Selling on Cafepress: A Beginner's Guide

Many people are looking for ways to make extra money online, and Cafepress is a great place to start for the artistically inclined. Cafepress enables you to run your own online retail shop without the headaches of dealing with customers, payments and shipping.

How it works: Cafepress has a warehouse full of blank products. You upload your own designs and decide which products you want your designs featured on and display them in your store. Each product has a base price and that is what Cafepress earns when an item is sold. You must set your own markup above the base price to earn a commission. When an item from your shop is sold, Cafepress prints your image on the product, takes care of the payment and shipping, and you keep your commission.

What you need to get started: A computer and a graphics program such as Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or Gimp. A digital camera if you want to sell photography.

How to get started: First head over to www.cafepress.com and sign up as a shopkeeper. There are two levels of stores: basic and premium. Basic stores are free and you can have as many as you want. The downside is that you cannot change the look of the store and you can only have one of each item. That means that if you decide to put your "I Love Cows" design on the tote bag, you cannot add another tote bag with a different design. The only way to have another bag would be to open another shop.

That is where the beauty of premium shops comes in. A premium shop allows you to have as many items as you want. You can separate them into different categories and subsections and organize your store any way you like. Cafepress has many different templates available for your storefront, but if you are handy with HTML you can modify the template with your own images to make your store unique.

The fee for a premium shop is $6.95 per month, or $60.00 if you pay for a whole year at once. Some people opt to open basic shops until they have earned enough money from sales to pay for a premium, but if you can afford a premium right off the bat, go for it! Premium shops are much more search engine friendly and you will see better results.