May the best-selling shops win! We’ve prepared a little contest to help you boost up your shop sales before the holiday season really takes off. If you sell well in November, you could win some great prizes. We’ve also set up three different prize groups to make sure that even the smaller shops have the chance to win something. All you need is one sale, and you’ve qualified for a prize!

• 100+ sales: 5x exclusive newsletters to your customers (consultation with the winners, created and sent by Spreadshirt).
• 50-100 sales: 5x free flyers for your shop (our graphics team will create the flyers in consultation with you, your logo and your designs. We will then send the flyers to the 5 winners).
• 1-50 sales: 4x help re-designing your shop-layout (e.g. we will create graphics, banners or teasers specifically for your shop).

We will randomly select the corresponding amount of winners from all of the Shop Partners who fall into each of the categories. We will then contact them via e-mail.

Hold your horses – that’s not all … of course, we would like to help you increase your sales: a 15% off everything in your stores would be a good start, don’t you think? This promotion runs during the same time as the above-mentioned contest 9.11 – 23.11 (brilliant, aren’t we?) The voucher code is: NOVEMBERSALE.

This voucher code is valid for the entire contest period from 9th to 23rd November 2009 and gives your customers a 15% discount on all products. You are free to use the ad banner which our graphics team put together for you. You can find out more information about this promotion in the forum.

Happy sales!

To save the shop partners amongst us a little time in preparation for the upcoming holidays, our graphics team put together two lovely winter-holiday-snowy-and-sparkly background images for you.

You can simply download these from our Flickr page or right click and save the images. Then you can upload them to your user area and select it as your shop background under “Profile – Shops – Shop Layout”. If you go the extra step and set your theme to “Winter” under the “Selected Design” drop-down, you will be sure to get your customers whistling their way into the holiday shopping mood!

For those of you who peruse Spreadshirt’s home page daily might have come across a new tab in our navigation named “Featured Shops”. We thought that it would be a good idea to have a selection of shops which shows the unlimited possibilities, directions, niches and ways Spreadshirt partners use their shops to sell t-shirts. It’s a start – and we hope you like it!

If any of you had a chance to visit your shop today, you might have noticed something different in the link which appears in your browser. The replacement of top-level domains (i.e. .de, .fr, .co.uk, etc.) as well as the change to the link went live today. Here’s a little breakdown for you:

Top-Level Domains:
You can select under which top-level domain your shop(s) should be accessible. Simply see under “Languages and Currency” and select the corresponding locations for each shop. If you would like to continue to have your shop accessible under .net, simply select “EU”.

Link Structure:
Changes in this area will enable an improved searchability of your shop, for example through Google searches, as well as a shortened general link structure (which looks much better!). To illustrate, let us look for example at the design page of your shop:
Old structure: shopname.spreadshirt.net/en/GB/Shop/Designs/index
New structure: shopname.spreadshirt.co.uk/shop/designs

Some important notes:

• Old links will still work! Basically all existing links will be redirected to the new URL structure (for the Nerds among us: with redirect 301).
• Please be aware that if you use tracking tools (i.e. Google Analytics) and have chosen to change your top-level domain, we also recommend that you also change the corresponding code. Simply check that you have changed the link to your shop from the original “.net/en/GB/Index/index”.
• The easiest way to create links to your standard shop is to simply copy the URL which now appears from the browser’s address field.

More information about these changes can be found in the Spreadshirt Forum.

After Andy from HYA listed 50 great ways to recycle your old shirts with some awesome examples of other uses of the tee, we thought we’d take the camera around the office to see what we’ve experimented with. Here is a collection of our ideas on the extensive possibilities a shirt offers, other than, of course, wearing it. Now with that “Holiday-Which-Must-Not-Yet-Be-Named” soon approaching, you might want to impress with some nifty shirt-recycling gift ideas.

A)Wall Shirt Print continue reading ‘Do it Yourself: A Different Take on Shirt Customisation’

It’s a little early to make the “Best of 2009″ list, but in case you want to shuffle and update your assortment for the upcoming weeks here are our bestsellers from January until end of September 2009:

1. Mens Classic Shirt

2. Women’s Classic Girlie Shirt

3. Men’s Slim Fit

4. Men’s Hooded Sweatshirt

5. Men’s AA Shirt

6. Men’s Contrast T

7. Men’s Retro Shirt

8. The Cooking Apron

9. Women’s Spaghetti Top

10. Men’s Summer Shirt

In regards of the colours: usually the most popular colours are black, white, blue and red. Of course what you offer always also depends on your niche, your target group - and your designs. But I hope this list is helpful to you in terms of which products to add.

