CafePress Shopkeepers up in arms!

Day428
CafePress Shopkeepers received a very unpleasant email from one of the founders on Thursday. Since then the forums have been in an uproar. I tell you this, because people reading this blog who are most likely thinking about starting an online shop, need to know the kinds of things that can happen when your shop depends on someone like a CafePress as opposed to being totally in control.

CafePress started an affiliate program a year and a half ago. In Thursday’s email we were told that program was going to dissolve and a third party, Commission Junction, would be taking over. As shopkeepers read the news we had to wonder how CafePress could so blatantly ignore the hundreds of hours we have spent searching for products and stores to affiliate, creating ads, sections in our stores, whole websites of affiliate stores and thousands of links both to our stores and to the stores we affiliate. People have spent money advertising and for special tools of course too.

Setting all of this up over the past year, we would joke we were working for about 10 cents an hour. We could joke, because we were full of hope it would pay off in the future.

Just look back over this blog how many products I have in the past 300 plus posts. Those all have a link, which after the new program takes over April 10th, will become links just sending traffic to competitors instead of affiliate links to people’s stores I admire, where I would get an affiliate commission if the customer bought something. Do I take all theses out? Two thirds of my blog posts? How about the 6 sections in my shop that are strictly affiliates?

If you could read some of the forum posts about how overwhelmed and angry shopkeepers are feeling right now you would probably say, “Why don’t they just close up shop and do a shop that is totally theirs or go to a competitor?" I think that will happen in many many cases.

But, first the shopkeepers have to grieve. As one put it, it’s like having a family member that you loved hit you and say, “I never loved you.”

Breast Cancer donation

Day272
Breast Cancer Awareness month is a time for people to come together and use the power of community to make a difference.

At CafePress, we've looked to our own community of over 2.9 million users to make this difference - and the response was a rally cry of support.

The CafePress Breast Cancer Donation Shop contains hundreds of products designed and donated by our community of Shopkeepers.

CafePress.com will donate 40% of the retail price of all products sold through the Breast Cancer Donation Shop through October 31, 2006 to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation* or another non-profit 501(c)(3) organization with a core purpose of raising awareness and funding breast cancer research and education.

Your purchase today directly supports a great cause, and makes you part of an empowering message of support, survival and prevention.

Breast Cancer

CafePress drops referral income to 1 year

Day35
Spent a lot of time sending out the free classifieds again. Every 7 days comes around fast! I promoted Super Bowl. Did a few more My Space ads and spent a lot of time reading and researching. Have a huge list of sites I want to learn from.

Day36
Read CafePress forums for a couple hours! Everyone was up in arms about the new shop referral change: now you only get income from a shop you referred for 1 year. Since I hadn’t referred anyone yet, or even put a link on my site to do that, it didn’t really effect me, but I felt for some of the people who were apparently getting a fair size monthly check from the program.
At first I thought it was awful of CafePress to do (and I still thinking the 2 month warning isn’t nice or fair), but someone in the forums pointed out that the affiliate program might have replaced this. So I spun that around in my head a bit: 5% from all sales forever from a store you referred, or 20% from one sale if the customer came to the sale through your site….hmmmm…..
Oh, well, what’s done is done.
I did notice a sudden flood of affiliate emails and sign ups going around! So I decided to go ahead and “announce” that my shop is ready to affiliate and asked John to create the link on my site. (He’s been working on it for a couple hours – I’m sort of afraid to go in there to see how he’s coming!)