I’ve been working on my t-shirt shop for some days now and I just wanted to share my experiences and my thoughts here on my blog. As some of you know, I purchased a Spreadshirt(.net) Premium account some weeks ago to sell my shirt designs and to start building my own clothing brand. I have to admit that, while still being a fan of their customer service and quality,  i’m disappointed with their premium account. Most of the things I mention here have also already been discussed in the german spreadshirt forums, but the admins didn’t do a very good job, promising they will write in this thread again(German) when they have an statement by the partner management – 4 month have passed since that post. It’s probably not their fault though, I’m sure they would have replied if they had received any feedback… So here is the stuff that really stressed my patience in the last days.

Global Basket & Checkout

When you sign up for a shop, they tell you that you get your own shop. Actually it’s not your own shop. Technically it’s just a category in their shop system that is slightly adjustable. You share users, basket and checkout with other spreadshops as well as with their main site. So when people are surfing the web, are on your site and put sth. in the basket and one minute later they visit another spreadshop, lets say cutemonstr, they see your product in the cute-monstr shopping cart. “How to explain [to the customer]” that he is shopping on 2 separate sites but they share a basket? (you will get that quote later)

Users are being forced to register

There is no reason why a customer has to register. Spreadshirt tries to force customers to receive their full service, but most people don’t need order tracking or an overview over their old orders. They just want to receive their shirt,  no follow up emails, no database entries and they don’t need the services that spreadshirt provides.

Spreadshirt-advertising

You are promised that the spreadshirt branding will be removed from your shop. And yes, the branding gets removed. But that doesn’t mean that the customer has the feeling of being in an independent shop, because there’s still a lot of spreadshirt stuff left. Of course, in some cases it’s critical to remove the reference to spreadshirt, but in most it’s not. Ultimately it still aims informing the user that he is using a spreadshirt service and that he has to visit the spreadshirt site, i.e. because of…

Newsletter & ToS

Let’s take a look at the “Privacy” section, which is included in every spreadshop. It says “We do not use customer data for promotional purposes, except when you have expressly given us your permission. You can change your consent at any time”. Yeah, but… if the customer doesn’t sign up for the newsletter, he is not able to order a shirt, because signing up to the newsletter is not a separate option. You sign up for the newsletter by accepting the ToS. I know, the real deal sales agreement is happening between sprd.net and the customer, but if people choose to buy at my “shop”, I still feel kind of responsible for them and I don’t want to fool my customers that way.  How to explain [to the customer] that he HAS to give us his expressly permission? I don’t know if this means that customers will get the spreadshirt newsletter or if it just applies to the optional newsletter you could send out when you are a premium partner like me. But in both cases it forces the customer to visit the spreadshirt site to get off of that mailing list, because…

Logins are not shop-specific

Of course this goes hand in hand with the global basket. Let’s take a look at that post by Jörg again. Translated he said the following: “If people already ordered at spreadshirt or in another spreadshop they can’t register with their email, because there’s already an account with this email. How to explain [to the customer] that they are already registered with a new shop [where they never bought something, if you don't tell them it's a spreadshirt shop]. They get the confirmation emails from spreadshirt anyways.” – Unknowingly he hits the point there. It’s all a big database written in one user data table. If you had specific tables for shops, you could separate sign ups for shops (and separate shopping baskets). I don’t know exactly how they solved it, but if they did it right, this wouldn’t be a lot more load for the database and it would be easy to change it, at least for future customers. I just remembered the newsletter you can send out – means it should work for all customers, since they are treated separately there too.

Spreadshop is not easy to work with

That’s it for the premium account features. There might be more that are not the way I’d like them to be, but that’s what I found out in the few days I have been working with it. I also have to say that working with the shop itself wasn’t a good experience, and that’s also what most people on the forums say. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s hard to customize, elements are not as flexible as they should be and even if you happen to work with css everyday some stuff is hard to find. Putting something on your Site via iframe isn’t the way to hang with the cool kids today, but that’s what you have to do if you want to have a cool site that includes more than the shop. The spreadshop is a solution for people who want something generic out of the box, not for people who try to build a brand or create their own label. The “Your own Label” claim is like most claims – it sounds cool but is far from the truth.

