Cafepress.com

As the great low ebb of high tech sweeps through the world of online commerce, two kinds of sites are weathering the storm. The first group is often referred to as "clicks and mortar" - online extensions of stores like Walmart or Sears . They take an existing, traditional business and extend it into the online arena.

The second group provides a unique service made possible by the Internet's special characteristics. Job sites and online auctioneer e-Bay are both good examples of the new breed of business that the Internet continues to foster.

Cafepress.com is one of the latter group. It's a website that provides users with online stores where they can sell shirts, mugs, and mousepads customized with their own logos and/or slogans. By itself, this is a fairly useful service, and an example of how the Internet has changed the art of marketing and customer service.

Cafepress.com, however, is rather remarkable for another reason. Customers don't need to print large lots of items. They don't need to worry about shipping the goods to their customers. And they don't need to talk to another human being to get their store "built" in the first place. The site lets you upload an image and choose what sort of item you'd like it to appear on. You can then choose how much to mark the item up - the difference between the item's base cost and your mark-up price is your profit.

Base prices are high , but understandable when you consider what Cafepress.com does for the initial investment. An 11-ounce mug starts at $10.99. For that, Cafepress.com prints the mug on a piece-by-piece basis, provides the ordering software, handles the money, packs it, and ships it for you. The mug's purchaser pays shipping and handling costs; the store owner's effort is limited to uploading the original image for the mug, setting the cost, and writing a brief description of the item.

It seems to be catching on. According to Maheesh Jain, Cafepress.com's co-founder and vice-president for marketing, the site has about 100,000 stores and adds 400 to 500 new "stores" on a typical day. And while most of these are started by individuals hoping to print out a handful of photo mugs for grandma and granpda's 50th anniversary, some of them are commissioned by companies who find they don't have the time or resources to handle straight-forward promotional marketing themselves.

"More and more companies come to us, who want to do some kind of merchandising, who want to offer a range of products to their users, but don't want the hassles associated with it," Jain says. "That's where we come in - we're one of the few companies that offer this kind of full-service solution."

An example of this is Cafepress.com's partnership with United Media's comics.com . By providing the cartoon giant with access to the Cafepress.com marketing system, comics.com allows its users to print mugs or shirts customized with a wide selection of their favorite individual comic strips. While the system isn't streamlined to the point where users can have any comic strip easily printed on any item, it's a good step toward user-driven marketing.

But the most exciting aspect of Cafepress.com is not its ability to help major corporations outsource and customize their merchandising efforts. What's remarkable about the system is how simple it is to open a store. An average individual with an idea that could sell 50 T-shirts or mugs can't justify a traditional merchandising effort. But with Cafepress.com, users can easily bring ideas to fruition with very little time and no financial risk. Moreover, the quality of the merchandise is good; I've ordered a mug and a shirt from Cafepress.com, and both were shipped relatively promptly, and arrived exactly as promised.

Cafepress.com is an idea that's easy to get excited about. It's a small - but tangible - example of how the Internet can change the way we live.