Cafepress.com is a rather interesting
e-commerce company. They are able to take digital
images in many formats
1 and transfer the image onto various articles of clothing, mugs, and mousepads.
People upload their images for products into their own store (you can have any number of stores). They then set the price, which can not be below a base price set by Cafepress. Any amount above the base
price is
profit for the creator of the
store. Once the store is created, you can publish the
URL (http://www.cafepress.com/storename) and try and get people to purchase your
T-Shirts and whatnot, or you can make a store that is only for your own personal or one-time use. Owning a Cafepress store is free, you only need to pay if you decide to buy your own product.
So far I have used the service to
order a
custom T-shirt I designed for my little brother. The quality is in general very good, except that the entire area of the image, even when there is no ink, has a "coating" and a different feel to it. I would also recommend keeping the images on the lighter, brighter area of the spectrum. The dark colors had a tendency to blend into one another and look like an undifferentiated dark area...
Here are all the
items and base prices that are currently available:
If you can manage to sell 20 items a month the base price will be lowered. There is also a
referral program whereby you make 50 cents every time someone you introduce to the site sells something, and a smaller amount for everyone they refer to the site, and so on, up to 4 levels deep. So if anyone decides to set up their own store there, fill in the "Referral Store ID" as "
johntheevil". And should your name be John, or should you know someone named John, and you or your friend/relative would like a weird
AYBABTU themed T-Shirt, feel free to pick one up for $14...
1 -
BMP,
GIF,
JPG,
PNG, probably others...