I recently came across a relatively new shop by the name of Ush-op. I had to take a second look at the title to try and guess how to pronounce it. I’ve landed on “you sh op”, but there is something about “ushh op” that I like. I was firstly impressed that the shop, for its age, already existed on two continents – with the UK/Europe shop boasting a larger range of designs. Ush-op has big intentions! I like how this shop has started up and where Gary is going with his designs – the intricacy in TWIGGY and the pun of Treecycle. I caught up with Gary, the man behind Ush-op and asked him about his shop, Scotland and fizzy ducks. Gary in the interview:

Where are you from and where do you live now?

From and still living in East Kilboring, a small “polo mint city” just outside Glasgow with nothing much to do.

What do you do, other than t-shirts?

Well by day I am design engineer. But by night I philosophise, or let’s be honest I do nothing much really, just hang out and have fun.

What’s the story behind ush-op? continue reading ‘Ush-op: “For cool new sweet rad funky fresh clothing of sorts”’

Search engines and their users in Britain prefer co.uk, in Germany they like their .de and in France they love their .fr. For those who don’t know where they stand, a good old .com seems to do the trick.

Spreadshirt grew up under a .net and have therefore found themselves stranded in a strange land without, well, any.. land. This has got its positives, but also its negatives. The ease at which your shops and products are found within searches (for example using Google) is limited by your potential customer’s location. To try and shift the balance, we will be changing our top level domain and the link structure for the products from .net to .co.uk during the coming time. To make sure there are no casualties as we make this change, we’ve put together the following handy bits of information:

1. You can fix your country setting within your log in area. Your shop will then be reached via (for example) spreadshirt.co.uk and will be automatically optimised for the needs of search engines.

2. Old links will remain valid and visitors will be automatically forwarded to the new address.

Further information regarding this topic (e.g. why the whole change is worth it, and other mad ideas that we have planned) can be found in the Spreadshirt Forum.

When we said “soon” in yesterday’s post, we meant today. Our Spreaducation pages have covered how to create products for your shop and market it online. Most of the tips on how to market your online shop are, well, using online marketing. This is where many of your customers will be found and where online marketing methods will bring them directly into your shop without them having to leave the online sphere.

On the other hand, there is the fact that we (hopefully still!) spend most of our time offline. This is where an offline promotion can catch the attention of customers in the “real” world and bring them to the online one. When we say “offline promotion”, it is less about taking out a full page ad or standing out on the street and forcing a flyer into the hands of every passerby. We are thinking more about targeted use of flyers and stickers. We asked some of our partners in the forum about their experiences using flyers. Here are a few highlights:

1. Flyer Layout
Once you have come up with a concept, the next thing to consider is the flyer’s layout. Christbear’s opinion: It’s important that the flyer’s info is conveyed quickly while still making sure the flyer is pocketed.

The less advertising found on the front the better. A nice picture, a funny saying and always put the site’s address in small font at the bottom right (so it doesn’t get in the way). These are the flyers (or postcards) which I pocket, pin up on my fridge or set down on my desk for a couple of days. And these are the only flyers which I turn over and take a look at the other side.

2. Format and Printing
Quality over quantity: look for a good printer (we’ve had great experience with MOO), rather than worrying about the price. People will think twice about throwing away a high-quality flyer. And vice-versa – if a flyer looks like it was copied onto recycled paper, it is very likely to end up back in the recycling bin.

Popgarten shared the same opinion: continue reading ‘Five Fantastic Flyer Tips! Market your Online Shop Offline’

Congrats, congrats!

A little over a week ago we asked you, our partners, to create new products with the new September apparel for your shops and the Marketplace. Many of you took us up on this request and therefore automatically entered yourselves into our MOO Minicard raffle.

We’ve pulled 10 winners out of a spare tea pot and each of them will receive 1 free pack of MOO Minicards from us.

The winners are:

Lucie - Milatchek Shop
Bernd - Warten Shop
Katharina - Katharina’s Shop
Yasmin - Wiesnengerl Shop
Rene - Vakantietshirt Shop
Stephan - Stephan’s Shop
Iris -Ticeforheroes Shop
Dagmar - Exklusiveshirtandmore Shop
Becky - Wonkywear Shop
Robert - Thecasualmusician Shop

In order to claim your coupons for MOO, please write a short e-mail to Kathrin at ktl at Spreadshirt dot net.

If you are wondering how best to use the Minicards, we will be posting some offline marketing tips in the blog soon!

So, don’t wait too long to claim your coupon as they are only valid until 31st October 2009. You can start creating your Minicards here.