On 04.04.2018 08:48, C R wrote:

So the more I use Spreadshirt, the more I see it's not a serious platform for merchandising. If you add a design for a mug, Spreadshirt requires you add the ENTIRE mug category, which contains any number of hidden (and hideous) products which you have no control over. I've confirmed this with Spreadshirt customer service: To add one white mug, you must add ALL mugs. To add one men's shirt, you must add all variations. This makes it impossible to control the quantity of products for a design, so the result is that the storefront gets flooded with a hundred variations of the very few things you set up, and the only way to remove them is to remove the whole category.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out, and I seemed to have found a way, unless they changed it in the meantime (it seems the same when I take a peek). There is a way to control exactly which products and designs you want in the shop, but it is time consuming. I've written it up in a Wiki page https://gitlab.com/inkscape/vectors/general/wikis/spreadshirt-shop Let me know if it needs to be more clear.

It was suggested we might be able to use their API to import it in bulk from a CSV file, which might be nice, once we get the designs and all the product copies in order. That is a lot more work than uploading and configuring the store. If we had product descriptions paired with designs and which products to use in a CSV file, even without the API we can find a volunteer who could chip at it manually.

I'm more annoyed by the inability to limit product colors, I'd love to exclude black almost everywhere because our logo is black and it disappears on dark backgrounds.

Many other services are like this, based on collections, because it makes it easier in most cases. Our case is a bit special.

So, what to do? I see only a few options, and none of them are great:

1. We limit it to one or two generic designs for everything. This is really the only way that makes sense. Anything else is going to have the visitors wading through hundreds of badly auto-designed products that no one will buy.

I vote for curated list of designs/product combinations, a small list, which also increases likelihood of sales. Our biggest issue is coming up with enticing copy (titles and descriptions) for each product with regards to our audiences. Once we have that, tackling any store config won't be too difficult to organize.

Online store services are there to take care of the products, printing, and interface. But they can't do our marketing for us.

I've added a few products in that curated way when I first started playing with the store a year ago. Maye they got lost in the flood when entire collections were added.

2. We ditch Spreadshirt, and seek other options. I mean, surely there's better than this out there somewhere. :)

If we stay, we risk carefully thought out designs getting lost in auto-gen rubbish, which any online retailer will tell you is death for a product line. Too many options is no options, especially when most of the options look terrible anyway.

I do have a list of other services I thought we could test. We're not limited to one store. I'm super excited by the possibilities of the ones with embroidery!

I have a list of those in my notes. I haven't published it on GitLab yet since I wanted to review them before dumping them on everyone else.

If you have a list of designs and products with descriptions and tags you want to include in the store I can get them in there, or I can help you with the configuration to get exactly what we want and not entire collections.

Mihaela

My 2p

-C

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