If Cafepress is to be considered as a dropshipper, it is probably the biggest dropshipper company out there. If you by any chance, never heard of cafepress before. It is basically a website that allows you to create your own customizable products which you can buy or sell to other people. It’s basically like Custom Dropshipper which I have mention in the article “Dropshipping for the Creative Mind“. Before I go and give you guys my opinion on whether or not Cafepress is a money maker or not. I must to make a point, about why I think Cafepress can be considered a dropshipper to justify the appropriateness of this article. Even though some people may argue that Cafepress prices are too high for resale, making themselves the retailer and not a dropshipper. Another point is that you don’t have enough control over your own store for it to be considering dropshipping. However, in my opinion dropshipping, to put it down plain and simple is basically a supply chain management technique where the retailer doesn’t carry the inventory, but the manufacturer ships the product directly the the end consumer. Under these definitions Cafepress can indeed be considered dropshipper, but I will admit that there is a very fine line in the distinction that I don’t think either interpretations are necessary wrong.

Now, moving on to the main topic “Is Cafepress really a money maker?” Considering the size of Cafepress, I am not surprised how many times I have seen this time of question been asked on the web. My answer has been and is still “Yes a few people do make money, and even less make anything decent or a fortune.” I hope this doesn’t sound a bit contradictory to my previous statement, but Cafepress prices aren’t exactly wholesale prices. Anything you mark up and sell, will not give you a huge profit; you are supplying your design to a large retail company that will compensate you a little if your product sells. You will have to get pretty lucky and sell hundreds of products on a regular basis to make anything decent. And if your wondering why I used the word luck, it is basically because with Cafepress you have much less control over your products and website than with most dropshippers. This isn’t necessary a bad, thing because it also means that Cafepress taking over more of the business functions such as marketing of the product. If I can sum up my answer to this question about Cafepress.

I would say for the majority, Cafepress is a great place designers who love to design stuff as a hobby with no business intentions, and shoppers who are looking for unique designs. Maybe you’ll even get lucky and sell something. But it is not really a place for dropshippers who are looking to make it a successful business out of it. The percentage of successful people in respect to people that try is just too small to recommend as a money making business venture.