Monetizing your website: CafePress
July 9th, 2008
Cafepress is a site that allows you to create custom products with your logo or design for free. Just upload your design, choose your product (a t-shirt, for example) and set the price of your product above the Cafepress minimum. As customers purchase your items, you’ll get paid the difference between the price of the item and the Cafepress minimum price. No risk to you and you get your brand and designs listed on the Cafepress website for free. Sweet.
We’ve created some products on Cafepress ourselves and while the revenue hasn’t been spectacular the value of testing new designs on Cafepress is huge. On one of our websites we sell t-shirts and stickers and every couple years we come out with a new design but we’re never sure which ones will sell the best. Printing t-shirts or stickers yourself can be a large capital investment so it’s smart to do your homework before laying out the cash. Within a couple weeks we can usually tell which design is the most successful, giving us the confidence to place a larger order offline.
Cafepress also helps spread your brand to new and potential consumers. We created t-shirt designs for our mountain biking website a couple years ago and listed them on Cafepress.com under the cycling/mountain biking category. When folks surf Cafepress looking for products that fit their interests, they often come across our branded merchandise and sometimes even make it over to our website to see what we’re about. Even if they don’t, it’s a free brand impression that we might not have received otherwise.
Cafepress offers an easy and low-risk way to monetize your website while spreading your brand to potential new customers. Toss up a few designs today and see what works!
