Printfection store owner Raw Tees was featured in the New Jersey Star-Ledger newspaper article Online retail gets easier and easier. Here are the highlights:
"Raw Tees (www.printfection.com/rawtees) specializes
in retro T-shirt designs…""…other stores are bringing competition to the field,
including Zazzle, Printfection.com and Spreadshirt,
adding more items to the mix, such as postage stamps and
cutting boards (yes, with your image-of-choice on the
surface)."
This morning around 9am our $2 t-shirt promotion ended up on Digg’s homepage. See the article here. Now a whole bunch more people will get to see our amazing printing process first-hand!
Question: What’s the 1 thing every Internet company has to worry about, takes up lots of their time, and their customers never fully see or appreciate?
Answer: Their infrastructure.
Growing Internet companies all face this same problem. All the sudden your website starts to take off, users are signing up left and right, and then your servers start to get slower and slower. The IT guys are telling the marketing folks to stop their advertising– all those PPC visitors are killing the servers! It becomes clear… time to upgrade the infrastructure!
Building infrastructure takes an enormous amount of time, resources, and money. Just think about all of the equipment running behind the scenes to power a service like Printfection: servers, data centers, databases, off-site backup locations, clusters, load balancers, switches, routers, etc.
After just about one year on-line we are starting to feel the infrastructure crunch. While our site is still running smooth today, we’re preparing for the future (what good retailer doesn’t think about Christmas in February!) It’s becoming time to upgrade the hardware that powers our website. Simple, right? Just add a few more servers and everything will run faster and all our customers will be happy. WRONG! There is so much more to think about. Buying the servers and installing them is only about 1% of the problem. There are code modifications, database splitting, backup configurations, redundancy issues, and the never ending problem of worrying about how the solution you are designing today will scale as you grow bigger and bigger.
What I find funny (well, not really) is how every Internet company from Flickr to YouTube to Smugmug has gone through the same growing pains and is constantly trying to solve the same problems, yet everyone is doing this alone. Everyone is re-inventing the wheel in their own data centers. Configuring their own redundant clusters of servers, their own SANs, their own backup solutions, and more. This reminds me of pre-industrial America when most people lived on a farm and grew their own food, raised their own cattle, and were for the most part self-sufficient in their own little worlds. How come the Internet is like this now? Why are we all forced to be farmers on top of our normal jobs? How come we can’t just buy our basic food (infrastructure) at the supermarket and concentrate on what we’re really good at (selling t-shirts). Sometime in the future I hope we can just buy our infrastructure like we buy food at the supermarket. This would allow all Internet companies to concentrate on what they’re really good at & would advance web-services at a much faster pace. It’s nice to see Amazon Web Services entering this space, and I hope this becomes a mature industry with lots of options sooner rather than later.
Until this happens, we’ll continue to worry about our own infrastructure so our website runs fast and reliably. Too bad our customers and store owners will never really see how much time and effort goes into the "behind the scenes" infrastructure projects. Yes, it does slow down development of new features. No, we cannot just forget about our infrastructure– at least not yet.
Every day we get suggestions for new features and improvements. A natural result of having passionate store owners that really care about us! In less than a year we have over 1,000 posts in our suggestions forum and receive countless e-mails and phone calls for every feature and improvement known to man. No matter how hard we work, the reality is we’re never going to accomplish every feature request nor build a service that is perfect for everyone. Today I came across this post over at a VC blog and it really caught my interest. When should you just say no? The VC believes startups should say no to just about every request from customers. This helps the company stay focused and on track. While I don’t agree 100%, he has a point. We’re never going to get around to every feature request. We can always say "It’s on the list" but does this really help our store owners? Maybe we should just start saying no! It wouldn’t be the most popular answer, but probably the most realistic and honest.
Goodbye to all those meaningless numbers in your product and section URLs. We are now putting the name of the product and/or section in the URL to improve the readability and SEO potential of every page within your store. New URLs are just one of many features pushed to the website earlier this morning….
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Update: Product Detail page URLs and Store Section page URLs have become friendlier! You can now tell what you’re going to see before you even click on the link. Look at all that descriptive text within the URL!
Here’s a new product page URL: http://www.printfection.com/area51/space-cadet-baseball-jersey/_p_270757
…and a new section page URL: http://www.printfection.com/area51/space-cadet/_s_21117
You’ll notice the actual name of the section/product now appears in the URL of the product page instead of just a bunch of numbers. If you change your section name or product name the URL will be updated automatically.
Store Logo & Section Images Update: You can now make your
store logo up to 760 pixels in width/height. Section images can be up
to 300 pixels in width/height. Both the store logo & section image width/height can now be changed at any time, on the fly!
Furthermore, you can choose to preserve transparency in your store
logo & section images so they look nice on colored backgrounds.
We’ll automatically save your image in .GIF format with transparency.
You can change back and forth between transparent & non-transparent
at any time without having to re-upload a new image!
We hope you enjoy the update. As always, feedback is welcome!
