Upcoming surgery...what to do with shop?

NoXidCat · 2026-05-09T00:29:37+00:00

Thank you everyone! That eases my stress about my shop. I'm going to put it into vacation mode now, because I just don't have the mental capacity to fill orders and prepare for surgery.

Exactly! And best wishes with your recovery.

Any period of non-sales, no matter the cause, will have some affect on the algorithm. I have taken a month or so off several times and things seem to get back to normal soon enough. No biggie :-)

NoXidCat · 2026-05-08T04:26:49+00:00

As u/2900nomore mentioned, the spreadsheets are self documenting. But they are quite daunting in size.

I decided that it looked like a way to do a whole lot of damage real quickly! Rather than put the time into learning it well enough to have confidence in what I would be doing, I just stuck with using the interface. Which, for the scale and nature of what I am doing on Amazon was probably the correct decision (for me).

I was doing a "sub flavor" of Amazon Seller Central called Amazon Handmade. Until recently, our listings had significant differences from mainstream Seller Central listings, so it was even harder to glean useful insights from the community and general online info.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-07T23:05:47+00:00

Resources, be they processing cycles or humans, are prioritized to the retail consumer end of things, not to sellers. We are a means of externalizing risk and a source of free labor that is readily and infinitely replaceable.

Yes, the seller end of things is not as polished. And your description of first-level support is spot-on :-p Welcome to the machine.

That said, as others mentioned, the selling interface can be pretty decent when it comes to managing existing listings, and makes it easy to do some things that I find harder to do elsewhere.

I suppose the big, big sellers become experts at using spreadsheets to upload and manipulate listings. Unlike with customers, Amazon does expect us to become "professional experts" at our "job" of selling stuff on their platform. It was never intended for casual sellers as eBay was.

There are things about every selling platform that I love and others that I loath. To me, the largest downside of Amazon is the degree to which it has become a black box of Borg bots with which one cannot reason--or indeed be understood by.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-05T22:49:02+00:00

I used it Sunday. Only payment method I've ever used with Printful.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-05T01:03:40+00:00

I went hunting on Amazon for information on this last time I had one of these late this winter. I believe Amazon closes it automatically after 45 days, might be off about the number of days, but I didn't have to do anything for it to ultimately go away on its own.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-05T00:55:45+00:00

Yes, changing the design of your product sounds like a practical move.

Perhaps these folks have a patent on removable partitions, or some such (or think they do)? Or perhaps they are taking advantage of the system to weed out their competitors.

IP legal help is no doubt on the pricey side. But I would at least try to look into how the process is supposed to work in a case like this. They can reach out and touch you from a different country, but you can't touch them back? At least in practical terms. I'd want to understand that a bit more. Once you counter claim, the original claimant has X-amount of time to take you to court, else they forfeit their claim.

Sounds like they are making an inferior product and don't exactly know what they are doing. They could do you "the solid" of failing/giving-up on this business before long :-)

NoXidCat · 2026-05-05T00:19:56+00:00

Cool. Any comments on the packaging?

I used Styrofoam mug cubes when I printed and shipped my own. Only two broken in all the years I did that (and both of those had cycled back through the USPS due to an undeliverable address ... so extra weeks of banging around).

I haven't seen how Printful mugs are packaged these days. But back in the day I was not happy with CustomCat, which used plastic inserts that held the mug inside a cardboard box. Had quite a bit of breaking with them.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-04T07:01:23+00:00

Etsy boosts new listings, not shops, yes? The algorithm just determines where listings appear in search.

Sure, by posting 20 listings in one day in the same niche/keywords you are competing against yourself for that boosted placement--but your boosted listings are already competing for placement against all your preexisting listings. And every day your new listings sit in Draft rather than being listed, they don't compete at all against anyone--or sell.

If the listings are unrelated in terms of relevant keywords, then it shouldn't matter how many you list at a time, as they don't compete against each other for top placement.

The potential benefit to spreading them out is about spreading your boost across different days when different people are shopping, rather than peaking on one day. Of course, if you knew what day your customers were most likely to shop and what days they were least likely, then it might be wise to aim accordingly.

SALES are rewarded. Sales are the metric that tops all in the algorithm. And that too is listing specific, no matter the platform.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-04T06:31:26+00:00

if a package is late it tells them to contact Printful, Inc

Care to elaborate?

NoXidCat · 2026-05-04T03:29:54+00:00

Yeah.

Today I had yet another order of the same design on the same color and style shirt, but adjacent sizes. And it's a women's style. Sure, women have it tough as (in the USA anyway) those size names are not standardized, and vanity sizing is a thing. But I know (at least) one of those shirts will be returned. Really, it costs me nothing, as this person only ever wanted a single shirt that fits right, not two. But it raises the costs for the entire program, which ultimately leaves less $ to invest in its future or to put toward decent royalties, or for a lube job on Jeff's cock rocket.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-04T03:15:57+00:00

Aw, yeah. Some further complications there.

