Setting up the stores in Cafe Press was a little confusing until I figured out the system. If you sign up for the basic (free) shop, it seems that you’re better off promoting just a single design, which you can place on multiple products. With the premium shop — which costs a monthly or annual fee — you can sell the same product but with multiple designs. Since I’m just starting out with Cafe Press, I didn’t want to spring for the premium shop, so I created two shops so that I could promote 2 different designs. You can create as many basic free shops as you want, and I’m considering adding a couple more shops using the same basic concept for the design.

So far I have to say I’m impressed with Cafe Press. They made it easy to set up my shop, select my products, upload my design, add appropriate titles and descriptions, etc. I left my shops opted in to the affiliate program, and tagged my images so they would appear in the Cafe Press Marketplace for relevant searches on the Cafe Press site.

I’ll report again after my shops have had a chance to get some traffic — I don’t know if I’ll make any sales or not, and the product designs I used give me a limited time for this concept to work.