CafePress recently instituted a change in their pricing policy, and as a result its shopkeepers--the people who do all the work as far as coming up with designs, putting the designs on products, etc.--are going broke.
Prior to this change each shopkeeper set his/her own prices for the products they chose to offer for sale in their shops. CafePress already had very high base prices, but shopkeepers could mark the prices up anywhere from a penny to hundreds of dollars. Most of us--the successful shopkeepers, anyway--marked things up enough to make a decent amount of money. Many shopkeepers relied on their CafePress shops as the sole source of their incomes.
But after the change things are very, very different. CafePress now decides how much to charge for every item offered in its marketplace--and the marketplace is where most shopkeepers make the majority of our sales. Okay, that change wouldn't be so bad if not for the other part--shopkeepers now receive a paltry 10% of the selling price.
Read more about it here:
Boycott the CafePress MarketplaceWe the undersigned respectfully request that CafePress reconsider its recent Marketplace pricing change.
We believe that the new "10% commission" model is unfair to CafePress.com's shopkeepers--the very people who made CafePress the phenomenal success it is today. We believe that returning to the original pricing model, in which shopkeepers set their own markup--effective both in their shops and in the Marketplace--is the only fair thing to do.
We recognize that the Marketplace exists because CafePress put time, advertising dollars, and effort into creating/promoting it. We appreciate the sales the Marketplace has generated for its shopkeepers since its inception. But we cannot accept that the shopkeepers are worth only 10% of the selling price for THEIR hard work.
The artists and other creative people whose designs are sold on otherwise blank CafePress products spend hours, days, or even weeks working on each design, placing them on their choice of products, and making their shops attractive. We believe that receiving 10% of the selling price for so much work is not only unjust and unfair, but extremely insulting.
Please reconsider your decision and revert back to the old commission model.
Thank you for taking the time to read and consider our request.