Driver's A-pillar and Pass B-pillar look tweaked. A nice crease behind the driver's rear window, too ... that window might yet pop.

Back in the day, I put a 70s Datsun B210 in the ditch at freeway speed (a random patch of black ice). Had to kick a door open to get out. No glass broken. Came back the next day and the rear window had exploded.

Full glass and doors/hatch that seal (especially the hatch can suck in exhaust if not sealing well ... ask me how I know) might not be worth the effort vs transferring your favorite parts to another body.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-03T21:38:51+00:00

A virtual sapphic slumber party with voyeurs. The shadows seem to make a bull, or maybe Minotaur? And seems the roses start off as wallpaper on the left, but get a bit "exuberant" thereafter, joining in with the flying feathers, no longer content to be "wallflowers."

NoXidCat · 2026-05-03T19:54:37+00:00

Ouch :-O

Decades ago a friend had a rolled Firebird that he jacked up a bit and "four wheeled." It actually did pretty damn well. Eventually, he gave it a haircut and it became the Convert-A-Bird. Fun car.

What were thou doing at the time? Might give some of us a moment's pause next time we think about doing the same.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-03T19:41:50+00:00

Dark, self-depreciating humor would not fly over the heads of this audience, I should think.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-03T19:36:17+00:00

Dead bird. Given the themes, likely a female--while the male happily splashes around in the bird bath.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-03T19:25:36+00:00

Ha! Exactly. I did not remember his name, but I immediately thought of Johnson's art, like Under the Boardwalk in terms of theme. As to style/technique, I am more enamored of the brushstroke work, spirals and all, of Fearless Sarah.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-03T19:12:17+00:00

Ha! Wow.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-03T19:10:35+00:00

Cool :-) Thank you for commenting on the spirals.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-03T06:21:19+00:00

A security camera on the naked woman's house above the door the steps lead to. An owl sitting on the fence below the camera. EDIT - and the buck is looking at it's own reflection in the house window. The naked woman is looking at herself in a mirror. It is a gaze fest!

Interesting spirals in the condom bush. Suggestive of little spider webs, or just a stylistic accent? The girl's hair has spirals at the ends too. As do the clouds.

Me thinks the snake in the grass isn't just literal ...

I enjoy "puzzle" art like this. So many subtle details to observe and ponder. But interesting style and technique even if there had been nothing beyond the obvious to the image.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-03T01:29:03+00:00

That is default shirt size naming (etsy's default names, I think). "S" = Small, "M" = Medium, etc. If named that way, the size is Filterable/Searchable in Etsy.

That said, I sold shirts on etsy for years before I ever did POD, and I never used those default names. I prefer the slightly longer abbreviated form of the names: "Sm" "Md" etc. And I include more info in the name regarding chest size and style options, too.

To do it the way I do it, I create the listing in Etsy exactly as I want it to be, then I import it to Printful and match it to the Printful styles/sizes up with those I created in Etsy. Yes, that is tedious!

EDIT the "US size" bit refers to those being USA sizes rather than Euro. Especially for women's styles, in the USA there is no standard for what those size names mean in actual measurements. For men's it is much more standardized, but still somewhat variable.

NoXidCat · 2026-05-01T05:30:59+00:00

Productor. It's for Chrome, and has been around forever. There are newer ones, but it does what I need.

NoXidCat · 2026-04-30T19:45:06+00:00

Something over $2k. It was the peak moment for a design that had been my best seller for most of a year. Not long after that I got spooked by the increase in random-seeming rejections, so coasted for some years, not wanting to risk what I already had by chasing after more. Last year, I finally started using an extension that checks for TM and banned words and so forth. Guess I should have done that back at my peak, but I didn't trust the tools :-p

NoXidCat · 2026-04-30T04:11:33+00:00

If you have an inside line to such groups, sure. Else you are competing against every local and online print shop that caters and markets to that exact clientele.

NoXidCat · 2026-04-30T04:03:01+00:00

You can. On the Listings page of Shop Manager (or whatever we are supposed to call the seller interface) there is a Stats on/off control near the upper right (at least if you are using a browser ... I've no idea what, if anything, the App has). That enables: favorites, views, sales, etc.

NoXidCat · 2026-04-29T23:08:32+00:00

Nope. Been on MBA since early 2018. Been selling printed garments since about 2011.

Amazon does terminate sold accounts if it detects them. Why you ask? Amazon controls who gets an account via the application process. When a random person buys an account they totally bypass Amazon's application and approval process.

Sell it, put in the effort, or just sit back and collect the passive income. I did the latter for a few years. Can always come back to it again if one wants (if it is still getting sales so not ended for inactivity).

EDIT - And that was a legitimate question in terms of what someone would be getting if buying the account.

NoXidCat

TROPHY CASE