Have anyone had experience selling STUFF using these folks?
Ruth Ann has expressed an interest.
it's been a while --and not in our circle of friends- but i've read several decent 'merchant' reviews of cafepress. be aware, though, these these typically fell within the could-not-find-anything-better category and not enthusiastic endorsements.
if this is real artsy stuff, etsy gets strong reviews but i know nothing about their set-up or requirements
TY
Will check them out for her...
I set up a cafepress store a while back. Not difficult. These stores work very, very well for the Niche crowd but I've not seen it work well for the masses. So, if you want to market to Dog people, you'd have better luck with "German Shepherd" people.
Etsy is huge, redbubble too. In the UK notonthehighstreet.com seems to be growing and growing.
If you imagine those 3 inhabiting the same solar system as pintrest and fancy and have a product that could play to all five you may have a nice little business.
I put up a few items just after GW Bush came into office and have otherwise left it alone. I visited my page for the first time in about a year while doing taxes just to see if I had made any money (I think it was $65). The most I made in a year was probably a few hundred dollars.
I sell a bumper sticker a week or so and every couple of weeks a t-shirt. When the stuff was more timely, I could end up selling 10-20 items a month, though given the markup, that was maybe $30/month. Mostly it's for fun and I hand out as much for free to friends (and sometimes strangers) as I sell, so it's never really been a "for profit" deal either in motivation or practice.
One thing I notice is that momentum counts. If you sell an item, you'll sell two. If an item doesn't sell for a while, it will never sell again (generally). They seem to weight their search algo pretty strongly recent sales. So whereas I used to sell a mix, I now sell just one item over and over and over. If you put time into it, you could probably make some money at it if that's the goal, but you'll never achieve the sort of margins you would if you did print runs of 1000. You can realistically only mark things up by a couple of dollars. So it's unlikely to make any money.
What it can be quite easily, though, is a low cost platform to have some fun. This is especially true now that you can have a "deluxe" (or "premium"?) shop for a percentage fo sales, so you don't need to meet any sales goal just to break even (it used to cost a bit over $100 per year I think). And onceyou have your degins uploaded and ready to go, you can send a fun gift to a friend at a moment's notice. For most people that is probably the best use of CP.
One odd thing - I have some designs that I think are pretty good - funny or innovative or something. But what sells is plain black text on a white background. Literally, something they could make themselves in the product creator in 5 minutes, which is probably less than the time they spent shopping/searching/etc. I expect that they're looking for inspiration, find it, and it's not worth it for them to create their own given my tiny markups (I don't know if I still am, but for a long time I had markups set to zero on organic cotton items to push people to buy them).
Artists from places like Deviantart put some original art on CP and sell it, local bands web comics.
Thank you all for your comments! :-*
I do know a couple of people that have sold on the usual suspects (they are artists rather that guys like us but niche), the general feedback is it can make a little residual income but nothing to get excited about. Personally I would work outwards, find a print partner so that you can supply directly from your main site with a decent margin, establish a site and illustrator/designer personal brand and then use the marketplaces as extra sales and marketing venues but branding the products well to encourage designer recognition and return buys to your main site. I would also, like the others say, aim for specific niches.
Hope this helps and good luck