Sunday Mailbag- Online Sales?

Q: Have you ever used an online store like CafePress? I see there is now Merch by Amazon now too. Is there any reason not to use one of these services? Do you have a favorite? Or do you suggest any methods of selling artwork in various formats?

A: The best way to do online sales depends on how much work and money you are prepared to put into it versus how much of the profit on sales you are willing to settle for.

All my online sales are done “in-house”, meaning I produce/print all the stuff I sell and then do the fulfillment myself. I use the Woocommerce plug-in with my Wordpess-based website and through Woocommerce have “payment gateways” via plug-ins with PayPal and Amazon to take the payments. Woocommerce generates the receipts and order details, and I can print postage labels directly through PayPal or the online service stamps.com for Amazon orders. Likewise refunds can be processed through Woocommerce and then automatically paid back through PayPal or Amazon. I have a little production/shipping area in the basement with a wireless label printer, all the different envelopes, tubes and packing stuff I need, along with inventory. The Lovely Anna is “Shipping and Handling”.

All that works but is a lot of time and effort, from the setup of things like calculating shipping on the webstore to the time spend printing labels, packing things up, and dropping off at the post office. The good part of that is the costs of producing the merchandise I sell (books, prints, etc) are as inexpensive as they can be because I do all the work in setting it up, pay for bulk printing, store the items, pack and fulfill. The bad part is I have to do all that, and I have to pay upfront for the costs of producing an inventory of these items.

A ‘print on demand’ service like CafePress or Zazzle takes the work and costs of production, payment processing, and fulfillment, off your hands. You upload art/design and they do the rest, printing your art/designs on products as they are ordered, collecting payment, processing, and shipping the items directly to the customer. You just get your share of the money. No upfront costs to print anything, no inventory, no need to store anything, no other work. You just sit back and collect the dough. That sounds great, but you end up getting a very small portion of the sales collected. The way it works is they have a set price for things like T-shirts, mugs, etc and you chose the “royalty” you want, which is tacked on to their base prices. The higher the royalty you choose, the more expensive the products are. For example Zazzle recommends a royalty of 5% to 14.5%. Therefore if the base cost of a product is $15 and you choose a 10% royalty, you only get $1.50 out of a $16.50 product sale. That’s not much, but on the other hand you do nothing but upload the art and then promote the sales on your website, social media, etc. They do the rest and send you the royalties.

I briefly had a Cafepress store many years ago, but it was not very effective. Granted, I did not have much in the way of products. For what I do and can sell legally (copyrights and right of publicity concerns taken into account) it makes more sense for me to do it all myself. Other types of merchandise might make more sense to do via a print-on-demand service like Cafepress or Zazzle, especially if you plan to sell something like apparel which would require different sizes and choices for the same product.

I have some friends who sell their work on Etsy or BigCartel. These are not print on demand services but online storefronts that allow you to easily create an online store and start selling. They host the storefront and do the payment processing for you, you have to produce the products and do the fulfillment. Basically they so what the Woocommerce plug in does for me, except they have customer support and do the back end stuff on your store software. For this they charge you a monthly fee depending on how many products you have and what kinds of features you want. If you can’t or do not want to do the heavy lifting when it comes to online store set up and maintenance, then this would be a good option for you.

Just remember, none of these options do any of the promotion and selling for you. You need to drive traffic to your store via promotion, advertising, etc.

Thanks to Greg Russell for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!