Online income in 8 minutes.

You can open a Basic Shop on CafePress in about 8 minutes.

If your idea is good, people will buy merch with your design on it!

Here’s a step-by-step for your first Basic Shop.

First, sign up for CafePress. (If you want to use me as your referrer, my ID is freelief.)

Next, you’ll upload your art (2000 pixels high and/or wide fits most items) and give it some tags that will help customers find it. If you don’t tag it, it won’t show up in the Marketplace search, so don’t skip that step!

Then, click on Open a New Shop.

We’ll look at Premium Shops later. For now, click on FREE Basic Shop.

Simple enough. Choose your URL, name your shop, and if desired send your customers back to your Web site when they have completed their order.

You might be tempted to click on Add Products right away, but DON’T!! First, go to Storefront Info. This will save you a lot of time, and make choosing the right products for your shop easier.

By filling in the default settings, you will be able to see what this design looks like on different merch and won’t have to go back and set pricing or add descriptions later.

Now you’re ready to choose products. The easiest way to go about this, is to click the Make Selections link under All Products (next to the New Products box near the top left of this page) and preview items in the pop-up window that will open.

Your design may not appear to fit on some items, but you can fix that soon. First, click to choose the items you want to sell in your store. It is not necessary to add every item, but you’ll want to give your customers plenty of choices. Don’t choose certain products if your design looks really bad on them.

Once you have selected the items you want, click the Add Selections button and the pop-up window will disappear. Scroll down to the bottom of the main page to add the products.

You’re getting close! Time to fix those items that need the design resized on them to be appealing. Click on the first item you want to change to enter the Product Designer.

From here, you can use the drop down menu under Select Image Height to get your design to look right.

Repeat with other items that need to be amended. Also on this page, you can change the name, description or price markup on all or on just selected items, or remove any items with the Bulk Change tool near the top.

You clicked done, and you are! You’re ready to start making money with CafePress. Share the URL of your store with your friends. I’ve found that regardless of my self-promotion or lack of it, the well-known CafePress and excellent Google search rankings do most of my marketing for me.

Here’s what your new store looks like. Since it is a Basic Shop, there are limitations in the amount of customizing you can do. However, you can open an unlimited number of free Basic Shops and good designs will still compete in the Marketplace.

These are real check amounts from the OOPTEE account, the store that is run by three young entrepreneurs who do virtually NO advertising and have mostly simple text art.

If you decide to get serious with CafePress, you’ll definitely see the advantage of having a Premium Shop. I will discuss some of the perks in another post.

Have fun!

Posted in CafePress, freelief
Tags: CafePress, freelief