In our 2018 preview blogpost, we promised that we would be more transparent in our communication about upcoming shop releases. So, with each release of a new SpreadShop version, Robert, the product owner of the SpreadShop, will give you a short overview about the latest updates.
Today our shop team released a new search backend for some of our SpreadShops.
You may be asking: why add a new search backend, and why for only some shops?
At Spreadshirt we currently have two shop models: an article-based shop and a, as we call it, flexi-product-based shop. For you as a shop owner, this might sound confusing. Honestly, it is, but this differentiation is extremely important for us and all future projects.
So, today’s release only impacts “flexi-product shops”. You have one of these if you use the new partner area. This means:
- You create products in bulk (upload one design and get up to 80 products automatically generated for your shop)
- Your shop administration can be found under partner.spreadshirt.net.xyz.
Since today’s release:
- Our old search infrastructure had some troubles from time to time. You may have published something, but it did not show up in your shop for hours or days. This problem is solved, and everything you publish should be in your shop within seconds.
- Customers in your shop get results displayed faster.
- All newly-published designs show up on top of your list (this was sometimes broken).
- We removed the option to sort each product individually, as this feature caused quite some pain and did not bring value to your customers.
- Links in the navigation that caused a 404 were reworked to reduce the number of error pages we show to your customers.
Also, today’s release is the foundation for some essential changes in 2018. We are going to introduce new list and detail pages, shop collections and a shop homepage this year. This will only be possible using our new search infrastructure.
But there was also something for “all” shops. We released our initial version of sitemaps to make your shops know to google and we fixed problems for article based shops that have the “show other products with this design” feature activated. From now on you will see all product types (e.g. all t-shirts) in a category instead of just a selection of 4.
Do you have questions? Feel free to comment below and let us know your feedback.
wpDiscuz
Perhaps this is already in the works, but it would be nice to have some more sophisticated search logic, if not for the customers, for the purpose of linking people to a subset of designs. For example, let’s say I have two versions of a design (“Strong – Abstract Characters”), one in white and one in black. I’d like to send people who want the design to a page showing an outcome of a search for that design. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, if I enter “strong” and “abstract” into the search field the return includes everything that has either of those words, instead of both. Putting the words in quotations marks (which is what google uses to indicate that you want an exact match) does not seem to help. I figured out a workaround (and arbitrary part of the design name that is the same for both designs), but more advanced search features would be very helpful.
Hi Scott,
Thank you for the feedback. We will take this into our backlog. A timeline is nothing we can provide right now, though.
Kind regards
The Shop Team
Reading this (and other) spreadshirt blogs is so refreshing because you tell it like it is, without disguising facts. Thank you.
Hello,
As a seller, is there a way to know the base prices of each product? In that way I could easily select the ones I am most interested in.
Hi Jorge, currently unfortunately not. I’ll transfer your feedback though.