To be honest, I have never bought anything from Spreadshirt and I didn’t even know that you could pay with Paypal but apparently you can’t anymore.

Update from Spreadshirt: PayPal is still available in the US and Canada, both hosted on spreadshirt.com, and Poland, hosted on spreadshirt.net, or spreadshirt.pl. (Covered in the blog post.) You linked this article to Spreadshirt.com, which does accept PayPal.

It seems that there was some trouble with Paypal recently and also they feel that they may make more sales without it. This may be a temporary situation but they have removed it indefinitely which does not bide well for people who want Paypal.

Here is the information from their blog.

Due to the fact that there have been problems with PayPal orders in the past, we decided to test the differences with or without PayPal in the checkout over the past few weeks. Our results have shown that most of our customers simply choose another payment method when PayPal isn’t offered. Comparatively, more customers abandon their order when we offer PayPal. Obviously, this isn’t in our best interests and needs more investigation.
Since the amount of PayPal orders is less than 10% and, as mentioned above, customers use other payment methods when PayPal wasn’t offered, we decided to shut down PayPal for customers in the checkout today. This affects all markets except for Canada, Poland and the United States.

We’d love to add Paypal again, since we still believe in the simplicity and convenience of this payment method, and we also think that our customers should be able to use their preferred payment from a variety of options.

We will investigate this further, but I can’t give you a solid timeframe, as making changes in the checkout (the most sensitive area in eCommerce) are very time consuming processes.

Source: Spreadshirt without Paypal

Recently Zazzle introduced Paypal as an option for shoppers. I wonder how they feel about it. I believe also in the past PayPal was an option at Cafepress too but was removed.

I’ll be the first admit that Zazzle’s earnings reports are pathetic. First of all, there are no combined earnings reports, which means that to check your earnings you will need to log in to each store. Not a very efficient way to spend your time but I try to do it once a day. Then came the introduction of Zazzle.co.uk and suddenly the number of stores you had doubled so that’s more time spend logging in. On top of that was the fact that Zazzle.co.uk’s reports are in British pounds and most people don’t want to bother converting them to dollars or vice versa if you are based in the UK. Well, the good news is that this final problem seems to be solved. When I logged in today I say that they UK and US sites earnings reports have been combined and if you have earnings in British pounds, it shows you the US dollar value and the exchange rate they are using. Pretty sweet. (See the lowest figure below.)

I won’t go so far as to say that Zazzle has good earnings reports now but this is a definite improvement. What we really want is to have all reports from our store combined into one report like the volume bonus.

Recently a Cafepress shopkeeper noticed that her transaction report had the text Cafepress on behalf of Amazon written beside one of her sales. A little investigation told her that some Cafepress items, including hers were for sale on Amazon. You can buy them through Amazon but they will be shipped from Cafepress. I had a quick look and it seems that at the moment there is a very limited selection (it looks like there are 197) of Cafepress items on Amazon out of the billions that are available. This is an interesting development though and I have to wonder if they will all be available on Amazon at some point.

I think this is pretty good for the shopkeepers who have their items for sale at another location as it increases their chances of making money. It is quite unfair to those who don’t have their items listed though.

Printfection has introduced another great feature for their shopkeepers called AddMerch which, with the help of a single line of javascript, will allow people to apply images that you display on your blogs and web sites to the various products that Printfection sell. I haven’t tried it out myself but it is a great development. Zazzle has a similar tool but it seems much more complicated than this one. One thing I worry about though is that usually the images displayed on web sites are low resolution and not at all suitable for using on products. Of course you could use high resolution images on your web site but then I don’t see what could stop people from taking and using them without your permission. Below is an introductory video from Printfection.

I have been meaning to take a closer look at the Zazzle API with a similar function for quite a while now but I keep putting it off. If I do get around to it I will write up an idiot’s guide.

You can read more about AddMerch at AddMerch.com and on Prinfection’s bl0g.

Update: As you can see from the comment by Gavin from Printfection, the high resolution images are fairly safe. Sounds great.