Anyone with a cafe press store, how is it going?

How did you get started, what imaging program did you use?

...and if PS is too expensive, The Gimp is a fine (free) alternative -- although the damn thing crashes a lot, without warning.

I am bookmarking for after payday.

How is your shop doing? Was it worth setting it up?

Worth it, yes, although promoting it takes an inordinate amount of energy. Competition is fierce among something like 2 million other shop owners and 8 million products, so you have to find creative ways to get your stuff noticed, outside the confines of CP itself. My own Web site (which I've had for seven years) points to my CP shop on just about every page; that helps a lot -- but it's taken the better part of seven years to build consistently good traffic.

One of the best ways to promote your shop is to wear your own stuff. My family and friends get a lot of my gear as gifts, too -- and they're the best "walking advertisements" I could ask for. (My Web site URL appears, in tiny letters, on every product. I use my site URL rather than my CP shop URL, because I know I'll have my own site forever.)

Another thing that helps is to have a LOT of products. I don't kick stuff out just to have it there -- I agonize over getting the quality of each design just right, and have pulled a lot of my older stuff because I've gotten better at it since the early days -- but it's simple math: The more stuff you have in circulation on, say, creationism (one of my favorite recent targets), the more of your stuff that will show up in a CP search for "creationism" (or "evolution" or "intelligent design" or whatever other relevant keywords you use.

As for how it's doing, I'm encouraged by the steady progress, but nowhere near making a living at it -- yet. That's my end goal; with a current conversion rate (the percentage of sales from visits) of between 3% and 5% (which is astoundingly good) from a rather small amount of traffic, I honestly believe that if I can find the right marketing key, I will actually be able to do what I love for a living.

And I do love it -- the design end of it, that is. And if it works out as well as I hope, then I may begin to believe something good came out of being laid off (some 4-1/2 years ago!). Because I make messageware near and dear to the hearts of liberals, I feel like I'm really working for a much higher good than I ever did for some big corporation.

Frankly, I can't think of anything I'd rather do than this -- and I can't begin to tell you how gratifying it is to know that every single person who buys something I made 1) likes what I did, and 2) is a genuine, bona fide liberal. (It's wonderful to "buy blue," but there aren't too many ways you can be confident that your own clientele is blue, too! LOL)

Anyway... If you're going to open a CP shop, I strongly recommend you spend the modest fee on a premium shop; not only do you get more products to work with and extra features to play with, but premium shops do get more attention from CP's internal search engine.

Also, CP feeds your products directly to Froogle.com (I'm not sure if they feed basic/unpaid shop items to Froogle), which is a godsend.

And if you want to put a couple of cents in my coffer, you can use my shop as a referral. ;)