the owners don't take the time to create another image that will fit on each product well. The results look bad in your store and worse -- they're lost sales. When you come up with a design that starts to sell well, make it your business to take the time to make the image fit on other products, such as mousepads and clocks. You will save yourself tons of time and aggravation if you simply get one section right and group the products that need different size images together. Then all you will hae to do is import these products into a new section and make bulk changes to the images, names and descriptions. Nevertheless, if it just won't work on any particular product - just don't offer it. It's better to omit a product than just slap it on there no matter how it looks.

It is particularly vital to your success that you learn how to tag your images properly. If you don't tag your images, they won't show up in the marketplace and you might as well be twiddling your thumbs. Writing short descriptions for your products and sections will also help your products turn up in the search engines.

Don't be afraid to charge a decent markup. Many new shopowners timidly try to test the waters and are afraid to mark up their products more than a buck or two for fear it won't sell. Well, it doesn't work that way. Successful shopkeepers will tell you that using premium pricing really boosts their sales. When someone sees a design they want, an extra dollar or two isn't really going to weigh into their decision to buy the item. Research other products with a similar theme to your designs, and price your products accordingly.

About the best advice I can give you is to keep changing your designs if they don't sell. Monitor your shop regularly. Tweak, tweak, tweak. I like to give a design a 4 to 6-month trial, but you may want to use a shorter time period. If one or more of your designs doesn't catch on within the trial period you decide upon, replace the design with a different idea. When you do this, you will come up with a design that will carry your Cafe Press shop soon enough. It will pay for itself and you will be motivated to continue in this vein. The end result with eventually be a respectable number of designs that sell.

Holidays are great on Cafe Press for sales, so make sure to offer holiday items. You can turn these sections off until the buying season begins for any holiday, so it's never to early to start working on your holiday lines. Cafe Press runs contests for the best holiday designs on occasion, and the prizes are great. Now there's a genuine incentive for you to come up with a killer holiday item.

Finally, don't overlook the Cafe Press affiliate program. Don't opt out of it. Other shopkeepers will feature your products if think you're designs are hot and if someone buys the product through their store, that shopkeeper gets not ony a small percentage of the sale, but credit for the sale toward their gross monthly sales. Now think what that could mean if you featured other people's hot designs in your store as well. You'll be on your way to a sales bonus in no time.

If you think this all sounds like a lot of work for a little bit of money, you're probably right in one way but wrong in another. It will be a fair amount of work and take real effort on your part for a while, but if you work at it, eventually you will have a store with a number of popular designs, and your Cafe Press shop will become an excellent source of passive income for you.