Collective Cafepress Storefront for Indie Publishers

[greyorm]

In another thread, Christian mentioned about Cafepress:

Sadly, it only allows one design per item if you've got a basic shop.

and it started me thinking.

That has always been my problem with Cafepress as well. My store just doesn't earn enough to justify the monthly expense for a premium shop where that restriction doesn't exist, though I would like to have a premium shop. I suspect many other indie publishers are in the same boat. Would a collective Cafepress storefront be a solution of interest?

The benefit is that costs could split among the membership, and the centralized nature of the store would also be beneficial to the members in terms of exposure (someone comes looking for a, say, Burning Wheel tee and leaves with swag from other games/publishers as well, or even simply an introduction to or reminder of the presence of other games (because exposure is free advertising), etc).

Obviously, we would have to figure out how to handle the financial and administrative aspects of the store (ex: can earnings be routed as appropriate by CP or how do we do so if not; does everyone get access to the store or do we have one central administrator handling it; etc.), but I figured I would ask and see how many publishers would be interested in pursuing the idea first.

If there proves to be enough interest, we can discuss the aspects above. Any other questions related to this idea can be pitched here as well.

[iago]

I'm not actually that interested; I occasionally spend accumulated cafe cash on myself, and that's an important thing for my purposes.  But I do think this is an interesting idea for a lot of folks; it's just not bound to be a one size fits all thing, and the administrative overhead on it could end up being a lot of work for someone.

[greyorm]

Thanks for your thoughts, Fred!

But I do think this is an interesting idea for a lot of folks; it's just not bound to be a one size fits all thing, and the administrative overhead on it could end up being a lot of work for someone.

Very true. One of the big reasons I want to discuss the prospect before leaping into anything is figuring out all the potential problem angles to see if it would, in fact, be worthwhile or if the cost would outweigh the potential benefits.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I like the idea. I'm definitely not the kind of person who buys swag of any kind, but I'm also horribly susceptible to earnest marketing. I can well imagine that while I haven't been at all interested in getting indie t-shirts before, if a competent branding presentation with an unified storefront was done, I just might get crazy and get ten coffee mugs for different games or something like that. (And I don't even drink coffee.) I don't do spontaneous shopping, so getting me to buy outside my usual patterns requires presenting the product as a "thing", not just an afterthought to another product. I suppose that if the quality and design of the products was also uniform across game brands that'd fire up my urge to collect one t-shirt for each game I own or something like that. So I can well imagine that an unified storefront could be a marketing advantage that'd actually entice more people to consider buying the stuff. No idea if that's desirable, though.

As for practical application: I have no right whatsoever to hand a project like this off to somebody else, but it seems to me that if the IPR folks were interested, they'd have a considerable advantage in handling the administration, finances and coordination of something like this. They already have most of the organization, after all. Then again, I can well imagine how they just couldn't be bothered. I myself likely couldn't, when I can spend my time in game-related endeavours instead.