CafePress Raises Prices And Ire

Yesterday, CafePress sent out a notice to its shopkeepers about a policy change that would raise prices on the average t-shirt by 15% or more.

With this launch we will begin charging a $3 second side printing surcharge for all garments* featuring more than one print area. To minimize work on your end and to ensure you don't see a margin impact on these products, we will automatically add $3 to the current retail price for each second side garment in your shop(s). Of course you can always readjust the retail prices of your products as you see fit once this release goes live.

Please note that there is no action required on your part unless you wish to remove or change second side images in your shop(s).

For more information, and a complete list of FAQ's please click here.

Now, while not pleasant, this change in pricing policy is understandable. Their biggest competitors like Zazzle do it. Why shouldn't they? But here's the part that ticks me off.

Because it was free, a lot of shopkeepers put their logo on the back of the shirts they sold. It's a prevalent enough practice that CafePress addressed it in their FAQ...

I use my shop logo/brand as my 2nd print area, should I remove it?

It is our opinion that you don't need to make any changes to these products. If you have garments in your shop that include second side printing, CafePress will automatically increase the retail price by $3 to cover the additional charge. Your buyers will not be alerted to the surcharge for the 2nd print; they will simply see the increased price.

Now, CafePress tries to assure its shopkeepers that the purchase decisions are driven by desire for the design, and our shirts won't sell less when our prices have been raised 15% or more. I don't buy it. With over 35 million products from 2.5 million members (their numbers), I do not doubt that someone looking for a shirt in a certain vein of thought will be able to find multiple shirts that are good candidates for purchase. If they're a dollar apart in price, that wouldn't make much difference, but when the price difference becomes $3-4 dollars... in a close contest, the less expensive one may win.

So I figured I'd just remove my logos. Surely if they were going to do this, they'd have a one-click solution to remove the back-of-shirt designs from all the shirts in my store. I know database programming and this is a relatively straightforward query. They could have one of their developers code, test, and roll it out in a day.

Nope...

• Will bulk tools be available for me to remove second side images from my products?

  We carefully considered the range of bulk tools our Shopkeepers would require for this change, and due to the range of variables involved we determined that there wasn't a solution that would satisfy all or most users.

• Why can't CP help me to remove the second side image from affected products in my shops?

  We carefully considered this option, but there are too many variables within different shops for us to be able to help Shopkeepers remove second side designs effectively.

"UPDATE products SET [rearshirt variables] = null WHERE store = [my store] AND product = 'shirt' AND allowssecondside = 'true'"

Now I'm sure that the actual query would be a bit more complex than that. They've got a huge operation. But that's what the logic boils down to. How is that "too many variables"? In my store, where there's a shirt with printing on the back, take the printing off the back. How many variables are there to that? How complicated is that?

Now let's imagine just 1% of CafePress members want to do this simple act, and by refusing to provide a bulk tool for it, CafePress costs each of them an average of an hour longer than it would take with the tool. That's a net cost of 25,000 hours of labor.

To put 25,000 hours into perspective:

• 25,000 hours is 12 years of 40 hour work weeks, with no vacations, holidays, or sick days...
• 25,000 hours is how long it takes to cook half-a-million three-minute eggs... in a row.
• 25,000 hours at $15 an hour is a stack of pennies 33 and a half miles high, and if you laid those pennies end to end, you'd have a line of pennies stretching from Washington D.C. to Boston, Massachusets.
• 25,000 hours is how long it takes to watch the entirety of Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings Trilogy (theatrical release versions) 2,688 times.
• 25,000 hours is how long it would take to cook a 16 ton pot roast.
• 25,000 hours is 180 million split seconds.
• 25,000 hours at two maximum strength Tylenols every 4 hours for pain is a 3 month old baby made entirely of Tylenol.
• 25,000 hours is how long it takes to go to the moon and back... in rush hour traffic (19.2 m.p.h.)... both ways.
• In 25,000 hours, a little kid on a Big Wheel could pedal around the earth... twice.

And CafePress would like to waste this much time so they don't have to spend a day or two of developer time on a relatively straightforward database query? Really?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.