My previous post took a little bit longer than I expected so I restricted it to Zazzle changes. In this post I will talk about the recent big announcements are Cafepress. The first thing to discuss is of course: limits. Cafepress has decided to set a limit to the number of sections allowed in Premium Shops to 500. This news came as quite a shock to some shopkeepers and has caused a great debate. Many shopkeepers feel that they are being screwed and for some it is kind of true. For shopkeepers in the middle of creating a big superstore with thousands, or even tens of thousands, of products, things will be more difficult. The 500 section limit isn’t for everyone though. For people who have stores with 400 or more sections they will be given more room to build, but new shopkeepers and those with less than 400 sections will be stuck with this limit.
The reason given is that large shops take up too many resources, put a strain on the server and cause problems. While many people seem critical of these reasons and believe that Cafepress is just trying to make more money off the shopkeeper, I tend to believe them. If you have been a Cafepress shopkeeper for a while you will probably know that shopkeepers with large stores have been given restricted use of bulk pricing tools. The reason then was the same as the reason given now. In fact it makes more sense as Cafepress have been gearing up to release new bulk tools to make it much easier to increase the number of products in our stores. So the potential for super stores is increasing which means the likelihood of problems occurring is also increasing.
To be honest, I am not all that bothered by the limits. There are easy ways around it. Of course it involves paying for more stores but if you can’t make $60/year from one store … Also, it will make it more difficult for people to spam the marketplace with generic designs, which has been another big issue recently.
The bulk tools that Cafepress are launching on May 6 (if all goes as planned) seem pretty cool and I am looking forward to trying them out. Until I do though, there is little I can say about them. Just check out the blog page and prepare yourself.
I was a little disappointed as I have a “name design” section that I had planned on growing to thousands of possibilities over a few years. Got to rethink that plan.
It’s still possible to do it at Cafepress. You just need to plan it a little better and of course it would mean opening extra shops. On the other hand other PODs such as Zazzle don’t have a restriction on the number of sections (as far as I know) so you could just take your business idea elsewhere. Zazzle also have a personalization option so it would save you making thousands of designs and uploading them. There is some talk of that happening at Cafepress too.