A thread to discuss naming threads, board policy, new thread suggestions, and anything else that has to do with board administration and maintenance. Guaranteed to include lively debate and polls. Natter discouraged, but not deleted.
Current Stompy Feet: ita, Jon B, DXMachina, P.M. Marcontell, Liese S., amych
Here is a clarification to that bit of the Member Agreement (bold mine):
Clarification: Members who have commission in their accounts and do not reach the $25 minimum payment threshold within 6 months will be subject to a $25 per month account maintenance fee until their account balance is $0. Members are not charged beyond the balance in their accounts (we will not charge your credit card, send you a bill, etc). The CafePress.com service and CafePress Basic Shops are still free, and if you have not commissions in your account, you will never be charged the account maintenance fee. This fee is only charged to those members with outstanding commission that never reach the payment threshold.
Which means that most of our stores will never be charged, since they earn no commission.
The original swag stores have a current commission of about $16. In order to get that out of CafePress' hands (before July 1st, when the new agreement goes into effect), what I can do is close those stores, and reopen them w/o commission. This will cost $5, but we won't have to pay the $25 commission fee, ever.
The other bit that was worrying is this:
6.2 You hereby grant to CafePress.com a royalty-free, worldwide, nonexclusive, right and license to use the trademarks, trade names, designs, logos and other images that you upload to your image basket in connection with your use of the CafePress.com Service ("Party Marks"). If you or CafePress.com terminate your account, CafePress.com will cease its use of the Party Marks within 90 days of the termination.
The only difference between this and the old member agreement is the last sentence, which to me looks like it puts an end date on their license that wasn't there before, which is of the good.
Isn't commission earned unpredictably? Or do they not still have volume discounts?
Isn't commission earned unpredictably? Or do they not still have volume discounts?
I can look up their definition of "volume" on the site, but we never earned any commission during the busiest F2F ordering period, so I'm not worried.
[edit: Volume pricing starts at 20 items/month. So far, we've never been close to that.]
We have gotten money back from them. Not a lot, but some.
Volume pricing starts at 20 items/month
It has to be the same item/same pattern, I'm guessing, right? Then we should be good.
I'm far more worried about the copyright issue than the commissions, where Cafepress is concerned.
Looks like the copyright issue has always existed, though. And now it's a bit better.
Swag is being bought -- do we have an alternative provider.
Admittedly, I'm not the biggest TOS reader except when it comes to domain registrars.
That non-exclusive license clause seems pretty common on web services. I know the Atlantic Forums have a similar kind of clause, and I think Worldcrossing do too. I don't think they stipulate an end date however. I think it's a clause that just allows them to publish trademarked or copyrigthed things -- they don't claim any ownership or exclusivity to the license.
It has to be the same item/same pattern, I'm guessing, right?
Exactly. We've sold 20 items in a month before, but never 20 of the exact same style/pattern.
AFA our intellectual property rights are concerned, the Member Agreement states unequivocally that we own everything. That said, in exchange for using CafePress, we grant them a license to use our product designs to advertise themselves [while we have accounts with them, and up to 90 days after an account is closed]. (Their mailing list will occasionally send out "hey, this is really cool stuff, and you should buy it!" emails -- I just recently got one with a whole bunch of Martha-Stewart-in-jail-wear. Or one of our logo shirts might show up in a graphic on their front page.)
