The newest t-shirt sales come first: monthly update for May, 2016
Jun 18, 2016 — During the month of May we overhauled what t-shirts you see first on Day of the Shirt: we now default to showing the newest t-shirt designs first. We’ll think you’ll like this change to the default ordering and here’s why:
The previous default, displaying Popular Merchants first, was optimized for new visitors who had never been to Day of the Shirt before, orienting them by showing websites they may already be familiar with.
But once you start using Day of the Shirt regularly, visiting us every day (if not multiple times a day), you’re most likely looking for new designs and sales you’ve never seen before. This matched the feedback we regularly receive: people didn’t like scrolling through t-shirts they had already seen.
Day of the Shirt always has the option to re-order t-shirts: ordering them by Popular Merchants (the previous default), Newest, and by Price. But when we looked at our analytics 78% of visitors never changed the default ordering. This means most of our users were not having what we believe is the best experience.
So… we changed our default to display the newest designs first.
And then we asked for more feedback: 82% of respondents agreed with us that they’d like to see the newest t-shirts listed first. We also received a lot of great suggestions for how to further improve the t-shirt discovery experience, which I’m eager to get started on.
This change really made the month of May great for us, especially when received feedback like this:
Honestly you guys are doing an awesome job getting all these shirts together. Keep it up 👍 😁
Thanks everybody and we hope we can continue improving the daily t-shirt discovery experience.
Monthly update for April, 2016
May 3, 2016 — I have to admit I was a bit distracted in April…
Releasing an Android App!
Our new Android App is awesome. The development was done by DominikTV, who did an amazing job. There will be a longer write-up on the app soon, but I’ve been busy emailing everyone who ever contacted us asking for an Android App to say here it is.
In addition to the Android app, I made some invisible improvements to help our SEO i.e. help t-shirt buyers find Day of the Shirt.
How can we make your t-shirt shopping experience better? Email us at [email protected] or tweet us at @dayoftheshirt._
Monthly update for March, 2016
Apr 6, 2016 — Having fallen behind on the weekly updates, I’ve moved to doing a monthly update.
You may have noticed that shirts on our front-page seem slightly… fresher. We’re experimenting with removing designs that are older than 5 days from our front-page, even if they’re still on for sale on the merchant’s website. After getting feedback from more than a few people along the lines of “I’ve scrolled past the same shirt all month” we decided to take action by hiding older sales. I expect to do more experiments like this to make the t-shirt discovery experience better.
Otherwise, March was a relatively quiet month of keeping all the plates spinning: Pampling, Pop-Up-Tees, SnappyKid and Othertees all updated their websites, necessitating updating our scripts for Day of the Shirt. I also made our internal scripts more reliable by having them retry if they encounter a network error when fetching a new t-shirt design.
Have experiment ideas for improving t-shirt browsing on Day of the Shirt? Email us at [email protected] or tweet us at @dayoftheshirt.
Another Fine to Zebra Tees: memories of t-shirt websites past and gone
Feb 16, 2016 — There are a lot daily pop-culture t-shirt websites. We should know: Day of the Shirt is tracking 45 of them right now, as you read this. But, not all of them last forever. We went on a dinosaur hunt though our archives and discovered 19 t-shirt websites that had gone extinct. Perhaps you remember them:
Another Fine Tee, Arteesel, Blue Box Tees, Comic Strip Tees, Companion Tees, Cosmos Tees, Gimmick Tees, Goodjoe, Limiteed, MuzikShirt, Nowhere Bad, SpookyTees, Tee-1000, TeeRaiders, Timey Wimey Tees, Tshirt Fight, Ubertee, Weekly Shirts, and Zebra Tees.
More than just a shirt
These websites didn’t just sell pop-culture designs, many had a unique hook. Goodjoe focused on community and volunteerism. Comic Strip Tees printed a monthly comic. MuzikShirt focused on music and audio paraphernalia. Zebra Shirts printed every design in black and white. SpookyTees were, well, spooky with a Halloween horror theme all year round. And you can probably pick out the websites dedicated to Doctor Who (hint: there are more than one). And T-Shirt Fight posted 2 designs and let buyers choose the winner.
Victims of success
So what happened? We can’t say for certain, but sometimes it’s too much of a good thing. For a small 2-3 person company, their most valuable commodity is time. And that time has to be divided into several different areas, such as finding artists, ordering materials and blank t-shirts, printing, shipping and fulfillment, customer service, marketing, and, of course, updating the website itself.
An unexpected flood of orders can actually be bad for business: not having enough blanks in stock may cause printing and fulfillment delays; even a tiny percentage of packages lost in transit results in a big absolute number. And when customer service gets overloaded, unhappy buyers take to social media and initiate expensive charge-backs. Even after things recover and customers receive their orders, it can be enough to throw in the towel.
T-shirts are for forever
T-shirts are a durable commodity and all of us fans are what keep these small businesses around the world designing, printing and shipping t-shirts every day. While running a design and production shop can be daunting (and rightly so) we take solace that T-shirts and their designs can live on in our closets and dressers long after the website stops loading. After all, that’s what keeps us coming back for more.
Do you have a story about a t-shirt or website that’s long gone? We’d love to hear it. Email us at [email protected] or tweet us at @dayoftheshirt.
Weekly update for February 14, 2015
Feb 16, 2016 — It’s Valentines Day so I’ll be keeping this update even briefer than last week:
- Some not-t-shirt items were erroneously showing up on the front page. I booted them with better filtering.
- The Twitter feed no longer uses Bit.ly for URL shortening. This is 2015 and Twitter can shorten its own URLs.
- I worked on a feature article to be published soon so these weekly updates are less lonely.
Are you spending today with a loved one instead of obsessing over t-shirts? Don’t let this post interrupt you, but please tell us tomorrow how we can improve Day of the Shirt. Email us at [email protected] or tweet us at @dayoftheshirt.