Today we would like to introduce you to Micha. Everyone running a Shop and creating designs for Spreadshirt should take particular interest in this. Micha is in charge of the business sector for Self Service Partners (SSP), and in this role he sees to their individual interests. Micha and his team work on the technical implementation of our Shop Partners‘ and Marketplace Designers‘ requests, and they are constantly improving the communication with our partners to make using the platform as easy and worthwhile as possible. In this interview, Micha will provide you with some insight into his work space, and he will fill you in on some hot and exciting new projects.
Micha, thanks for taking the time to talk to us in the hot seat. Tell us, who are you, and how do you make Spreadshirt a better place?
I joined Spreadshirt in 2012 as a Business Development Manager for the design community LaFraise. We conducted a complete relaunch of the community website and implemented the laFraise online shop with full Spreadshirt shop technology. In doing so, laFraise turned into something like an internal Shop Partner in itself, and the whole process posed quite a challenge. What was difficult here was to realize our ideas about what the Shop should ultimately look like by applying Spreadshirt technology.
The laFraise project was terminated in the summer of 2014. It was then that Spreadshirt put a new department in place to cater to the needs and requirements of designers and Shop Partners without a personal Key Account Manager – the partners we call “Self Service Partners”. Our laFraise team got transferred to this department, and in doing so, became the mouthpiece of every regular partner using Spreadshirt to make money by realizing creative ideas on an individual basis.
What exactly is your role in the SSP Team?
My team and I essentially pass on the feedback we receive from our partners to help other departments at Spreadshirt implement projects with a more improved focus on how our partners want to use our platform. So we are working on meeting their requirements, and you can already get a taste of some of the fruit of our work. Now the premium functionality is available for free to all of our Self Service Shop Partners. We have a partnership with moo.com and have taken the first steps in restructuring the User Area. A lot of the things we’re working on will most likely be completed by the end of the year, which is due to a massive effort that needs to be put into realizing the all new User Area look and functionality.
What are this year’s most exciting projects?
We’re giving most of our attention to the development of the new User Area for our partners. At the same time, we’re tackling long-desired changes to facilitate the uploading and editing of designs as well as the publication of products. And since this project poses quite a unique challenge, it will take at least until the end of the year for the most vital parts to be realized and visible online.
Another project is the development of a completely refurbished and newly equipped Self Service Partner shop. The first steps in this direction have already been undertaken, and a mobile-optimized version of our Spreadshirt Shop, designed to make surfing and ordering more fun, has already been undertaken. Once we’ve realized this, a further new project of renewing the desktop shop will loom on the horizon. We hope to be able to implement it by the end of this year as well, and you’ll receive an update once this new egg is laid and ready to roll.
What’s more, we always feel that improving the communication channels with our partners is something that deserves a lot of attention, which means that we’re broadening the scope, relevance and accessibility of our service. And of course we want to generate communication on the part of our partners as well by making it easier and to have them get in touch with us more. This is important to us as partners providing us with valuable feedback help improve the overall experience considerably.
Next to these major projects, there are many smaller ones that require our attention. These result from changes in our product range, partner commission, marketing campaigns, sharing tools and other things. And our partners will of course receive an update on these changes once we can say more concrete things about them.
What’s your biggest challenge?
Different partners have different demands. Our biggest challenge is meeting the demands of all of our partners. As our industry evolves it’s important to open the lines of communication both internally and externally. We will continue to glean more feedback from our Shop Partners (which helps foster community). The SSP team is an added value for you– our entrepreneurs, celebrities, brands, designers, gamers, Non-Profits and Average Joes. We will continue to seek your input and support as we work through additional improvements on functions and features here at Spreadshirt! In doing so, we’ll in turn be able to continue with a strong-selling platform for designers and Shop Partners.
Where do you see the partner business in 3 years time?
