CafePress: Printing Online For Everyone

This is the fourth review in our series of web printing applications. For an introduction to this category please check out: Printing Online: Customizing Merchandise With Web 2.0.

It takes less than a second to understand CafePress, and that’s because it puts it all up front; buy, sell, and create your own merchandise from a long list of products, including stationary, clothing, home decor, and promotional items. They can print on nearly anything they’ve seen in a store, and with their new product, InfiniStitch, they can create custom embroidery on shirts and hats.

Users can use CafePress to host their own designs for purchase on a variety of different kinds of merchandise, but CafePress is more than print on demand - it offers a chance to create their own commerce site within the CafePress site with a specialized url (cafepress.com/yourname). Directory listed and searchable, your commerce site has a unique advantage over self promotion - people already coming to the CafePress site can find you, and are trusting of the products offered through the CafePress site. To manage your store they have also included sales reports and a mailing lists.

To support the printing process CafePress offers templates and forums, as well as image workshops and tips for first time designers. Long time designers will like that CafePress supports Photoshop files, which allows designers to create detailed images with transparencies. This is the best part about CafePress - on top of having a wide variety of merchandise to choose from, users can use templates and graphic programs to get more out of their design. A drawback is that at this time the ability to add Adobe Illustrator and vector art, which is a favorite of designers for its ability to resize images without losing clarity, is not not available.

What CafePress is missing is a chance to put the best of the marketplace up front. As it is, all products are promoted equally; there are no comments or ratings, and so users may be put off by what they see. Users that do not have their own page are likely to be disappointed in the products that surround them, and without the added involvement of the CafePress community, they may be suffering traffic leakage as well.

CafePress is free, but business users can also take part in a monthly plan of $4.99 that will give them additional product options, promotional and organizational tools, and one click shopping. To find CafePress or similar applications, there is the Listio search: customize+merchandise.

Previously in this series: SpreadShirt: Customized Printing For Apparel

Application: CafePress
Listio Profile: http://www.listio.com/web20/app/CafePress/
Website: http://www.cafepress.com

Shop at CafePress for the things you are looking for. CafePress.com is an online marketplace that offers sellers e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of products, and offers buyers unique merchandise across various topics. Individuals, organizations and businesses can... Learn more

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Tags: business, create, customize, marketplace, merchandise, personal, print
Posted in: Printing | Respond
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