I am building a new website that will house designs from both of my CP stores, a store I have elsewhere, and eventually affiliate stuff. How do I approach the fact that each click will take them out of my site and to a shop? There doesn't seem to be a way for them to purchase from my site, so I am feeling very confused?

Purple Crayon Please. I don't understand how to offer items from all these different places on my site. I know how to copy/past a tumbnail, but I want more than that. I want to keep them in my site as long as possible.

I also want to make sure they understand that I am not the one selling them the shirt.

Ohhh my heads going to explode.

Caroline, cpshop keeps them on your website (adding your cafepress stuff or affiliated cafepress stuff to their carts) until they check out at cafepress.com.

Initial setup is a little challenging for a purple crayon wielder... but once it's set up...

You can add an affiliated shop in just a few minutes - along with every item they offer.

Thanks Carl, but what if it is non-CP stuff?

This site will be more content driven than product driven. So it is not a heavy affiliate site if I am making sense. I just want to add more than thumbnails but not enough to require cpshop.

Is there an in between? Are there people using their websites to promote their CP stores and Other(cannot mention) stores, with out actually wanting to be a big affiliate store? Or without needing CP shop?

You can hand build as many off-site affiliate pages as you want, but you're not going to be able to mix merchants in one cart. When the shopper clicks the product, you're going to lose them to the other site. If they buy you'll get your cut.

As far as mixing cafepress products with a competitor on the same page: I've seen shopkeepers ordered to remove any bit of branding that would make the shopper think they were shopping at cafepress. If you have a customer service link to CP and you're selling something on that page from another company, cafepress would suffer only ill-will if somebody calls for a guarantee on a competitor's product... because they saw the cp name on the webpage. Nobody wins.

I try to make bouncing between my offsite pages and my cafepress shop as seamless as possible (and I use the cp customer service links) - but I don't offer anything but cafepress products on that website. I have others that I use for other products.

Thanks Carl,
Sorry it took so long to get back here. I think I will just make it obvious that the products are from all over the net. Then people will realize that the products aren't mine just cool stuff I scoured the internet for.

Also I think I will make the link open in a new window. Maybe?

If it's a product link, and if your shoppers are made aware that clicking a link opens a new window... I don't know. I'd personally become aggravated with a site that generates 50 new windows while I'm browsing around.

If it's an add-to-cart link, definitely use the same window. No serious shopping site uses a popup for the cart.

See Carl now I am really confused.

How can I do an add to cart link on each item if the items are all coming from different shops and not all of them CP shops either?

Cause like you said,

quote:

As far as mixing cafepress products with a competitor on the same page: I've seen shopkeepers ordered to remove any bit of branding that would make the shopper think they were shopping at cafepress. If you have a customer service link to CP and you're selling something on that page from another company, cafepress would suffer only ill-will if somebody calls for a guarantee on a competitor's product... because they saw the cp name on the webpage. Nobody wins.

That was my original question... How are people who are NOT using 4th click or Cpshop, constructing their affiliate shops? How are they able to let the customer know that you have scoured the net in search of cool shirts for them, in such a way that they are expecting to leave the site at the point of purchase?

Maybe what you are saying is that I should only affiliate CP stuff, so they can add multiple items to the same cart? If so, then I am kind of bummed because I wanted this site to do this and also promote my other non-cp shops. Are you saying this is not a good idea?

Sorry, I am either too tired or stupid to get this. Maybe I need to look at some peoples affiliate shops.

Caroline, you can code whatever you like onto your offsite affiliation pages - view larger, wish lists, etc. However, you must send them to the merchant's site when they're ready to buy. If they have ten different items from ten different merchants, they're gonna have to buy ten different times in ten different transactions.

Because of this, it's better (imo) to just send them straight to the merchant when they click the product. You stand a high chance of tanking the sale otherwise.

quote:

Because of this, it's better (imo) to just send them straight to the merchant when they click the product. You stand a high chance of tanking the sale otherwise.

This I understand I guess it would be a bad idea to have them going to different merchants. So I will just stick to affiliating CP stuff only until I can come up with a different plan.

I am still going to hunt down some affiliate sites to look at. It's hard because most people including myself don't post links.

I usually just search the marketplace and fit a collection together for a specific affiliate page targeting a holiday or occasion. Jen's tool is great for this. Use more than one search term and you won't get so much spam.

I use cpshop for large scale affiliation. There are plenty of ways to string a few affiliate pages together manually, but folks are very tight-lipped when it comes to automatic bread-and-butter affiliation coding. Hand-built pages go stale quickly. You'll soon hit a point where you no longer have time to keep them all fresh.

That said... you can learn how to scrape a dynamic portal page together in about twenty minutes.

I looked at Jens tool, but maybe need to look at it again. It looked like you couldn't do t-shirts only.

quote:

I am building a new website that will house designs from both of my CP stores, a store I have elsewhere, and eventually affiliate stuff. How do I approach the fact that each click will take them out of my site and to a shop? There doesn't seem to be a way for them to purchase from my site, so I am feeling very confused?

Basically, you're can't.

On some of my sites that work like this I have a wish list feature that operates much like a shopping cart. Users can add items to their wish list, which is a saved list of URLs. The URLs can be affiliate links, links to products I sell, or products I sell via CafePress etc.

That's just one idea how to unite all the many pieces together.

Ooooo Good idea Adam.

I will look at the wish list idea down the line. I have to have the pre-school version of everything right now.

Adam, I am snooping around buy-tees right now. what I am seeing is that when I click buy now it takes me to that persons shop.

So it is not confusing to shoppers that each click takes them to a different shop?

That is what started this whole thread.

Well tbh - I'm not that bothered with that particular site as I am others. The purpose on buy-tees is to get people to click buy now, get them cookied and on to a page they can purchase from.