To be absolutely honest – that’s quite hard to tell. I’m not one to promise people the earth and end up giving them hell, so let me tell you just this: my team and I always pursue two basic principles. The first one is to keep the platform as simple as possible so that we’ll be able to convince many more people of the Spreadshirt shop system. And the second one is to increase our partner success to make the overall experience more fun for all parties involved.
Of course this is a quest with a continuous strive for improvement. It’s also important to remember that a couple of things have already received a massive betterment. Proof of this is that Spreadshirt has been able to pay out almost 60 million dollars in commission (as of Feb. 2015) to Key Account and Self Service Shop Partners since its foundation in 2002. And the recent development in shop sales makes me believe that 2015 will be a fantastic year for our Self Service Shop Partners. If we get everything on the right track the way we anticipate it, then we’ll be able to see our “fantasy” come true, smiling faces all around.
We would like to thank Micha for providing us with this great insight into recent Self Service Shop Partner developments. These interviews with our various team members certainly provide a great insight into the inner workings of the Spreadshirt machine. Do you run a shop as a Self Service Partner? Is there anything you would like to ask Micha and his team? Just leave a comment below this post, and we’ll be sure to pass it on.
Hi hwhit,
thanks for taking the time to describe the search functionality you would like to use a bit more in detail. In fact this way you are actually using our search API, but in a much more simplified way. After double-checking with our product manager for this project I can ensure you that this functionality will definitely stay available.
Please keep an eye on your inbox regarding our partner newsletter for any udate about our new releases.
I am looking forward to make some serious money together,
Michael
Hi Michael!
Thanks for the early heads-up on the whole framework changing! Since I haven’t launched yet, I’ll sit on the sidelines, wait for you guys to mostly-finalize the new shops, then update my external site to integrate accordingly. It’s good to hear you guys will try to make it as easy as possible.
I’m VERY happy to hear that you’ll be keeping the advanced customization options (HTML/CSS/JS) because they’re crucial for any sort of external site integration. Thanks!
I fully understand the loading speed issue; my external site is heavily optimized for it. It’s good to hear the new Spreadshirt shops will be optimized similarly.
As for “search-within-the-shop”, no, I’m not using the API at all, unless by “API” you just mean simple URLs that cause searches to be run and results displayed. For example, a search on the string “foobar” simply requires a URL like this: “shopname.spreadshirt.com/foobar”. Some seriously sophisticated product selection techniques can be achieved this way with clever use of search strings and matching strings placed in the product descriptions. So, please don’t eliminate this ability for a simple, ordinary URL to cause a search and results listing. My integration is largely based on it!
Lastly, thanks for the update on the issue of excessively-large images of designs being made available. As a web developer who’s worked with very large systems, I fully realize there will be significant dependencies and other technical stuff to be addressed when fixing the issue. But, as long as I know you guys ARE going to fix it before too long, I’m quite happy being patient!
Thanks again for your detailed response, and all your work. Hopefully I can launch before too long, and make us all some serious money. 🙂
Hello everyone,
thank you for your feedback. It’s nice to see that my team and all our other colleagues here at Spreadshirt have made it that you are enjoying working with us.
@Robert and Raul: I need to admit, that we are currently facing some issues with the Google Analytics integration. However, our engineers are already working on this and hopefully you can use it in a much better way soon. I can not promise you that setting goals will be available in the beginning, but I will feed this as a requirement into our product backlog.
@Trevor: thanks, I will definitely make sure that your commendation reaches our service team 🙂
@hwhit: it’s good to read that you like our shops the way they are. Unfortunately the technology we are using there is a bit outdated and doesn’t allow us to update the shops to be mobile friendly or even responsive. But don’t worry, we will keep the customization options. Although they might not be available in the first release-versions.
Important: the changes we will introduce for the new shop will definitely not be possible without touching the whole framework. The reason for this is the already mentioned need to make shops more mobile friendly and give you as a shop-owner the option to apply responsive CSS easily. Additionally this will also allow us to introduce much better ways for integration into Web-Pages and Content-Management Systems.
