Using a Personlization Site for Design Products
The most attractive feature of owning an online site is being able to supply a product and make money without having to actually do any of the heaving lifting. What I mean is that many of the websites that are strictly online businesses get their products from somewhere else and don’t house the products themselves. The sites and companies that provide the services for warehousing, packaging, and shipping are considered order fulfillment companies.
There are many high profile sites online that are fulfillment sites. One popular site is Cafepress.com. CafePress offers personalized merchandise for customers as well as allowing users to obtain their own storefront to sell products from Cafepress.com. For the users that choose to create their own online store, they do not do anything as far as merchandise goes, they usually just take care of their own customer service if anyone has any questions, comments, issues with a product, and so on. This process also works for regular customers who shop on the site and do not create an online store. With CafePress doing the product delivery, customers can sell their designs elsewhere, like eBay or their own online site, and have the products shipped by Cafepress.com. This may not always work because CafePress is not a wholesale site and making much money on resales is not likely.
Product Fulfillment for the user’s store is done through CafePress. Customers who purchase an item through the user’s store simply make the purchase and then Cafepress.com takes care of the rest. Once an order is place, all of the creating, packaging, and delivery is done by Cafepress.com. Along with providing general merchandise for personalization, the site also works with audio CDs for musicians. The musician simply provides CafePress with a master CD and the artwork, and they handle the rest. The site takes care of duplication any time an order is placed as well as order fulfillment for the artists. This benefits the artist from having to deal with the hassle of finding somewhere to get CDs created and having to pay for discs that may or may not sell. The musician also doesn’t need to keep any CDs or worry about mailing them to customers.
