Being Irish I wouldn’t want to miss out on a contest such as this: a Saint Patrick’s Day design contest. The prizes seem pretty lame but if you are making St. Paddy’s Day designs anyway why not. If you win you will get a nice bump from the Spreadshirt newsletter. See details below.
We’d like you to create a St. Patrick Day design, submit it to the Spreadshirt Marketplace and tag it with STPATTYCONTEST. We will then select 3 winners and award the following prizes:
One of three 1st positions in the Bestseller category in the Spreadshirt Designer between February 25th and March 17th (One of our most trafficked areas on the site)
One of three 1st positions in the Holidays & Occasions/St. Patrick’s Day category in the Spreadshirt Designer February 25th and March 17th
Winner’s design featured in a Spreadshirt St. Patrick’s Day Newsletter sent to Spreadshirt’s house list (Date TBD)
Design will be featured in the main teaser on Spreadshirt.com homepage
One coupon for a free product ($35 value + free standard domestic shipping)
Basic RulesContest officially starts on February 5th and ends on Feb 19th, 2010. Spreadshirt will announce the winners on February 19th, 2010.
Your design must be submitted to the Spreadshirt Marketplace and tagged with STPATTYCONTEST during the above period.
Designs should be closely or loosely related to the themes surrounding the idea of the St. Patrick’s Day. Be creative. A generic green clover will definitely not win you the prize.
The winners will be picked by Spreadshirt staff based on following criteria:
Creativity and Originality (New and previously unsubmitted designs have preference)
Versatility (Invites customization – provokes thought for adding text or multiple designs)
Market Appeal (Immediately attracts attention from the viewer)
Applicability to Apparel (Design can be used on a wide variety of apparel items)
Production ( Vector designs are preferred )
Not being a developer myself I don’t really know what this means but from what I hear Printfection’s API is miles ahead of other POD stores. And now it seems to have gotten even better.
Unfortunately thought, the thing that is really holding Printfection back is not the lack of tools because there are plenty, but rather the lack of an affiliate program. If Printfection had an affiliate program there would be more promotion and developers would be clamoring to test out their API. We live in hope.
“The Printfection API just got a whole lot simpler. Using our new API wrapper, developers can focus on their code instead of dealing with the integration between their application and the Printfection API….(read more on Printfection)”
Printfection are going a really cool route by allowing their shopkeepers to totally brand their own stores and now they have gone one step further in helping you put your store on your own domain. That is awesome. If I ever get time I must look into doing something with my Printfection store again. Below is the post but check out the original post at Printfection.
Great news! You can now put your entire Printfection store on your own domain. That means no mention of Printfection anywhere in your URLs or within your store!
Better yet, you don’t even need a server or hosting plan, just a domain name. We’ll map your domain name to our servers (e.g. www.yourdomain.com or store.yourdomain.com), so all URLs will show your domain name, not Printfection’s. Your visitors will have no idea that we are acting as your website host and merchandise fulfillment service. Best of all, this new domain mapping service won’t cost you a cent. It’s completely free.
If you already have a Printfection store, you can easily change its URL to your own domain. If you don’t yet have a domain, you can register one and point it to your Printfection store in less than five minutes. See “Setting up domain mapping” for more information, including step-by-step instructions.
We hope you enjoy this new addition to our myBrand portfolio of white-label fulfillment services. Let us know if we can do anything else to help you be great at selling merchandise and building your brand.
Google Product Feed is no more for POD shopkeepers
Printfection made this announcement a few days ago but of course it is relevant to all POD sites as far as I can see.
We were notified by Google today of changes Google is implementing to their Google Base/ Google Product service. Starting tomorrow, September 3, 2009 Google’s new policy will no longer allow non-domain owners to submit products to Google Base on behalf of the domain. This means you cannot submit products to Google Base with www.printfection.com in the URL as you are not the “domain owner” for printfection.com. Furthermore, any products with www.printfection.com URLs you have submitted to Google Base in the past will be removed from Google Base shortly.
Going forward, all products will have to be submitted directly from Printfection, from a single Printfection-Owned Google Base account. Please be patient while we work on a new solution to submit your designs and products to Google Base.
To be honest, because I have been so busy I haven’t been uploading my feeds to Google base recently anyway but this will be a further blow to many shopkeepers, especially Cafepress shopkeepers who are fervently trying to compete with Cafepress itself for sale of their items. It’s hard enough to compete with CP anyway because they have the resources (paid for with our sweat) but this development doesn’t help at all.
In the case of Cafepress, there might be a workaround though. If you have set up a domain with cpshop you may be able to create a feed using that website. I think I have heard of it being done but I haven’t done it myself. If I get time to figure it out I will certainly post about it here. And of course you could opt out of the Cafepress marketplace. I haven’t done that either. When I get more time I will see how to proceed.
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.
One of the first posts from POD Helper is not only a way for you to get a discount but also a great tool for marketing your POD store: coupons. The POD companies frequently issue coupons for their customers. Some are provided to large affiliate marketers while others are provided to everyone. These were provided by Printfection, one of the smaller PODs. You can use them in your stores and in other promotions as they come up.
They will be available from January 10 through to January 31.
$5 Off $25 Order Use Promo Code: 5OFF25
$10 Off $50 Order Use Promo Code: 10OFF50
$15 Off $100 Order Use Promo Code: 15OFF100
I will talk more about coupon codes and how to use them effectively in a later post.