What to do?

If you ask me , I’d prefer an open source self-hosted speadshop software that only imports the functions for elements, but not the elements itself. I want freedom when in my product presentation and in the ordering process. A piece of software that allows you to apply and fully customize themes and templates (yeah I know, I should have said “I want WordPress with a taste of spreadshop lol). I also think it would be a lot better if a premium partner had his own user database that he can access. Then you could use signups for your shop also for other stuff on your site like blog comments and your own forum because – I’m sorry to quote you again Jörg, I know you’re a good guy – “How to explain [to the customer]“ that he has to register twice or thrice when it feels for him like he’s on the same website?

My Speadshop

Will I still be using Spreadshirt? For now yes. I know that their product and printing quality is good and their customer service is great. But that is free and I wouldn’t have to pay 10 euros a month for it. As I said, I’m looking to create a real brand and establish it, so for the long run the premium account will (hopefully) not be enough. I also thought about creating an magento shop or using the WordPress e-commerce plugin on my own webspace, taking orders there and then ordering the shirts in my own spreadshop, but since I had to pay shipping costs twice, repackage stuff and take it to the post office again then, I don’t think it would have been a good solution either. Plus shipping times for customers would be four times longer, since I’m a lazy guy ;) Spreadshirt’s customer service and quality is really great and I hope I will make some business besides all the struggle that I described here. I shouldn’t forget that they take away a lot of struggle that I would have if there wasn’t such a service with people behind it who do their job as good as them. My Shop should be up and running by next Friday. I’m not linking it since I’m working on the live site and I don’t want it to be indexed by google too early.

What are your thoughts on the premium spreadshirt accounts? Had any trouble? Suggestions to improve the their premium feature? Are there other services/companies that get the job done as good as spreadshirt while giving their partners more flexibility? Somebody who works for spreadshirt reading who has something to say? Discuss. (If you just understand english and don’t feel comfortable speaking/writing it, you’re welcome to comment in german too)

This is the Response from spreadshirt:

hi sebastian,

as promised I wanted to come back with a detailed feedback (which took a little since I was out of office and your post is quite detailed ;).
So first of all: thanks a lot for this post. Sorry that you’ve had trouble with our platform, and sharing the problems with us, so we can learn and improve.

Now, specific feedback:
- forum. We work to answer all threads, but yes, some do get lost in the volume. If you feel that we lost something important, just bump up a topic again to get answers.
- shared baskets. This is a tough one. Few people do it (<3%) and those that do usually like it (security and convenience). However, we should make this more clear, so folks that do stumble upon it, and don’t get the Spreadshirt connection, feel good about it. We need to present it as a “network” that is empowering to the customer and you, the shop partner. We can do this.
- forced registration. I expect you know that we’ll always need an email address, but yes, we should have a “guest” (no password) checkout. It is on our list. No timeline yet for implementation.
- private label.
– in checkout. Feedback from customers & “the market” is that being associated with Spreadshirt is a good thing for most independent shops. It means there is a bigger company taking care and it is one place rather than many to register. Again, we need to position this differently as covered above.
– in newsletters. We do not send newsletters to your customers without you initiating it and/or to promote anything other than your shop. Period. We have to get permission to do this from the customer. So our terms have to cover that in a general way for all shop partners (premium shoppartner included). The newsletters you initiate from our platform are about your shop only.
– in the shopping or order process. We work to only mention Spreadshirt where legally required, or to support the customer. For example, the customer has to know that Spreadshirt will be on their credit card bill .. they need to know who to contact for customer service, etc. We are happy to discuss specific areas if we have to mention spreadshirt at some places, and sometimes we change this based on feedback (as we did in the past & as we can legally).
- shop customization. this one is hard, it is a balance between flexibility and ease of use. And it depends on the skills and knowledge of the shop partner. But overall, your mention of Wordpress/Spreadshirt hybrid is a good analogy to what we want to do. WordPress has great ease of use, but adds in extensibility. We aren’t there yet, but that is our goal. Specifics on what you think is the most painful is helpful, so we can improve the most important parts the soonest.

Thanks again for the post and the discussion. We look forward to having you as a partner, and hopefully improving for you.

best,

ami.)