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Comment by guynamedloren | Hacker News Reader

Back of the envelope calculation: 200+ shirts (over half in the first day) in a few days, ~$9 profit per shirt. Should be an interesting trip to the post office.

Just curious - what kind of profits did you get for your Cafepress shirts and how much did you sell them for?

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I'm not sure anymore, but I did go to Cafepress and take a look at my sales history just now.

It doesn't give much detail, but feel free to have a look: http://twitpic.com/3y0pg0/full

I seem to remember you saying you had a new visitor every 4.5 seconds for 48 hours (can't find it again though). That works out to about 38,000 visitors.

So the conversion rate was 200/38000 = 0.5%? Or am I missing something?

Good memory, and your calculations are pretty much spot on. Low conversion rate, but high traffic - so I can live with it.

Sure, I was just curious if paid traffic could have been profitable for you. With $8 in profit per shirt and a conversion rate of 0.5%, it looks like anything over $0.04 per click would have resulted in a loss.

Your site was gorgeous, and the idea was strong. Amazing how hard it is to push people to action.

No issues with Paypal?

One small issue. Somebody wanted a refund (which is totally fine), but they stupidly filed an "unauthorized funds" dispute, basically implying that I hacked their account and stole the money. Paypal froze the funds temporarily, but I issued a refund and cleared it up right away.

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