Wikimedia merchandise

Less talk more shop? https://shop.wikimedia.org
Don't forget to come back and let us know what you thought!

Goal

The Wikimedia Foundation wants to be able to provide affordable high quality merchandise to the project volunteers and the general public to reward its volunteers and spread the Wikimedia and project brands around the world. To that effect we want to build a wide reaching store that is able to provide good value and fast shipping around the world with the help of a world wide distribution system and the Wikimedia Chapters. The revenues from the store will support the Wikimedia Foundation and the chapters with most of it, especially at the beginning, going to subsidize merchandise and/or shipping for more expensive locales and to provide free merchandise to world wide volunteers as a reward and thank you for their service.

What is this page for?

The logistics of creating a world wide shop to serve a community (of editors, donors and readers) as diverse as ours is an enormous task. We wanted to get the process out in the open as quickly as possible so that we can involve the community for feedback and advice throughout the process. We also wanted to allow the community to use the store as quickly as possible. The community can help find bugs in the system from top to bottom and notice where things should be tweaked as we go through the Beta process before we market it to the public.

We are looking for feedback on basically everything about the process.

• What do you like about what's for sale?
• What else do you want for sale? Is there information that's missing that you think should be there? Changes to packaging or automated order/shipping emails? Quality of goods?

Any part of the process is able to change at this point and we want to get it as perfect as possible so that customers (both within the editing community and outside of it) can get the high quality experience they expect from our projects.

Call for designs

We want your designs! Go to /Design ideas page to give your ideas. We don't want to flood the shop with 'too much' but we want to be able to keep a constantly fresh variety of products (constantly more available and eventually some just going away) so we need ideas from everyone on what should be 'the next generation'. Product ideas (without specific designs) can go on to the main discussion page for now.

Shop Advisory Committee

The whole idea of this store is to be able to reward the community and get our awareness out (and, not really, to make money) so we also want to make sure to have as much community input and hands in it as we possibly can. Because of that we're setting up an advisory committee. The advisory committee will:

• Give feedback, opinions and ideas about the shop itself, the product etc.
• Help reach out to the community to gather their feedback (and make them aware)
• Help with the strategic planning of the store:
  • Launch communications both now and for the public launch
  • Community Merch giveaway plans and execution (As part of this they would likely be ineligible for normal giveaways themselves).
  • What do we need? What should we release? Financials/costs etc?

Hopefully we would have a core group of at least 6-12 people interested in what's happening who can help us as we move forward. Are you interested? Sign up on the Talk page!

FAQ

Do you have a question about the store that isn't answered here? Please feel free to add it or ask on the talk page

OK, where is it?

The store is located at http://shop.wikimedia.org. Please feel free to poke around and, if you want, order something. It should be fully operational and we're trying to tweak things as we go along (everything from the shipping labels/packaging to the products to the site). If you have any feed back please let us know on the Discussion page or at merchandisewikimedia.org (logged-in users can also use the email user function for User:Jalexander).

To help out:

* We are offering an initial 10% store discount for at least the next 2 weeks of the Community Launch - use this promotion code at checkout: CLAUNCH over :)

• $10 Maximum shipping for most shipments worldwide (under '5lbs' of merchandise, I'm hacking together a way to show you the weight of the merchandise). If the cost is less then you pay the lower amount and if it's more we'll cover the rest (unless you want to pay for faster shipment obviously). If you want a lot of goods and it's going to cost too much for you let us know and we'll find a cost efficient way to deal with it.

For the long-term we're looking at a permanent discount system for all Wikimedia project volunteers.

Can I order from outside the US?

YES! We want to make sure that people are able to order from anywhere at a reasonable cost. While we don't have a full multi-country distribution system in place yet we've decided to guarantee a maximum shipping price for all orders during our community launch period to make it easier. If the shipping costs are less the $10 USD you will pay that but we'll offer a $10 USD flat rate shipping price for any reasonable size orders above that. We decided to cap orders at 5lbs which would cover 2 sweatshirts with a couple t-shirts and/or other extras (so that very few people will get to that high). If people need bulk orders (for an event or other reasons) they can contact James Alexander at merchandisewikimedia.org to try and find a cost efficient way to do it.

What about the old CafePress store?

The old CafePress store was a good stop gap but doesn't provide us with a great option to expand globally. It had limited options for merchandise (especially quality wise), took a large percentage of the sales and didn't have a lot of traffic (we got $150-$300 in royalties a month from it). We wanted to have more control and be able to produce higher quality products where we could use our leverage to get much better prices. We also wanted to make sure that we could expand this into a global system. That is always difficult to do given that there are very few good examples to follow (we need to be flexible). CafePress doesn't offer any good option to lower prices and/or make the entire process more affordable for international customers and does not allow us to mix up products beyond their partners.

The old CafePress store is still live for now but we're going to shut it down as soon as we can. We've already extracted all of the original designs from it (especially the community contributed ones) and will make sure they are uploaded to Commons if they weren't already. We will be trying to get a hold of everyone who contributed designs to make sure that's okay. Some of the original apparel ideas were awesome. Bacon number? Yes please.

What else is coming? This isn't that much.

