Webupon

When deciding to create an online t-shirt store, you have a lot of different companies to choose from.  No longer is CafePress, still the market leader, always the obvious and best choice.  Today we’ll look at Spreadshirt.com and what it has to offer.

A relatively new player on the market, Spreadshirt has some advantages when compared to CafePress.

Pricing:  Both companies offer free shops for users.  Naturally, however, free shops do come with some significant limitations.  At CafePress, free means you are fairly limited in terms of creating multiple categories for products, and you can create only one store.  At Spreadshop, going the free store route means that you have only one store for your login.  You can create multiple stores, however, by using multiple email addresses.

If that isn’t to your liking, both companies offer premium stores.  At Cafepress it is $6.99 per month as of this writing.  That gets you one premium shop.  If you want to run more than one store, it’s another $6.99 for each.  At Spreadshirt, $10 per month gets you as many premium shops as you like, plus a little bonus.  You can actually open three “designer shops” where you use their software to allow your customers to design their own shirts on your site.  CafePress has no equivalent offer.

Site Integration:  Both companies can be integrated into your site, but CafePress has a much more intrusive appearance.  Your site visitors will never doubt that you are using CafePress.  On the other hand, Spreadshirt offers a much cleaner integration.  In fact, with the premium account, you can remove the Spreadshirt logo from all your stores.  This means that your customers never realize that you are using an online fulfillment company.  To me, that presents a more professional appearance.

Procuct Pricing and Variation:  I would call this one a draw except that Spreadshirt doesn’t offer bumper stickers at this time.  So if you are looking to create those, you’ll have to choose CafePress over Spreadshirt.  Pricing for other products if very similar on both sites, and both have a good range of products to choose from.

Product Design:  For someone new to t-shirt design, Spreadshirt is going to be much easier to use.  For one thing, if you just want to put some words on a shirt, you can type them directly into Spreadshirt.  At CafePress, even shirts that just contain a phrase or saying have to be uploaded via a graphic image to their site.  Also, Spreadshirt gives you a much larger playing field for shirt design.  You can pretty much fill up a shirt with your designs, while CafePress offers only a small design area.  The functional ability to add multiple designs to the same shirt is also easier at Spreadshirt.  Spreadshirt also allows you to use the designs created by others, who receive commissions on any products that you sell with their designs.

Multiple Avenues of Income Generation:  CafePress leads when you talk about people going directly to your CafePress store via search engines, although there are so many stores there that it may not make a noticeable difference.  Spreadshirt offers an interesting option to place your shirts and shirt designs into their marketplace.  That means that people just arriving at Spreadshirt.com can buy your shirts without even knowing who you are.  Also, other shop owners can use the designs that you select to place into the marketplace, and when they sell these shirts, you get a commission back.  So it is possible to make money at Spreadshirt without anyone ever going to your store.

Bottom Line:  For ease of use and particularly for ease of creating multiple shops and design integration onto your site, I would have to choose Spreadshirt over CafePress.  When you combine that with the ability to earn income in a variety of different ways, I think that Spreadshirt becomes the obvious leader.