Zazzle, the online T-Shirt business has been ill for a while. I wanted to order my own T-shirt, but needed a slight addition to the design. Well, it’s kinda difficult to work on the design when images are not displayed properly…
Today Zazzle’s condition appears to have worsen: any time you try to talk to her, she just blurts out:
An error occurred on this page which may make it unusable. If this occurs please refresh the page.
I did. Refresh. She blurts again. Again.
Ouch. Dear Zazzle, I hope you recover soon…
Update: I am not experiencing the above errors from another laptop, running XP. But it’s not browser-specific either: on this Vista computer I run into the same problem whether using Firefox or IE7. And yes, I cleared everything (cookies, permissions, cache) on both browsers.
Hey Zoli,
it depent on your browser. Use Safari and you don’t have this problem.. Zazzle is one of the side that works best with mac!
I created my stuff on Zazzle using Firefox, and back then I did not experience this problem …
Zoli,
I have had the same exact issue and just resolved it. For me it was a McAfee Security Center Personal Firewall setting. If you go under “Internet and Network Configuration” and under “Web browsing protection is enabled” click on Advanced you will see 3 settings. I had to uncheck the top setting “Block advertisements that appear on Web pages when you browse the Internet.” Hopefully this will fix the issue for you as well.
Recently CafePress began competing with the artists for whom it acts as printer and shipper.
CafePress rents web shops to its artists. The artist creates a website page and manually loads the desired blank products. The artist imports his image onto each product, arranges the products on the page, describes the products, titles the products and tags the images.
Initially, the artist would set a markup and received the markup for each product sold.
However, recently CafePress began competing with its artists, using the artists’ own images. CafePress created a marketplace where a customer can search a keyword. That search brings up artist products. When the customer buys from the marketplace CafePress pays the artist 10% of the price CafePress set. Both the customer and the artist lose money. If the artist’s shop sells a t-shirt for $21, the artist makes $3.01. If the marketplace sells the same shirt for $25, the artist gets $2.50. The customer pays $4 more, and the artist gets $0.51 less.
CafePress tells artists to “promote your own shop,” but CafePress buys Google adwords using the very image tags the artist provided.
CafePress justifies this bait and switch of service terms by telling artists they can opt out if they don’t like the new terms; however, many have spent as much as 7 or 8 years creating as much as 88000 images.
In spite of their sweat-equity, many shopkeepers (content providers) are building shops at other print-on-demand companies and then closing their CafePress shops due to the broken faith and trust, the financial hardship CafePress has delivered into so many lives, and the huge amount of time and dedicated effort all lost in the momentum of their own businesses. Would you keep your AMOCO station franchise if AMOCO built a company store across the street from you?