We really want to keep the store both well stocked and fresh with a bunch of new stuff and, eventually, rotating off the old products. Right now we already have a bunch of stuff in preparation and starting to look at the 2nd generation of products to come in. We need your help! Let us know either on the talk page or on the Design ideas page.

Currently in the works:

• Timbuk2 messenger and backpacks (These should 'hopefully' be ready in the next week or two)
• Lapel pins for the Wikimedia logo, MediaWiki and all of the projects.
• Stickers and buttons for Wikimedia, MediaWiki and all of the projects.
• Aluminum Water bottle
• China mugs

We also know that we want to make shirts for the other projects as well. We have some ideas but want the communities. There are a lot of options for the store from what we have now, kids clothes, books etc and a lot of it will depend on what the community and the public wants.

Who profits from this shop?

One-hundred percent of the proceeds from the Wikimedia shop go to the Wikimedia Foundation and it is not intended to become a Profit center. The proceeds go back into the shop to keep costs low, subsidize shipping and help provide merch specifically to community members.

Is the store secure?

Right now the checkout page is fully secure (through Shopify) but we do not have working https throughout the rest of the site (including the login page). This is especially an annoyance for people with HttpsEverywhere installed since it will try to force you to an https connection. That connection (including on the login page) is secure, but will throw a certificate mismatch warning because the certificate and the server identify as myshopify and shopify.com (instead of wikimedia.org).

We are working with Shopify to make sure that this is fixed as soon as possible and we can provide the most secure and comfortable experience and https throughout the shop.

For now we're also in touch with the httpsEverywhere team to add an exemption in the *.wikimedia.org rule for shop.wikimedia.org

Are there any 3rd parties that you are working with?

Yes, given the enormous logistics involved and limited resources we have we're working directly with two main service providers.

Social Imprints is a third-party printing and fulfillment company based here in San Francisco who we've worked with for the past 3-4 years when printing merchandise for the staff, Wikipedia 10 and other events. They are a full service custom printer with a unique social mission, to provide higher paying professional jobs to at risk adults. They help manage the fulfillment and shipping of all orders from the Wikimedia Shop. You can learn more about them at their website.

Shopify is the online shopping platform that we're using. They provide an easy to use and relatively adaptable platform that services more than 40,000 stores already, including other high traffic stores such as the KONY 2012 campaign and Angry Birds. They have been incredibly excited to work with us and have offered developer resources to adapt the platform to our global needs. You can read more about them at their site Yes pricer.

Are purchases tax deductible?

All of the purchase price of the item goes directly to funding the cost of the merchandise and the shop overhead, therefore we're not able to provide a tax receipt for any of the purchase.

Can I make a donation on the store when I shop?

Not yet, but we are looking at that functionality.

Where do your products come from?

We only source merchandise from socially responsible businesses with ethical manufacturing practices. Our branded products are manufactured in the United States, China, India, Pakistan, El Salvador, and Guatemala, Our fulfillment partner, Social Imprints, is a San Francisco-based employee-owned cooperative that provides professional jobs to at-risk adults in the SF Bay area.

Will my order get to me without any issues?

We use United States Postal Service and FedEx for deliveries inside the United States and abroad. All of our shipments leave the United States and will likely spend time in the customs for the country where the shipment arrives. We cannot provide any customs clearance estimates, but in most cases shipments may spend anywhere from one to three days in customs.

Why don't you accept my currency?

Right now we're able to show dozens of global currencies to give you a sense of how our prices convert into other currencies. However, we are only able to actually charge in USD. We're working to implement new payment systems that will allow us to accept not only different currencies, but also dozens of different regional payment systems.

How about the store (and products) in my language?

This is something (along with more currencies) that is incredibly important to us and shopify has committed to making the software help the store deal with multiple languages. Right now it can be in any language but only 1 at at time :). I'm having a meeting with some guys from their team in the next couple days and will keep everyone up to date on the progress for this.

Why does shipping cost so much?

Shipping products internationally is always going to cost more than a domestic shipment. We've created the 'Wikimedia flat-rate global' shipping option, which is $10 USD, to provide a cost-effective way to send a shipment anywhere in the world. In some cases your shipment costs could be well under $10USD, but when it isn't, and when your order is under 5lbs (about 2.2Kg), we provide a subsidized flat rate so customers in all parts of the world can purchase products at a reasonable rate. If you want to order more and cost is a problem let us know and we'll work to find a cost efficient solution.

We're Wikimedia - Why can't we have our own designs on the store?

Right now we want to make sure we have a minimum collection of high-quality, durable, and high-value products with the Wikipedia and Wikimedia project marks. We're actively looking at services that would allow small-batch printing of user-submitted designs, and soon we will begin to offer limited-edition user-submitted designs posted on Wikimedia Commons and will be taking user ideas for longer term editions as well (see our Design ideas page). Our normal Trademark policy also allows you to make Wikipedia merchandise for yourself (without selling it ) already and we do not plan on changing that.

Old store pages and information

• http://www.cafepress.com/vikipedio?aid=79835261 (items with the old Esperanto Wikipedia logo) - not updated
• Original discussion pages for the cafepress store
• English Wikipedia Merchandise Page