So I’ve used Cafepress for several years now and they’ve always offered a fairly nice selection of items and a fairly nice quality. At one point I ordered a trucker cap and tshirt from them and the trucker cap was pretty shoddy and the tshirt was only mediocre. Since then they’ve expanded their options for designing to include transparent images which should help the iron-on look and feel of several graphics on a single shirt.

Recently, though, when I opened up the new Rants and Raves shop I was hoping that since I last used Cafepress that they had included drink huggies. I have no idea why this isn’t an option because I would imagine they’re ridiculously easy to make in mass quantities. Well they hadn’t added them and so I set off in search of alternatives to Cafepress. I never found my custom shop site that offers huggies, but I did find a few interesting sites out there that are similar to Cafepress and a few that are completely different in both what they offer and how they allow you to design it/sell it/promote it. The following list is not in any kind of order. They’re not best-to-worst or worst-to-best. They’re just in the order that I came across them in. They include Cafepress, Spreadshirt, Zazzle, and Printfection. Read on and leave some feedback if you’ve used any of these stores!

1. Cafepress

My Shop

http://www.cafepress.com/rantsandraves

My First Item

With Cafepress you can have a single account with multiple shops. The free basic shop allows you to have one of each product in the store. You can bypass this by either paying to upgrade to a premium shop or opening another shop if you’d like to create another Fitted-T or mousepad. I’ve used Cafepress for a long time now and was the reason for this search for new alternatives. Creating a shirt is easy. You simply upload an image to your image basket (which you then can continue to use on other products as well) add it to your product, set price & description, and you’re good to go. My favorite part about the process is that they offer templates to use in Photoshop when designing for a circular wall clock or oval sticker, for example, which other wise I would be left stuck guessing at the size and shape.

My first tshirt was a breeze. I downloaded the template JPG and opened it up in Photoshop. I pasted it into a blank document and saved it as a PNG with a transparent background once I was done. Uploaded, priced, and finished. Simple as can be. You could even create a design and add it to 5 different T-shirts at once.

Tons of Items

Calendars, clocks, teddy bears, CD’s, postcards, tshirts, hoodies, messenger bags, stickers, magnets, mugs, mousepads, aprons, underwear, steins, coasters, doggy shirts, posters, framed prints, buttons, and more and more and more. Lots of options to choose from and a design template to help you create a design for each and every one of them.

Other Features

CafePressVoice is a panel of Shopkeepers elected by YOU to help us evaluate new features, services, merchandise and programs. You basically get to vote in a party that helps Cafepress decide what goes in the marketplace. This makes Cafepress basically a big democracy with elected representatives from the shopkeepers. This is a great idea. They also have sales and promotions fairly often. April 22 for instance is Earth Day, and Cafepress is promoting shops that offer eco-friendly designs.

Downsides

No vector support. To create more than one of an item you must open a premium shop. There’s no downgrading from a premium shop to a basic shop…you must delete the store and start from scratch if you decide the $4 a month isn’t worth it. With a premium shop, however, you can customize the appearance of your shop almost completely.

Conclusion

Cafepress is the easiest to use with the most options. Still looking for a shop that sells freakin drink can huggies though… /sigh

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2. Spreadshirt.com

My Shop

http://200159.spreadshirt.com

My First Item

At first glance Spreadshirt seems like a viable competitor to Cafepress. Signup was easy and making my first shirt was a breeze. I picked a brown Ringer-T with yellow bands around the neck and arms. They have a great assortment of athletic wear, Camo T’s, Hoodies, Underwear, Messenger bags, and even Converse-style canvas sneakers. The shirt designer is flash-based so it’s easy to use and hard to screw up. For a simple first shirt, however I stuck with a Ringer-T. I was quickly able to use the type-tool to write “therantsandraves.com” across the chest in the same color used in the arm and neck bands.

Vector Support

After I had created my first shirt I decided to create a logo and use it on the shirt. It took me about 10 minutes to find out how to upload a design. You have to click on your profile and then “Upload a Design”. I did. It then asked whether I wanted to upload a vector or pixel artwork. I of course wanted it to be the highest of quality so I went with the vector artwork. I created the artwork below in Adobe Illustrator and saved it as an ESP file like they suggested and proceeded to upload.

When it finished I went to create another shirt expecting to see my design there ready to go on a shirt, instead I was greeted by an email in my inbox that said this:

Unfortunately, vector files cannot be automatically integrated to the Spreadshop. A Spreadshirt employee must check the submission to make sure it is technically possible to print the design. Once the design is reviewed, then you will be notified by email if any changes need to be made or if the design was approved. As a rule, vector designs are generally released within 48 hours, but the process can take up to one week.

Once authorized the design will appear in your shop administration area and you can then start adding the design to your products. Until then a design icon will be shown where the design will eventually appear.

Feel free to contact us if you have any further questions by writing to designs@spreadshirt.com.

