Building a Better Store
Hello, there! Sorry for the radio silence, and shout out to Korcenton for keeping me honest on the blog posts. I took a week off because my parents were in town, and since, I have been continuing this process of streamlining what I do on the channel. Apologies in advance, this one is going to be a long-winded meta-post about learning to run a social-influencer-whatever-presence because that’s most of what I have been focusing on lately. Don’t worry, this week I’m going to be working on a Bender Rodriguez costume for Halloween (and conventions hopefully) so, stay tuned for that!
The big hiccup this week was about the store. At the time of posting this, it is actually offline. Haven’t had this situation since launching on Squarespace, but it’s not their fault. I really like this hosting service over the previous one I was using. I can sort of blame the printing service that I use, Printful, but if I’m being honest the responsibility mostly lies with me. For starters, I selected the cheapest option possible that delivered a quality product, and to be fair, I will say that the stuff I got from Printful has held up nicely through multiple washes.
By the way I’m not sponsored by Printful, or Squarespace, or anyone actually. I just wanted to say something honest and nice before I kinda bitch about their services a little bit.
The thing about trying to go for cheapest print shop with a quality product is that other things… like customer service and feature development, for example, might not be as good. Printful’s site functions, but you have to poke around a bit to find shipping rates for products. When you do, you find a clunky list of dropdown menus covering all the product categories, each containing a small table of countries and shipping rates. Why this can’t be displayed along side other price information displayed next to products via a link or dropdown menu? I’m not sure, but maybe it’s there and I just missed it. It’s more likely than I care to admit.
After sifting through the menus for a while, I was able to get a spreadsheet built organizing my products and the prices for shipping. For each category, there is a starting rate for the first item and a lower rate for additional items. Makes perfect sense, so I go to plug that into Squarespace. Except the pricing system in Squarespace’s store is, like, missing features. Setting aside the fact that built-in integration with Printful should mean the pricing—with all taxes and fees—is passed through to the customer seamlessly without any backend bullshit, the backend bullshit doesn’t even work the way it intuitively should.
You can set a shipping rule in a Squarespace store by selecting the countries it applies to. Then, you have two options. For the group of countries you selected, you can either have:
A) Flat rate shipping, including two different rates for first and additional products, but the same rates apply across all products, or
B) Shipping by weight, which would apply more if I were shipping things myself
There was also a third option to have FedEx, USPS, or whoever calculate shipping for your products, but that costs extra money and still likely wouldn’t be very accurate to Printful’s rates, which should just be passed through to Squarespace while the order is happening. The end result is that I end up doing my best to calculate a shipping rate for each region that keeps me in a profit range of $2-$5 or so depending on Printful’s shipping rate for the product. I thought that worked, and I was sitting pretty with my basic product line and not really pushing it in the stream. However, when I started plugging the merch store, and I got an order, I found out I was missing some information.
One big one is totally on me, as I did forget that Printful would charge me tax on every order that went through. That said, $5-$10 worth of additional fees for shipping to certain countries, and some products that don’t ship outside the US at all, feels like something that should be in bold type somewhere. My pricing matrix did not protect me, and I would have ended up owing money on the order if the whole thing didn’t roll over because mugs are apparently only for Americans, according to Printful. I ended up having to build the whole price matrix again, and this time my baseline costs are not calculated on my end. I am in the process of going through every single product in the store and running a test sale in each region I can ship to. It’s been a long process and it’s not over, but when I’m done and the store is up I suspect I will share it in a blog post, just so I can be fully transparent about what profit I get and where, as I know for some that may impact their decision.
It looks like there is a new feature which may work in a roundabout way to fix my shipping problem. I’ll try to post a mini-update when this situation is fully resolved, but that’s not all that needed addressing this week. I’ve been looking at simplifying and streamlining the channel, and one fun thing that came from it is the return of the blue screen. In previous set-ups, the blue screen was the bane of my existence. They work great, but mine isn’t a real one. My bluescreen is a nearly-chromakey-blue sheet of fabric that has a stitch in the middle where I brought two pieces together to make the whole thing wider. It’s not exactly an optimal scenario, so I’m working on improving it. More on that when I get it set up with lighting and a track to hide it away and everything, but that’s it for now. Thanks for reading! It’s been a blast as always. I’ll see you in the next one.
