Running a retail shop on Cafe Press... Made easy?

If you figure out the secret to instant wealth, please let me know. For the rest of us normal people who actually have to work to make money, well, you can make a few extra bucks by selling your artwork online. Although I'm still relatively new to the whole CafePress.com thing, I have made some sales. I won't claim to be a professional, so don't blame me if/when things go astray. Notice how the title of my lens mentions something about running an online retail shop being easy. This is true in many aspects. I'll go over the important stuff after I bore you with more useless stuff...

The suspense is terrible, I hope it'll last!

Wait, I never was a good narrator. I think I skipped over the most frequently asked question, "Just what is a green coffin??" Clearly, it's a coffin that's been painted green! All joking aside, (Is it politically correct to make a joke involving coffins? Someone please comment and let me know...) "Green Coffin" is the term the artist dubbed his green box where he stores his artwork. Therefore, in a sense, all of our products came "from the green coffin." Nifty, huh?

Before you get too excited and forget, if you like what you see in this lens, may I suggest you add it to your favorites or let your friends know about it and if you really like what I wrote, join my fan club and send me an email letting me know! When you're done reading this lens, don't forget to rate it!

One more thing, profits from you visiting advertisers and purchasing items displayed on this page benefit the Humane Society of the United States and Earthjustice. So, you'll feel good about yourself if you take just a minute to visit a partner and generate money for these two charities!

I'm sure you're mumbling to yourself at this point, "I don't care! Just tell me how to make money! I'm ready to start my shop!" Obviously if you haven't done so, your first step is to open a shop! Once you have your own shop, here are my suggestions to help make your shop successful...

Many new shopkeepers on CafePress simply add an image to a product and plop the item in their shop. No tags, no descriptions, no unique names. Unfortunately for us, Google and the other search engines can't see images. Bummer, I know. But, Google provides almost 60% of my traffic! Be sure to include relevant text anywhere and everywhere you can around each product. Make full use of image tags, product tags and product names.

On the other hand, don't just list keywords where it doesn't make sense to do so. "Green, coffin, graphic, tee, red, skull" may look fine and dandy to search engines, but what will your customers think? Of course, they're going to assume you're a two year old incapable of assembling a coherent sentence!* May I suggest this description instead:

The perfect gift for anyone who loves skulls, our red skull graphic tee by 'From the Green Coffin'

Utilize the title and description to write relevant phrases that include all of the keywords for that product while remaining readable to humans.

Also, keep in mind that users may use quotes when searching phrases. This will only return pages containing that exact phrase. For this reason, I highly recommend you try to keep descriptive words together, but do not sacrifice readability.

*No offense meant to those two year olds that actually can write better than myself...

This is easily a close second in terms of having a successful shop. In fact, if there was such a thing as having two number 1s, it would be up there - contrary to many people's beliefs, you can't really have two number 1s though...

The mistake that many shopkeepers make is to plunk the same image on every item available from CafePress. The problem with this in 99.9% of cases is that the square image leaves unclean, empty white space on many of the products. In particular, round items like the wall clock on the right look horrific when the image is not properly prepared.

But how do you know how to properly prepare images when there's so many different products?? That's easy! Well, kinda. CafePress offers templates for every product available and for every location your image can appear on those products.

Now that I have the template for the product I want to design, what do I do with it? I use Adobe Photoshop. I recommend it if you can afford to shell out upwards of $700 for image editing software. If you can't, don't despair. You have several other options! Adobe offers a 30 day free trial of Photoshop. Corel has Paint Shop Pro for $150 and Painter for $420. Google also offers a free image editor, Picasa, that will meet all of your basic needs, mainly cropping and resizing.

So you have the template for the product you want to create and you have software to edit you images that you plan on putting on the product. What's next?

For any rectangular template, you simply resize your image to fit within the template, remembering not to allow any white to show around the edge unless it's part of your design.

Non-rectangular templates can be slightly more complicated. Just remember to keep all important elements of your image within the dotted lines. Once again though, no white should show within the solid line outlining the template.

For clocks, after you have resized and positioned your image within the solid lined circle, it is recommended you add clock faces on top of the image. Although this step is optional, it makes reading the time easier. You can see how much easier the clock below is to read versus the previous one.


What happens if the image just doesn't want to fit the template perfectly? I recommend leaving the product out of your store altogether. Although there is a chance someone may eventually overlook the imperfections and purchase that product, it is more likely that a customer will see an unprofessional product and move on to the next shop.

