Cafe Press Competes With Its Users, Cafe Press terms of service are bait and switch San Mateo California

Recently Cafe Press began competing with its artists.

CP rents shops to its artists. The artist creates a website page and manually loads the desired blank products. The artist imports his image onto each product, arranges the products on the page, describes the products, titles the products and tags the images.

Initially, the artist set a markup and received the markup when a product sold.

However, recently Cafe Press began competing with its artists, using the artists' own images. Cafe Press created a marketplace where a customer can search a keyword. That search brings up artist products. When the customer buys from the marketplace Cafe Press pays the artist 10% of the price Cafe Press set. Both the customer and the artist lose money. If the artist's shop sells a t-shirt for $21, the artist makes $3.01. If the marketplace sells the same shirt for $25, the artist gets $2.50. The customer pays $4 more, and the artist gets $0.51 less. CafePress justifies this bait and switch by telling artists they can opt out if they don't like the new terms; however, many have spent as much as 7 or 8 years creating as much as 88000 images.

Cafe Press tells artists to 'promote your own shop,' but Cafe Press buys Google adwords using the very image tags the artist provided.

Would you franchise an AMOCO station if AMOCO built a company store across the street from you?

Linkin
Duluth, Minnesota
U.S.A.