Also very important, if not the most important, with the current framework there is no improvement in terms of loading-speed possible anymore. And we all know that loading-time is the biggest conversion killer. My apologies for any inconvenience you will face while updating your shop-integration when the time comes. Our product team will give their very best to make the migration as easy as possible for everyone.
About the “search-within-the-shop” function. If I got you right you are referring to an API function. In that case please don’t worry because we rather expand the API search functions for the new shop than limiting or remove them.
The copyright protection of submitted designs is an issue we also have on our agenda. However, I need to ask you for a little more patience because this is directly related to major technical image-server “stuff”. Can’t go into more detail here but like Leila already mentioned it’s a topic where we want to introduce some changes in the near future.
I’d also like to point out that it’d be much easier and better if any deskshop shop “renewal” only involved changes to the look/style of content widgets like the product preview images, color chips, drop-down menus to select sizes, etc. and NOT the overall format of the pages (the outer set of “framework” DIVs). I’ve already hand-coded my external site to EXACTLY and seamlessly match the structure of my Spreadshirt desktop shop (i.e. a main content DIV 660px wide along with a right-hand sidebar DIV within a larger container DIV, etc.) so the main layout and navigation looks perfectly identical across the two sites. I’d hate to have to completely re-do my external site periodically as Spreadshirt keeps changing and “renewing” the desktop shops. If only the contents (widgets) INSIDE the main framework DIVs are updated/”renewed” and not that main framework itself, life would be MUCH easier for shopkeepers like me who have external perfect-lookalike stores with that same framework, and really, there’s no good reason to change it anyway; it’s a good and modern one already with a fine layout and set of dimensions! Of course, an “opt out” of the “renewed” stores would be even better. Thanks for listening, guys. (Also, sorry for the “HTML/CS/JSS” typo above. I put one “S” in the wrong place, heh!)
Oh, also, if/when you “renew” the desktop shops, please don’t eliminate the search-within-the-shop function. My external site uses it to integrate with my Spreadshirt shop by passing it different specially-constructed search strings to show different lists of products on the Spreadshirt shop as needed, based on special strings in the products’ descriptions. Without the ability to pass in these search strings and have the Spreadshirt shop respond with the appropriate set of matching products, integration would be very seriously harmed. Thanks. 🙂
Is integration with Google Analytics goal a current feature? Or is it coming later on at some point? Having that transaction data on-hand would be so beneficial to properly optimizing my shop and boosting sales. Everyone wins, right?
I am new to Spreadshirt, but I must say that I am very impressed with the Support Team. Notwithstanding the time difference (I am in Australia), my enquiries are always responded to promptly and answered completely. I appreciate the Team’s patience with me, as I become familiar with the System 🙂
Thanks for offering an opt-out option for the mobile sites; I prefer to stick with the desktop version. I think the desktop shops are fine as they are, but if you’re going to “renew” them anyway, PLEASE don’t remove the powerful abilities to customize the HTML/CSS/JS code. I have your current desktop shop tightly integrated with my lookalike custom external site, and while it’d be a pain to redo all the custom HTML/CS/JSS code after a “renewal” to keep the shop looking and working like my external site, it’d be a DISASTER if today’s powerful code customization capabilities were lessened or removed entirely in a “renewal”! Please keep this in mind. Also, I’m still waiting to launch my stores until you guys offer the option to let us reduce the maximum resolution of our design preview images to deter mass design theft, but the recent “very near future” comment I heard about it from Leila is encouraging. Thanks for reading this, and thanks for all your work!
Another really good article! I enjoy learning about the different roles that keep the Spreadshirt machine well-oiled 🙂
One thing I was curious about was Google Analytics goals integration with partner shops. I found an old forum post that listed configuration settings, but it seems that any changes made to the system since then have caused Google Analytics to not properly record incoming transaction data. If I have overlooked some section on the Spreadshirt site that explains this all, please forgive me. If this is not a current feature, can you let us know when we can expect it?
Thanks again for all your hard work! Have a great weekend!!
Best,
Robert Diaz