Sales Stopped in September

Just wondering if anyone else’s reports look like this? According to this all my sales stopped in September. Granted, I don’t have a ton of sales but that statistically looks like there is a major issue:

If you noticed a drop in sales one of the reasons may be that your work is being pirated and resold on other platforms. You can research your listing titles on Google and click “shopping” or “Images”. Google also has an image search on their search bar as well. You may want to check sites such as Aliexpress, DHGate, Ebay, Amazon etc… (pirates are famous for harvesting listings and reselling your artwork for $6 -$9). As disheartening as this may be there’s a friendly face-book fellow artist group called “Pirate Busters” who will help you for free to navigate the DMCA take down notice procedure and processes. You can also report stolen artwork to the pirate’s online service providers and payment portals such as Paypal, Mastercard, Visa etc… I’ve personally noticed the newest thing is for pirates to rip-off listings from other popular POD sites, use the titles and remove the models heads on their listings. As the artist/designer it is your responsibility to seek action against these pirates. Don’t despair and fight back as these pirates are ripping off your income and damaging your business. If we stick together and report pirates their shops will after so many reports (because they are on a point system) will be taken down. I hope this helps.

I’ve been doing this for 10 Years… I am aware of this sad fact. That is not the reason for the immediate halt in sales. I have fought the few infringement cases I caught and most of the time settled with cooperation.

Hi @Tutkahnkuchacka

As we are talking about shop owner driven sales here I can only assume why there is a sudden drop.
And I can give a statistical walk-through.
But at first let´s do this step by step:

I´ve had a look at your statistics and the overall sales distribution throughout your shops,
(and did a year on year comparison 2018 - 2019) You are gaining the majority of sales through 1 main shop. This shop is mainly responsible for your sales success. (Glow Tees) Additionally you carry a “long tail” of 11 shops. They bring in some sales here and there.

In 2019 your main shop performed better than in 2018.
All other shops don’t show this significance in general. Some worked better, some did less.
But as your overall sales are not that high, the difference between 17 and 24 items per month might look pretty scary. And then there is that drop. :frowning:
Here we are coming into the dark fields of assumption, where I would need you to answer some questions. :crystal_ball:

As the shop is only as good as the seller’s ability to market. I personally like to break a shop’s performance down to 6 pillars of success:

  • Customer Features (UI/UX improvements)
  • Shop Owner Marketing (Ad spend)
  • Customized vs Default Shop Setup (website integrated vs stand alone)
  • SEO / SEM (applies only for embedded shops)
  • the Shop’s topic & quality
  • Google ranking (only god knows / there´s a new kid in town)
  1. Featurewise we have not released changes to the Shop’s basic framework in the last months.

  2. Did you do Ads before and stopped or lowered your budget in Sept-Oct?

  3. Did you made major changes to your shop set up?

  4. Depends on your answer to No. 3 :point_up:

  5. the Quality & Niche of the shop itself is a main driver, right after the points listed in 6) :point_down:

  6. Google / Competitors are outranking you.
    Yes, Google did a major algorithm update in between Sept&Oct. Might be that Shops have been affected but we do not see a general trend until today, which makes us pretty confident, that there is no disadvantage coming from that.

But what I see is that your shop is listed at the end of page 3 in Google’s search results. :chart_with_downwards_trend: This is okay for a standalone shop but not the best for your customers to find you.

As your shop has not a very high SEO power (coming from content that Google would see as relevant for visitors) you´ve been ranked to this position. Now, I don´t know the position of your shop before, I can only assume that maybe another page popped up with a similar offer. Maybe it has had a slightly better SEO & content, and in the end you´ve been outranked.
Now customers don´t see your shop and you´re experiencing a drop in sales.

What to do now?
Work on your SEO and your content!

Increase your shop’s design range and continue to focus clearly on your topic.
Think further! Which usecase do customers have in mind when searching for glowing tees?
Add more of these!

Decrease the number of mis-matching product colors. Not every shirt color works with glow-in-the-dark designs. Too many choices confuse customers.

Add more content by using the new Start Page Options (Shop Admin > Page Settings > Start Page) e.g. You can add texts and several moody images to the Shop’s About Us section.

Verify your Shop´s URL with Google´s Search Console and submit it to their indexing pipeline!
This will tell Google to come and crawl your shop again.

Do some basic marketing!
Create Model images with Placeit.net and upload them to your Pinterest account. Google will love you for that.
In some weeks your model images will appear not only at Pinterest’s search results, they will also appear in Google’s search results. This will make it much easier for customers to find your products.

Let me know if this helped you :slight_smile:

1 Like

ouch! and maybe it is related to your reported issues over here: How to integrate your Spreadshop into your Blog

I contacted Spreadshirt directly on this since there was a delay on the answer.

Apparently a lot of my sales were generated through the Custom Text Tool, which has now been removed.

This is disappointing. I had two stores that actually had consistent sales, but I haven’t had any MARKETPLACE SALES either which are generally consistent!

I am a Website Coordinator, I work in Marketing with 10+ years of experience with eCommerce and online retailers, and a lot of my items DID HAVE SEO set up for them until this change took place. Your lengthy response seems to blame me more than all the changes that were made on Spreadshirt’s end of things. Please consider, some of us are much older and/or more experienced and this comes off as offensive.

You are also advising me to SPEND MORE MONEY when Spreadshirt is taking more and more away from us. My accounts with other POD companies are THRIVING some tied in with the same themes/artwork I have here, this is the only one that is going bust.

Of course my Spreadshirt ranking statistics are bad! I was forwarding Spreadshirt to my own URLs where I integrated my shops… ugh…

I wasn’t worried about the actual quantity, I was concerned the drop indicated a total disconnect of any sales I should be credited to breaking away from my actual account.

Well, this changes everything. Knowing about that fact in advance would not have lead to my “lengthy” but for you non-satisfying answer. As explained, I could only assume upon your given facts.
See, my intent was to find a reasonable explanation based up on your message.
And I am always open to brainstorm handy solutions and to give advise to people in need.
If you feel ranted about your web experience, this was and is not intendet by me.