So naturally I was a bit bummed to think that my design could take up to a week to be approved, but I was in luck! Just 4 hours later I received another email from them regarding my vector design! Unfortunately this time it was to tell me that it had been rejected. Damn. I opted to try a pixel design this time. The exact same design as before but as a PNG file instead of EPS. I created a simple red t-shirt with my logo on it and it worked perfectly. Also, when printing on darker colored shirts, they first put down a layer of white ink underneath the design so that you get more vibrant and richer colors in your design. A big plus. My designs didn’t show up in my store at first, but I figured out that while I had created them, I hadn’t clicked “Add to Shop”.

Other Features

One feature they have is you can publish shirts or designs to the marketplace. This allows anyone who visits the marketplace to see your tshirts and buy them without having visited your store first. You can also choose to upload designs to the marketplace. This allows marketplace browsers to put your design on whatever they choose to put it on – and you get paid for it.

Downsides

I wasn’t given a URL with my name in it like I was with Cafepress, instead I was given a number. This is kind of a pain as I can’t give people a direct link to my site because I’ll never remember that number and if I manage to, they probably won’t. To see the shop I ended up with: http://200159.spreadshirt.com

Conclusion

Do I think it’s a serious online shop competitor. For t-shirts? Yeah, it’s got a nice assortment of shirts and some unique items (ie, canvas sneakers) but it doesn’t have tons and tons of general items like wall-clocks, mugs, calendars, etc).

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3. Zazzle

My Shop

(well…Gallery, technically)
http://www.zazzle.com/rwbronco

My First Design

So I gave Zazzle a shot but I’m still not impressed with their system as far as shopkeepers go. You don’t have a “shop” per say, but you do have a “gallery”. You can create a logo and put it on one of several (really cool) shirts but then any customer can just click on the shirt in your gallery (store) and change the shirt to be something else altogether. I designed myself a Ringer-T and when you click on it in my gallery, you can change it to be a Destroyed-T and buy that instead. I want full control over what my design is used on and I haven’t figured out if that’s even an option or not…I made a Ringer-T very easily. Or did I make a

Cool Features

They have my favorite shirts by far…Their Ringer-T’s are the best looking (they have 2 or 3 types) and their Destroyed-T looks like I could live in it. They also have a few cool athletic and microfiber shirts.

Downsides

As I’ve already ranted about, it’s not very well geared towards shopkeepers. It’s geared more towards shoppers. The storefront…I’m sorry, Gallery, sucks. It hardly looks like a shop at all and the Zazzle branding is covering every square inch. If I wanted to personalize my shop – I don’t see the ability besides choosing from one of 5 different background colors…I need customization. I’m gonna be selling shirts out of this thing possibly and I want people to think it’s my store with items I designed…not someone else’s store on someone else’s website that someone else designed.

Conclusion

If you want to design your own shirt and then buy it, Zazzle has some awesome shirts to choose from. But if your intention is to open an online shop, design specific items, and set the price…Zazzle doesn’t just fall short, it doesn’t even make the cut.

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4. Printfection

My Shop

http://www.printfection.com/rantsandraves

My First Design

Like Cafepress, you can have multiple shops with under a single account. That’s a plus if you’ve got a lot of websites you’d like to offer shops for. The link to create my first item was very easy to find once I registered and started a new shop. Their selection of items was pretty decent considering they focus mainly on clothing goods like Tshirts, hoodies, and jerseys. They did have a good selection of other miscellaneous items such as corkbottom coaster, mousepad and the exclusive-so-far cutting board (random, I know – but it’s the only site I’ve seen with it so I think it’s hella cool!) I started with a light green tshirt and uploaded the same PNG logo I used in my Spreadshirt shop. Making my tshirt was a simple simple task. I was alerted of the formats I was allowed to use but was never told what DPI to use in designing a tshirt (i know it needs to be between 200-300, but a beginning designer may not) nor was I given the option of downloading a template to use. I hope the logo I used turns out and wasn’t shrunk or enlarged to fit the tshirt.

The Pros

They have at the time of this article – 31 different colored tshirts. They have 21 long sleeve shirts and 6 different colored spaghetti strap tanks. They by far have the best tshirt variety of all the shops so far. This is great because you can create something that doesn’t look like any other old run-of-the-mill tshirt. I picked pistachio for my first shirt for a reason – I hadn’t seen any other store offer a color like that!

The Cons

I didn’t see any store customization options. I like the way it looks by default, but Cafepress offers the ability to add my own header to the top of the page for customer recognizability. They want to associate it with me? All they have is “The Rants and Raves” text in a couple different places.

Conclusion

For clothing it’s an awesome alternative to Cafepress. For other items it’s only so-so. Sure they have some pretty cool items like cutting boards and mousepads just like all the other custom shop sites, but what makes this site stand out from the rest is the nearly limitless options for colors. They have your run of the mill designs like hoodies, ringer-t’s, longsleeves, sleeveless…etc. But they have colors and shades not available on any other online shop.

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In The End

This certainly doesn’t cover all the different custom online shops out there and certainly doesn’t include just the best. As you can see they range in what they offer and they range in the quality of products and services offered. If you’ve got an online store that you use for your website, please drop a comment and let us know so we can review it and maybe do another follow up post comparing some others!