Today ADV Films— in partnership with Printfection— announced the launch of ADV Gear! Anime fans can now sport official
merchandise from their favorite shows like Azumanga Daioh, Saiyuki,
Godannar, plus Anime Network shirts and more. Visit ADV Gear now!
Did you know ADV Films has become the #1 producer-distributor of Japanese animation outside of Japan and has the largest English-language anime library in the world? We’re really excited to be working with one of the premiere anime companies on the planet!
From Pistachio to Prairie Dust, Printfection now has colors to compliment every one of your designs! Early this morning we added a total of 70 new colors and three brand-new products. Let’s recap this massive merchandise launch:
New Products:
Girl’s Baby Rib T-Shirt (3 colors)
Girls Cap Sleeve T-Shirt (5 colors)
Girls Ringer T-Shirt (4 colors)
New Colors for:
T-Shirt (17 new colors)
Women’s T-Shirt (5 new colors)
Long Sleeve T-Shirt (12 new colors)
Sleeveless T-Shirt (4 new colors)
Kids T-Shirt (10 new colors)
Kids Long Sleeve T-Shirt (5 new colors)
Kids Baseball Jersey (2 new colors)
Kids Ringer T-Shirt (2 new colors)
New Light Colors:
Sport Gray
Light Pink
Ice Gray
Pistachio
Heather Gray
New Dark Colors:
Cardinal Red
Forest Green
Charcoal
Royal Blue
Prairie Dust
Blue Dusk
Indigo Blue
Purple
Maroon
Chestnut
Dark Chocolate
Military Green
Dark Heather
Black (Women’s T-Shirt)
Navy (Women’s T-Shirt)
Chocolate (Women’s T-Shirt)
New Plus Sizes:
T-Shirt (more colors in 4XL and 5XL)
Ringer T-Shirt (3XL)
Women’s T-Shirt (3XL)
From the day I started Printfection it’s been my goal to offer the largest selection of custom, on-demand apparel products anywhere. The vision has always been to offer a selection as big as Amazon manufactured on-demand like a Dell computer.
Today we’re one step closer to this goal. Printfection now offers more options than anyone else—215 to be exact! When you multiply the color options by the sizes for each color you get a really big number… 1,028 unique SKUs stocked in our warehouse, ready for your designs!
Many of these wonderful designs are searchable in the Printfection shopping mall. Our shopping mall has been growing in leaps and bounds over the last few months thanks to the hard work and incredible talent of our store owners. This morning’s update added over 250,000 new colors to the existing products in the mall. If you’re looking for a unique gift item you’ve got no excuses! Better start your holiday shopping soon… can you believe it’s almost November 1st? I’m thinking cardinal red and forest green t-shirts for everyone on my list!
We’re excited to announce the addition of 55 countries to
our roster of international shipping destinations! Customers in Australia, Europe, Latin America, and many other regions can now place orders with delivery via international airmail. International shipping was one of the most requested features by store owners on the forums.
Furthermore, domestic shipping within the USA has been simplified and the
rates are now much lower across the board! Customers are now presented with four
simple shipping methods and uniform rates regardless of the shipping
ZIP code:
Canadian customers will notice lower shipping rates as well, with the base rate to Canada only $4.99 – the same as US Super Saver!!
Earlier this morning we released a brand-new upsell feature
and revised our checkout process to boost average order value and improve
overall conversion rates for our store owners!
When a customer adds a product to the shopping cart, the new
upsell page will show them related products and a mini-cart on the right side
of the page. The related products and images shown to the customer are based on
the products in their shopping cart & the keywords associated to the
image(s) in their shopping cart. Here’s an example of the new upsell page:
Along with a slew of minor usability changes, the revised
checkout process includes two brand-new features: gift messages & rush order
processing!
Customers can now designate the order as a gift which
removes the prices and the billing address from the shipping receipt. The
customer also has the opportunity to include a gift message for the recipient.
This is perfect for drop-shipping to a 3rd party, selling
Printfection items on eBay, and of course gift giving!
Rush order processing is now available on most orders for a
10% surcharge ($2.99 minimum). Orders that normally take 3 business days for production will
ship out the next business day with rush processing! When you really need your
order fast, rush processing is an economical and guaranteed way to speed your
order through our production facility.
I hope you enjoy these new features and improvements. As
always, comments and suggestions are welcome!
Recently we attended the open house at one of our main distributors and had a chance to meet up with our reps at Gildan, Anvil, Bella, and other mills to discuss new product lines, colors, and garments coming out in 2007. We previewed tons of new styles and took some photos too! There was plenty of free food and even an open bar to keep everyone happy!
Highlights included:
We’re really excited for what’s coming out in 2007. It seems the retail fashions are making it to the wholesale decoration market faster than ever before. The quality of the Alo line is amazing- this stuff rivals The North Face, Arcteryx, Under Armour, and the rest. Look for many of these new products & colors on the Printfection website in 2007!
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