Firstly note, the title of this post is more for SEO than because I'm irate in any way. I imagine more people will search for "cafepress.com scam" then "clever title that Travis came up with".
Let me explain their business model. They let you use web tools to upload graphics that they then print on t-shirts. Sounds simple, but the key differentiating factor is that they'll print as few as 1 t-shirt, which is perfect for novelty t-shirt ideas for you and just a friend or two. Most other t-shirt design companies, online or off, require orders of 20-50 to do a run.
They also offer you the opportunity to 'mark up' the price that they charge for t-shirts. So, if a t-shirt costs $14.99, you can sell it for $17.99 and you get a 3 dollar commission. It sounds like a cool idea, until you realize that no one is going to pay $14.99 for a t-shirt, never mind $17.99. More to the point, no one thinks your design is clever and so no one is going to buy it anyways.
So basically, that's the plan: Everyone buys their own shit at insane markups, and generally everyone is happy.
The problem is that, at some point in the summer of 2006 (when I set up the shop), someone from the Boston ruby user group bought a 10 pack of my clever and exquisitely designed "I'd Rather Be Using Ruby" button. I happened to make a princely $5.51 off this sale. Which I thought was neat, but never really thought about again.
You see, I had forgotten to enter address and tax payer information on the site, so they could never mail me a check. But more to the point, my amount was always under the $25 'minimum' payout amount, so they never intended to mail me anything anyways.
Okay, so that's the obvious scam: minimum payment amounts. I worked on a PayPal integration, you can pay people automatically via computer with them and it costs about 15 cents per transaction. I'm not an accountant, but it seems that they must have a HUGE amount of liability on the books for the millions of people, like me, to whom they owe less than 25 dollars. The only reason they have this shitty system in place is because they want to dodge that liability.
But liability is a real thing in accounting, and you can't just let it sit around forever (for tax and other purposes). So, after 2 years of 'inactivity' (which means no sales, not no logins), they will eventually send you a check. Okay okay, so I had to wait 2 years but hey, at least I got someone money. Penny saved, something something.
But here's the bullshit part. Cafepress.com, after making you wait 2 years for a check, proceeds to AUTOMATICALLY charge a $5.00 'processing fee' for all the steep toil and hardship it takes them to print a fucking check. No matter what their service agreement says, legally they owe you that money. So I imagine that this is a blanket policy to protect them against people demanding their money and them having to realize their epic liability. But automatically? That's where they really cross the line, in my opinion.
Anyways I called, and the customer service representative tried to explain that the check would only be for $0.51 and I should probably just wait until I had made more earnings. More to the point, there was the issue of whether I would get the check 2 years from NOW (when I finally entered mailing/taxpayer information) or 2 years from 3 years ago when I became 'inactive'.
She eventually decided to escalate my issue, because she honestly didn't know the answer. She also told me should couldn't tell me at the moment when I'd get my check. I told her that I hoped it would be soon, because there's this really nice gumball that I've had my eye on for a while.
She didn't laugh.
One mushroom makes you larger, and one mushroom makes you small....