Cafepress - let's just do it? | Fundraising and sponsorship issues | Forum

We have put off setting up a Cafepress shop or the like in the past because we've wanted to wait on having a CSTART bank account so that things look official.  Now that I have a little more experience using PayPal (thanks to our 2 fundraising drives), I've realised that all customers see when making a PayPal purchase is an account name and an email address.  Surely we could set up a [email protected], or a [email protected] or similar address and set up a PayPal account with that address?   It could point to one of our bank accounts for now and then be changed to a CSTART account later, invisibly to the users, right?  From the user's point of view, the account will simply have belonged to [email protected] the entire time.

If this is an accurate view of how things work, then why don't we just go for it?  Some shirts with the CSTART logo and our motto shouldn't be hard to get set up, and SpaceUp might provide a good source of early buyers.

I did not realise this.  We are closer than we thought!  Somebody should definitely try to sort this out soon,

Now that I think about it, we wouldn't even need to temporarily link it to a personal bank account, we could just have the money sit in the PayPal account, right?

Oh, that's a shame.  Still, it doesn't change things overall too much.

I don't think that at this stage anybody is going to suspect you of something like that!  If Rizwan sets up the finance@ address, can you simply change the main address associated with your existing PayPal account to that or would you need to set up a separate PayPal account?

This would indeed be great, and should be quite doable.  The artwork is already 90% done, it's just a matter of adding the appropriate text.  Setting up a PayPal account can be done quite quickly too.  We should have no problem pulling this off within 20 days.  If we do it soon enough, brmj may even be able to purchase one to wear to SpaceUp.

Sounds like this will be very straight forward, then.  I'm not sure how much the primary address matters, all we really need to worry about is that people making purchases see that their money is going to finances@cstart or something similarly official sounding (if we can have multiple emails per PayPal we may as well have spearate store@, donations@, etc@ addresses – that way different people can field emailed questions about different fundraising efforts) and not to some_random_guy@wherever.

Thanks very much, Rizwan, that would be great!

Looks like we have hit a minor roadblock with Cafepress.

From what I understand, when people will purchase something from our store they will be directly paying to Cafepress, and cafepress at the end of each month will calculate our commisions and send us a cheque. Since we do not have a bank account encashing that cheque will be a problem. There is no other payout method available.

I looked into another company — spreadshirt.com

Their shipping prices are exorbitant for the US. More than $10 to ship a package of $25

I will research further in this front.