If you plan to make money from your shop, without a doubt, premium shops are the only way to go!

Premium shops allow custom HTML
A basic shop looks rather bland. You have no option but to stick with the white and green layout of CafePress and you have little control over where your items will show up. A premium shop allows almost limitless control over the HTML of your shop. Premium shops also allow JavaScript, a very nice bonus. What does this mean to you? When you look at my shop, you'll notice that the shop almost appears to not be affiliated with CafePress! There are a few limitations, though.

Premium shops allow multiples of the same product
In a basic shop, you can only have one of each product, regardless of how many designs you wish to place on that product. So, if you have 30 designs you want to put on a clock, you would need 30 basic shops. This is not so with premium shops though. They allow limitless amounts of any and all products and designs.

Premium shops look professional!
Premium shops offer several templates that look professional straight out of the box. Basic shops look cheap and are likely to lose customers because of this.

Although you will get some sales from the CafePress Marketplace, you can't rely on it to make you significant amounts of money. You must promote your shop yourself! Create a lens here on Squidoo about your shop, write blogs about your new products and wear your own products when you go out! Just be sure not to spam users on forums or other sites. That just makes you look unprofessional.

If you have spare time, submitting your sites to key directories will not only direct more traffic to your site, but will also help increase your ranking on search engines. A few worth mentioning are the Open Directory Project, Yahoo! Directories, About.com and Business.com.

The resolution of your image is almost as important as the artwork itself! If you are creating the image from scratch using image editing software, you can easily set the resolution when you create a new file. CafePress recommends a minimum of 200 pixels per inch. Although you don't need to be an expert on what PPI means, Wikipedia has an article for those that are interested.

What does this mean in layman's terms, though? Basically, the higher the starting resolution of your image, the prettier it will print, especially when being stretched to larger sizes. With inadequate PPI, pixelation may occur and cause your final product to have a fuzzy image.

Many shopkeepers believe even if they add hundreds of superior quality items, they will start making money within a few days. This is almost never the case, though. It can potentially take a month or more for search engines to fully index your shop and this is where many of your sales will come from. Many shops can take months or even a year before they begin to make substantial sales! Don't be discouraged, though! The sales will come if you maintain a professional looking site and follow my suggestions!

Although that photo may look cute to you and have sentimental value, it likely won't appeal to the average Joe. A list of rights and wrongs would be infinitely long and unfortunately, Squidoo doesn't allow infinitely long pages. So, you'll have to use your own judgment on what would appeal to the majority of your customers. Or if you prefer, leave a comment with the link to your page and I will give you my honest opinion on your shop. Don't be upset if I give you the truth, though!

Often shopkeepers wonder if they are pricing their products too high. In most cases, the answer is no. In fact, within reason, higher priced items may actually sell better than similar items priced a few dollars less! Although there is no definitive answer to this conundrum, perceived value may likely be part of the answer.

So where should you begin your prices? I prefer to use CafePress' built in tiered markup system. I start my products at either the high or premium markup and adjust items individually as needed.

If you have an item selling particularly well, you can try marking the price up by a dollar and see if it maintains. Each shop will be a little different. Be sure to allow price changes enough time for you to judge the impact, though.

I wouldn't go as far as saying you have to run an external site, but I highly recommend it. At the very least, you should set up an easy to remember domain that forwards to your CafePress shop. For example, I set up FromTheGreenCoffin.com for my shop. Although I may eventually add real content to attempt to gain more traffic from search engines, it just forwards you to my shop. What benefit do you gain? You can display your link on bumper stickers, shirts, magnets and more and customers can easily remember it. For less than $15 a year, it's a small price to pay to have an easy to remember link to your shop!

Of course, if you prefer not to spend money, you can use Squidoo and make a page about your shop!

If you decide to run an external site, it's usually a good idea to submit it to the search engines to be sure it is crawled on the next run. At minimum, you should submit your site to Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines make up over 90% of all search engine traffic!

Simply send me an email letting me know what you're having problems with and I'll do my best to help you free of charge. I will do my best to answer all questions in a timely manner!

I will also be honest about the layout of your shop and the quality of your artwork. It's best to have an opinion outside of friends and family anyway.

Buy products listed above, visit From The Green Coffin or visit My Fantasy Election to help support this lens. A portion of profits help benefit the Humane Society and Earthjustice, so you can feel good about yourself, too.