There’s a great rant over at the Inktank site about the new CafePress policy agreement. Having read through it I’ve got to agree that the situation kinda sucks.
For those of you who don’t know about it, CafePress is an online shop that prints your artwork on any of a couple hundred different products. They handle all the annoying details of printing, shipping, billing and such. You decide how much of a markup over their base price you want to charge, and they send that along to you.
Or at least they used to.
Now they want to take a 5% cut off of the profit, in addition to charging their base price. That’s just plain dumb. Basically, they’re trying to cash in on any premium that a popular artist might charge. Instead, the popular artists are either closing up shop and taking their business elsewhere, or just shutting down their shops altogether.
Quite frankly, I don’t blame them. The biggest reason to use CafePress is conveniance, but there comes a point when it’s not worth the price.