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 Rules

Contest 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 )

I love to see the PODs make and effort to improve their stores and while these are minor improvements by Spreadshirt all improvements are welcome.

• Product Detail Page now features a tab info box, so your customers can view details about the product, printing methods, and the size chart!  Need more information or details?  Read more on the Forum!

• Digital Designs have option for grey thumbnail background:  Under the Design Tab in your User Area, you can activate a grey background for your digital designs…ideal for white digital designs.  Choose the detail link for the design and check the ‘Display grey background’ check box and Save.  The design will have a grey background wherever the design thumbnail appears!

• Premium Newsletter now offers feature to display the promo banner:  Alert your customers not only of new products added to your shop, but also of any sales going on!

See original article on Spreadshirt.

Spreadshirt always has a nice lineup of clothing items and the often add more although sometimes these items are only temporary. New products are great but if you are a serious POD business man you might not want to spend a lot of time adding products that won’t be in your store for very long. On the other hand if you market them well you may find a nice niche.

A short while ago Spreadshirt released a Summer Exclusive Line and they are pretty sweet and of course have a sweet printing area for customizing with your designs. They do seem a tad expensive though will all except the t-shirt having a base price over $30 and the tee’s base price is just over $20.

In addition to the Summer Exclusive Line Spreadshirt have released four new products which are more like what you would expect from a POD company. Well, apart from the skirt. I can’t imagine designing for a skirt but I’m sure some people will come up with some great ideas.

1. Women’s Double V-neck Shirt
2. Women’s Scoop Neck T-shirt
3. Women’s Drape Hem Skirt
4. Men’s AA Henley T-Shirt

Spreadshirt have this pretty cool promotion going on at the moment where if you can get a few new customers you they will give you a $20 voucher (£15 in the UK). You have two weeks to do this but it started a few days ago. I’m not too sure what it’s like at Spreadshirt but if this were Zazzle or Cafepress I don’t think that I would have to do anything to get this voucher because I’m pretty sure I get more than three new customers every two week period. (I don’t know that for sure of course but I make sales every day and I can’t believe that they are all repeat customers.)

You can read more about the conditions on the Spreadshirt blog. Good luck.

Spreadshirt have released four new apparel items for the summer which you might want to take advantage of. I have found that new shirts sell well. It is also likely that Spreadshirt will promote these items because they are new increasing your chances of selling them.

1. Women’s AA Racerback Tank Dress
   Available in: White, Red and Black
2. Men’s AA Pocket Tee
   Available in: White, Black and Navy
3. Women’s Deep V-neck Shirt by Continental
   Available in: White, Peacock and Dark Pink
4. Women’s Scoop Neck Tee by Bella
   Available in: Black, Teal, Plum and Ocean Blue

There is an interview with Spreadshirt’s Jana Eggers on MyFox Boston. It is basically a promotion of Spreadshirt and there is nothing much to learn from it if you are already familiar with the POD world but it is good to see the people behind the scenes.

Jana Eggers is the one who corrected my post about Spreadshirt and PayPal.

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 often come across people who want to know which POD service to use. It is a difficult question because there are many options. Unfortunately there is no right answer to this question. You could choose one of the big dogs namely Cafepress, Zazzle and Spreadshirt or you could chooose from one of the many smaller or newer POD sites that are available. In part it depends on your aims and what you hope to do.

While I have looked at many PODs, apart from Cafepress and Zazzle, I haven’t really invested time in them. I can recommend these two sites because it is relatively easy to set up shop and get the hang of things. I can’t say that it is easy to make money but money can be made if you make an effort.

I think that the important thing to look at when choosing a POD is how these PODs are going to help you make money. What do they put on the table? One of the most important things is traffic. How many people will actually get to see you products? Of course the more people that see you products the better. From the following graph you can clearly see that Cafepress is by far the most popular site and that Zazzle leads in terms of growth.

Unfortunately we can’t really judge from these statistics which on will drive most traffic to your store. Cafepress has far more stores and far more products than Zazzle so it is only natural that they get more traffic. Your share of the that might be very small though. An equal share of traffic from Zazzle may actually bring you more visitors. Spreadshirt too. Who knows? What we do know though is that growth is good. Cafepress has to grow in size but only slightly in unique visitors whereas Zazzle has seen phenomenal growth in visitors along with its physical growth. Looking at these stats alone, I would bet on Zazzle but there is a lot more to consider when choosing a POD. Hopefully I will be able to help you make your decision in the future.

Spreadshirt have some new tops especially for Valentine’s Day – a camisole and a nighty. The photos they use to show you what you are getting are quite sexy. If you are designing for Valentine’s Day I suggest that you include these items in your store as more than likely Spreadshirt will promote them for Valentine’s Day. I don’t always jump on every new product that a POD offers and I recommend you consider your market before you do do.