Impressions So Far

OK, so roughly two weeks into my experiment, here's what's happened:

I've learned to make absolutely sure designs will be sale-worthy by keeping them simple. I had a couple designs on CafePress that looked absolutely fantastic - really really awesome - on the preview panes. I ordered one just to make sure. In the mean time, somebody else ordered one off the marketplace (before I opted out). Mine arrived. It looked like absolute crap. It had some color shading stuff going on and it just didn't work at all. It looked like a mud puddle. I feel bad that somebody bought it and keep hoping it will be returned, but so far it hasn't.

I've learned that keeping two sites up and running is suboptimal. I'm doing twice the work and have no idea whether it will result in twice the results. However, you never know when a POD company will pull the rug out from under you the way cafepress did to it's shopowners, so it is probably best to have a second option at least visible by the search engines just in case. Still, I'd like to have twice as many designs and products out there instead of half as many twice as often. Or something.

Two weeks in I've had only a very small handful of visitors from search engines. Less than five spread across both stores.

Two weeks in I don't think I've had any visits from the Zazzle marketplace, but I can't be sure because stat counters don't work there. I've got Google Analytics, but I'm unfamiliar with it and don't know how well it suits my wants compared to sitemeter or similar.

I thought I liked the Zazzle store setup best, but I think I actually prefer CafePress. It just seems so much more organized. I think there are custom html solutions to improve the zazzle store, but that's again more time away from populating cyberspace with my goods. Besides, I'm unsure how important a nice looking store is. I'm guessing most people come in through search and land on a specific product. We'll see.

My sections and products are growing nicely in numbers.

I started out working on Zazzle and catching up on CafePress when I had time. I'm starting to reverse that trend as CafePress is just easier to work with. Uploading images to Zazzle is better, and they have a MUCH larger item description section, but aside from that, I'm liking the user-friendly CafePress. If only I could use the Marketplace without feeling like a schmuck.