I asked about Cafepress and friends a while back, and I thought it was about time for a new thread to see if there are any experiences out there amongst the dopers.
I have a lil website and for a while I’ve offered a few random items for my visitors through CafePress, and for the most part it was a decent experience. Everything looked pretty good, decent prices (relatively speaking), etc. Unfortunately I eventually had a problem with them involving my premium shop. Every three months I’d be charged the 18 bucks or whatever it was to keep the store open, and get an email letting me know about it. However, my credit card on file eventually expired, and I got a message informing me as such. At the time, the shop was pretty much in hiatus anyway, so I didn’t really give it much thought. This was about 18 months ago.
So a few weeks ago I decide it’s time to fire it back up so I log in to my account to find that I have a negative “cafecash” balance to the tune of $110. This was for the charges my store accumulated every three months since my credit card was declined. I asked them if there was any way that charge could be erased as the store hadn’t been used during that time, but no, no refunds whatsoever. Ok fine, I understand that it was my responsibility to “close” the store, so I won’t hold it against them. Of course, had I been notified about even one of these charges I would have taken care of the problem a long time ago.
So I deleted my store at CafePress and started to look around, landing first at Zazzle.com. I was immediately impressed with Zazzle’s design tools. Within minutes I had a store that looked pretty cool with a few products ready to purchase. The stuff there is a little overpriced, but that’s to be expected with this single-order printing type stuff, so I understand.
Side note: It appears that shipping is per item, and not per order. I ordered a mousepad and a keychain last week (the mousepad looks great, the keychain is trash), and they were shipped separately with separate charges ($5.99 and $1.99 respectively). I spent $8 of my $20 order on shipping. And while I’m on the subject, if they’re going to charge two bucks to ship a keychain, they should think about not printing the actual postage ($0.63) on the label.
Anyhoo, what I don’t understand are the inexplicable limitations they put on their users. Last week I created a few products and put them up for sale. I quickly discovered that you cannot edit a product that you’ve published for some reason. You have to delete it and create it again. Ok, that’s unusual, but I can work around that.
So yesterday I receive a keychain that I ordered, and it’s not at all like I expected, and despite that, the image very dark, and off center so you can see a white bar across the top where the printing ends. I decide that I don’t want this product on my site to sell so I go to delete it and find… hey where’d the delete button go?
I looked through the help page at Zazzle and discovered that to have something deleted I now have to email the support team and wait for them to get around to it. I emailed them yesterday at around noon, and I’m still waiting for the item to disappear. In the meantime I changed the description to DON’T BUY THIS because that’s pretty much all I can do (I suppose I should be thankful for that meager ability). What possible reasoning could be behind this change?
I also discovered they removed the ability to display large or “supersize” images of my designs without the big Zazzle watermark in the middle of the screen. I understand the reasoning for doing this, of course, but the option was there before. These are my designs, why not let me decide if I want to protect them?
So despite these issues, I may stick with Zazzle and give them a fair shake. However, I’m definitely open to alternatives. Is anyone here familiar with these types of services? Anyone use Spreadshirts maybe? I’m open to suggestion! 