Recently Spreadshirt added a new function allowing visitors to preview a design when hovering over a product, in a shop owners store. With this new feature came some scaling issues. Temple from the Spreadshirt forums has announced earlier today that this problem should now be fixed. It may take 24 hours for the cache to be cleared site wide but I have already tested a few sites and the issue appeared to be corrected.

Just add the following code to the bottom of your shop.css file located in your Spreadshirt Admin.

#menu {
display:none;
}

Spreadshirt has launched a new feature for users with their Designer Shops. Basically what it does is allows shop keepers to view what custom t-shirt or product was created in the designer and also show what color product, font, font size, wording and design colors. This is a great feature because it allows shop keepers to get a better feel about what is being designed and ordered in their custom designer shops.

Along with this feature 2 more features were also added.

• Shop Partner enables free color selection display in an existing standard shop
• Add option for enabling/disabling text tab in designer shops

Sometime next week Spreadshirt is set to release some new added features for shop keepers to take advantage of. Let’s take a look at what’s reportedly being added as posted by Temple on the Spreadshirt forums.

In Designer Shops:

• More information for Premium partners on sales through their Designer shop, so you can receive a better idea of what customers are creating and ordering through your Designer shops.
• Option to disable/enable the Text tab in Designer shops
• Option to insert an inspiration Bar on either side of your Designer shop, which would show the products you created for your designer shop and the customer can then click the product to load it in the Designer. Some tests of the inspiration bar in shops showed it could increase the conversion rate.

In Classic Shops:

• Option to display the Free color selection for the compact view of the shop. You can choose to display or not display this option. If you display the option,
  then the color squares will appear on the first view of the classic shop.

Out of all of those features the one I am most excited about it the designer shops displaying sale information from user created products.

Here’s another tip this week. I am no expert Illustrator user (that’s not the tip) but for what ever reason I noticed while working on vectors that sometimes trash is left behind in the file. Trash you say? What I mean by trash is un-need outlines from dividing or merging elements. See example:

Every time I create a new design I scan through the layers to make sure there’s no trash as above. Sometimes there are outlines in my design that look like the above, but they are good layers, so I have to be careful about what’s getting deleted as I scan through the layers. Take your time and see what yo find. It might just help get your vectors approved faster.

There are so many times I see people posting that their vectors are getting rejected or are too big for certain products. The solution could be easier than you might think.

99.9% of the designs I make for my Spreadshirt shop are designed on a starting area of 9inch x 9inch in Adobe Illustrator. After much trial and error, Temple from Spreadshirt helped me come up with the 9×9 rule and it hasn’t let me down yet. Will this work for everyone? Probably.

Now I only sell t-shirts for the most part so for those other smaller products such as scarfs, hats, bibs and etc it’s not going to work.  So if you’re having problems designing vectors for most of the t-shirt products at Spreadshirt I recommend you give this a try. Once I have my design ready to go, I stretch it so that it touches the right and left of my 9×9 grid. In some cases the design may be taller and therefore I stretch it flush with the top and bottom.

As many of you Spreadsters out there know that if you have a premium account you get a free custom designer were customers can design their own clothing. I sell about as much if not more through it than I do my pre-made shirts. In this article I’m going to quickly show you how you can:

• Link to a specific product so that it appears when the designer is loaded
• Change the color of products
• Call for a design to be preloaded
• Change the color of the design
• Tell the designer to load a specific category such as baby & family designs

So let’s begin shall we.

Here is a typical link to your designer might look like once you’ve renamed it such as I have.
http://nekkidtness.spreadshirt.com

Here is what the modified link looks like which loads a child’s t-shirt with the baby & family design section.
http://nekkidness.spreadshirt.com/us/US/Shop/Index/Index/productType/442/productColor/1/design/3830646/designColor1/2/department/3/designCategory/1000010/

I know the first thing that came to your mind is “could that link be any longer?” and the answer is yes it can. But for now I’m going to keep it short and down to the basics.

Let’s take the above link apart and see what each part does.

http://nekkidness.spreadshirt.com
This is the basic link I have to my shop. I called it nekkidness by going in to the administrator section of my Spreadshirt account and then clicking Shops and then Linking.

/us/US/Shop/Index/Index/
This is standard and always appears in the linking structure. I’m assuming it changes based on your language or whether you’re at Spreadshirt.com or Spreadshirt.net which is the EU version.

productType/442/
This code defines what product from the huge selection Spreadshirt offers is going to be pulled in to the designer once it loads. It will be the first shirt the customer sees. The number 442 is the actual ID number for the clothing. I’ll explain later on how to retrieve item IDs.

productColor/1/
This defines what the product color is going to be. By default if you leave this field out it will use the first color Spreadshirt has assigned to the clothing. But if you want to change it you can. The number 1 represents the colors that can be used with each produce. To find out the color codes you can visit the apparel page at Spreadshirt.com

design/3830646/
Now if you have a specific design you want to load first, maybe you’re running a new featured shirt or it’s a seasonal design, you can call that design by adding design/yourdesignid. To find you’re design ID simply log in to you’re account, find the design, and it should tell you out beside it.

designColor1/2/
This code determines what color your design is going to be. In the example I am using a white shirt so I wanted the design to be black. In order to do that I added the designColor code followed by a 2 which represents black. I’ll discuss the color ID codes in my next article.

department/3/
Let’s say you wanted to link to the kids section of clothing only, as I have done above, you would do so by this code. In order to find out what ID number represents what section you can go to the Apparel section at Spreadshirt.com and on the left side there is a navigational box, hovering over the links will show you the department IDs. In this case 3 is Kids & Babies.

designCategory/1000010/
Now if you wanted to call forth a specific category of designs such as the Kids & Babies as I have done you just need to know what the category ID is for each section. Thankfully the good people at Spreadshirt such as Temple pointed me in the right direction for this. You have to go to the Spreadshirt site, click on a link such as Men, Women’s, or etc and on the next page you should see a drop down called topics. Under that drop down is a link of categories and when you hover over each one you will see the category codes. To make it easier I will put the list in my next article.

