Great article. I appreciate the depth of tips.

Statcounter just changed to 500 from 100

I just re-read the article -still need to write descriptions!

Thank you so much for writing this. I will apply this advice to my own shop and hopefully I will finally be able to make some sales.

I just submitted "something" as a reply and thank you. Then I got this. I'm not sure what will be posted. But here goes again ....

LBowser

my store: www.cafepress.com/lbowser

Aloha,

I know there's a lot of messages but I couldn't take what I read, which really helps me, and not go without saying Thank-you, Mahalo, Si Yuus Maase! (English, Hawaiian, Chamorro respectively).
You have helped me to make my decision to switch from basic to premium.

Have A Great Day!...and...
StayMotivatedForever!

Thinking inside the box

Thanks Zapgraphix for putting together your wealth of experience.

You mentioned that 50% of all Café Press sales are for Text Products. Where did you find that information? I am wondering if there is a further breakdown on categories of images or text.

From reading the posts it appears that there are more people focused on selling their artistic endeavors then witty statements.

That got me thinking that maybe its time to move from the right brain thinking to the left brain and think inside the box. My suggestion is using the artistic designs as an inspiration for text to put on products. It just may be that the world we are selling to is
more left brain and text then us artists trying to get their attention. Or it could just be that search engines are text oriented, and when a buyer is looking for product matching their impulse they may not want to wade through thousands of images.

An example would be: Drummer Girl could translate the emotions of her picture into poetry or word phrases like: (Philosophical) I Drum, Therefore I Am, or (Spicier) Have Tom Tom’s, Will Travel. (yes drummer girl you can use these words if you want to. I suggest doing a Google search to search to see if someone hasn’t already.

I wish I could do the same for my designs. My designs are very carefully crafted to create an energetic effect on the wearer’s aura. They are a kind of substitute for prayer and meditation for busy people. Please check out my shop at:

http://www.cafepress.com/bewellsymbols

Everyone, good luck with your stores and the endeavors they support.

Leigh

That was an amazing post. Thanks!

I mentioned that a good portion of sales come from text based products, I guess I should have qualified that with a "this is my observation" type disqualifier. I do not have real stats to back that up, but if you do a search in the marketplace for just about anything, you'll find that the bulk of the products contain just text or a combination of text and art. This was just a way to encourage those who may not be so good with a pen and ink or a version of photoshop to not despair. It's not REQUIRED to be artistically talented to do well on CP, but it definitely helps to have the creative gene inside you and your experience will likely be enhanced if you artistically create your text based shirts/stickers/etc. But plenty of people are making money with what many may consider to be marginal in terms of artistic ability.

Best of luck to you!
Andy - aka ZapGraphix

that was a very informative post and i am really glad i read it and i am definatly going to change some things.
i only have one problem...
i did tags on some of my pictures a little while ago and searched by just typing in one or two of those words and didnt see my pics at all come up in the CP search engine. shouldnt they show up if they have those tags/keywords??

Yes, they should. You should make sure you haven't inadvertantly opted out of having your images displayed in the marketplace and you should also make sure that you have not tagged images that you currently don't have displayed on any products, other than that yes they should be displayed. They may not be displayed on page one, but they ought to be displayed somewhere. If they are popular tags, they may get buried somewhere back on page 47 or something. Keep in mind it can take a little while for them to appear, so if you put them up yesterday and they haven't yet appeared then I wouldn't panic just yet.

Good luck,
Andy - ZapGraphix

Thank you for the great article.
It is very useful for new shop owners like me.

I'm trying all of this now! Thanks so much for taking the time to help us out.

I'll come back in a couple weeks and let you know whether it's worked or not.

Thanks so much for the great information I am new and it was nice to find great information all in one location on many topics...Thanks Lisa

Some great advice here! Thanks for sharing

Thanks for the very helpful information, Zap. It's very much appreciated!