Cafepress is a website where one can create and buy, create and sell, or shop a marketplace for personalized materials ranging from T-shirts to baby bibs to buttons. The website allows for individual shopkeepers to create an online “store front” where they can sell items with a logo they have designed. Cafepress additionally has over 50 major accounts, including wiki and startrek.com, as well as strategic agreements with licensors that include more than 90 properties. The website represents every aspect of online business by offering storefront development, site hosting, order management, secure payment processing, etc. They feel that as a company they stand out because they offer a free online shop, shipping world wide, customer service, and the freedom from a minimum order. Cafepress can create and sell a variety of customizable products, for a large cut of the price. The base price of a T-shirt is $16.99 and is marked up on average about $5.00. This price covers the product creation, customer service, transaction management, returns/exchanges, and online shop maintenance. If you were to create you own custom T-shirt it would be about $14 dollars. I thought that this might be a little high, so I checked other sites and found that it is the lowest. The double edged sword to cafepress is that there is no minimum order requirement. So that’s great if you want to buy one shirt. However, customink.com has prices that significantly decrease when you order more shirts.
Cafepress is a great example of user generated content. You can put essentially anything on a variety of products and sell it to anyone in the world. This openness is what I love about Cafepress. If you want to find a product for almost anything you can find it there. In this sense it appeals to all people of all generations, races, sexes, genders, etc. There is something for everyone. I personally have bought shirts from cafepress because I find things there that I wont find anywhere else. The concept behind cafepress is fascinating to me, and I feel it coincides with the ideas of creative commons. Cafepress is essentially sharing their ability to produce with the creative minds of others. In collaboration they create a product that people can own and make their own.
