Sellit & CafePress Blaze a Path to the Future

This age of user-generated content has spawned a parallel upsurge in user-generated commerce, leading to the emergence of platforms like CafePress, where millions of users create and sell “print-on-demand” products like T-shirts, posters, books, CDs, cards and artwork.

Enterprising members set up virtual shops to sell these products; some of the more creative and robust shops are featured on the CafePress home page; others can be accessed via six “departments,” as well by an internal site search engine, and by product-specific data clusters.

This UGC is also spreading throughout the social networking web courtesy of widgets, one of the most innovative of which may be a partnership announced today this morning between CafePress and Sellit, which is supplying an embeddable ShopBOT widget that allows shopkeepers to franchise their operations across blogs, MySpace, Facebook, and other promising real e-estate.

“What’s really exciting about this,” Josh Manley, President and co-founder of Sellit told me, “Is that we are helping merchants and customers connect by enabling the marketplaces themselves to emerge all across the social web.”

The jointly branded widget is easy to embed in virtually any website and comes in various sizes to conform with the variations in platform specs that had made the “one-size fits all” widget-building process so frustrating to so many small software companies.

Other vexing problems with widgets, of course, have been the twin dilemmas of how to reliably measure the traffic they generate, and how to gather the demographic data that sites are used to collecting via the free/registration function on their home sites.

Sellit and CafePress get around these issues by standardizing the checkout process — no matter where the transaction occurs, checkout takes place back at CafePress, where the user info is stored and the revenue split is calculated.

In this manner, all of that random traffic out along the long tail of distributed ecommerce can be integrated into an overall reporting system that generates consistent metrics.

Based in Phoenix, and funded by an angel round, Manley says that Sellit has a software team focussed on rapid development and aggressive Q-A. During a recent beta test of the ShopBOT by 1,000 CafePress members, Manley says, “We had a 50 percent adoption rate, and very few bugs. The best part is now we are flooded with feature requests.”

Sellit also offers a premium service, where for as little as $10/month, small shopkeepers can gain access to an advertising network of a few thousand publishing partners brokered by the company.

What can media companies learn from this partnership? Cynics will say commerce is different from content, but isn’t that precisely our problem in media? That nobody wants to pay for our products?

Think about it: If a news and information service re-imagined itself as a commerce operation, it would still provide tons of free content, but it also would facilitate the distribution of its products throughout the social web via widgets. So far, so good, and many media companies are trying to do exactly that.

But somewhere in the chain there has to be an incentive for users to make money. What I am suggesting is very simple: Endeavor to turn users into franchise-operators, who repackage and sell bits of your content as attractive “products,” complete with a secure checkout system to collective demographics and provide detailed metrics.

To be specific, empower users to sell T-shirts or mugs or posters with replicas of your home page, your headlines, photos, and other micro-slices of content for whatever price the market can bear. Which market is that? The viral distributed marketplace that is the key to the Sellit/CafePress model.

Given the chance, smart users will spread this marketplace like birds distribute seeds throughout the physical environment. Because they can make money that way. This virtual marketplace will eventually, and inevitably, develop into a robust interactive advertising environment as well. Sound far-fetched?

Maybe. But it might also be one piece of that new business model everybody keeps talking about — you know, the one that will “save” media?

Note: Special thanks to David Speiser for his help on this piece.