With everything said and done I hope this helps you with your designer linking or at least gives you a better understanding of how the linking functions.

As many of you have noticed I re-launched NekkidTees last month after doing a major back-end system change to manage my shirts. I did this because I wanted to provide more information for search engines. I also wanted to add user photos to each product page, similar shirts, short descriptions and a starting base price.

I plan on adding new categories this week and have been focusing most of my time on creating new t-shirts based off searches customers are using to find my site.

The Kids and Babies sections are still under development.

The NekkidTees logo received a minor makeover as well. I removed the shirt and tightened the the characters up some.

Now only time will tell if all this work was worth it.

I get asked a lot why I decided to choose Spreadshirt as my POD (Print On Demand) company. The truth is they were not my first choice but that’s only because I had never heard of them. I first started at Cafepress, which I’m sure everyone knows about, but was highly dissatisfied with how my store looked, customization options at that time and most of all the printing. After only a few washes my test shirts were starting to fade in to that vintage look.

Eventually I stumbled across Spreadshirt while working on a Logo for an Open Source Project. I had to email Spreadshirts custom support department regarding some design measurements and the response I received was beyond what I had expected. I toyed around with the Spreadshirt system and realized they offered a more “personal branding” platform. For $10 a month you can remove the Spreadshirt banners, get your own designer and more. Unlike other places such as Zazzle who is a WELL known POD now. I contacted them to see if the huge banner across the top of every shop I visited, that said “Zazzle”, could be removed and was told simply in 2 short sentences “no”. Now granted this is a cosmetic issue for me, not a product quality issue, as I still use Zazzle for printing my stamps and etc. They are really good at what they do. It just wasn’t right for me.

After testing the waters with Spreadshirt I moved everything over and have been with them ever since. Like any company there are going to be up and downs. My biggest complaints with Spreadshirt is:

• Base Pricing
• 3 color limitation with Flex & Flock

and a few other smaller issues that are more of a personal preference.

This gets me to their printing method which was another reason why I’m with them. Flex and flock are in my opinion superior to most POD printing these days. It’s basically like having vinyl that you see every day on signs while driving around heat pressed on to a shirt. It has a slight gloss and can last a lot longer than a digital printing. It’s soft and flexable as well. Does it last forever? No. My first shirt I ordered with Spreadshirt as a test shirt almost 4 years ago now has a nice vintage look but that’s after it being washed 2x a week x 52 weeks x 4 years, equals something like 416 washes. That’s a lot and you also have to factor in wear time.

Spreadshirt also offers Flock which is similar to flex but the key element here is that it’s raised and fluffy. It’s great for those unique girl products. They offer other specialty printing as well like Writable flex and provide a dry erase marker with each order, glitter flex, glow in the dark flex and more.

Customization is another thing they offer. You can have a custom layout to match your own site, if you own one, or just to give it that unique look. As I said before for $10 you can upgrade and remove the “powered by spreadshirt” banners and get other perks as well.

Spreadshirt handles it all from printing the products (1 at a time), the shopping cart system, collecting payments, sending out shipping invoices to you and the customer, shipping by USPS or UPS and handling all customer support such as returns, sizing issues and etc.

If you are considering using Spreadshirt or any POD for that matter, I recommend you do one thing, Order a shirt from them first. It tells a lot about a company. While Spreadshirt may not be right for you, it is for me and this is why I wanted to share my experience and reasoning behind using Spreadshirt.

Organizing your shop is a very important step if you run or are planning on starting a t-shirt shop with Spreadshirt. Basically once you create products there needs to be a way for customers to find these product on your site. Whether you plan on setting up products by categories, design, style or even gender, there has to be some way for you to parse all those products.

One simple way, that I do, is to add a search term in to your description field of each product. For example you could add sku-101, sku-102 and so on. What this does it allows you go formulate a search string to find all products with the description sku-101.

Sample:
http://yourshop.spreadshirt.com/us/US/Shop/Index/Index/search/sku-101 may pull up all t-shirts with a single flower design or maybe all flower designs (as an example).

The link above would bring up every product that contained the description sku-101. You could make the search term anything you want but remember to make each one unique and keep them the same amount of characters. Let’s say you have sku-1 and sku-101, if you search for either term ALL products for both will appear no matter what. Why? Because the system sees the search as sku-1 and sku-101. It will pull in all matching products that begin with sku-1. So if you have them all the same amount of characters such as sku-001 and sku-102, the search knows exactly what to pull in.

So I would recommend you to formulate your term for the long haul. If you use the example above make sure you start with sku-001 and not just sku-1.

I hope this helps and if you have questions please feel free to ask because that’s what I’m here for.