For some time now, cafepress has been trying to encourage their users to upgrade from “basic store” (free) to “premium stores” (monthly fee). I’ve been resisting, because the only reason we’ve stayed with cafepress for all of our merchandise is because it was free. I could put a few hours of work into setting up a store, link it from a central spot, and basically wait for a check without having to do any further work.

Well, that has slowly been changing. Cafepress has been expanding their services, and offering new products, and changing some of their prices. This meant that I needed to go edit our stores to adjust our markup, and add the new products. Well, when you have 30+ stores, that can become a bit of a hassle. As a result, the only stores that were updated for a long time were the Pokey stores, and the hammer/sickle and mr. yuk logos, all of which are big sellers (meaning 3 or 4 items a month).

As some of you know, I’ve been working on some shirt designs for KillingMachines.org. Yesterday, when I logged into cafepress to set up the first of the new designs, I saw their little note saying “upgrade to a premium store.” What I noticed was something they’d never prominently displayed before – the price! It turns out it’s only $7 a month. They were offering a free trial, so I set up a premium shop to try it out.

I was stunned. This is not an overpriced version of the free service. There are a lot of benefits to the premium users. I could import all of my existing designs (without impacting the existing stores) quickly – it only took me about 10 minutes to bring in all 30+ stores!. I could create categories and sub-categories, so I can keep the products sorted by type (fojar, pokey, hammerspace, etc). I could style the store! Now the space ninja store actually uses the design I created! But the best feature of all, as far as I’m concerned, and certainly the one that will save me the most time, is the ability to do global price changes. I can update the cost of every white shirt in my store to whatever I want. Which means that changing prices isn’t a hassle, which also means that all of our products now have the correct markup!

I know I sound like a salesman, but I am seriously excited about this. Cafepress is easy again! So go check out the newly updated Space Ninja Store! KillingMachines.org designs coming soon!