New Shipping Rates

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Just a quick post here to let you know we’ve added several new garments to the Teescape Fulfillment App recently.  Also, we have REDUCED THE PRICE on the Fruit of the Loom t-shirt.  It’s now the same price as the Gildan.

We’ve added the Hanes Nano-T and Anvil 980 Fashion Tee as options.  These are both great shirts that offer more of a “premium” feel, a little softer and lighter than the standard tees, for just a little more cost.  Hanes is a more-recognized brand name than Gildan or Canvas and some store owners had asked for that.  The Anvil 980 is regularly being requested.

To fill a special request, we also added the Anvil Ladies Featherweight V-Neck.  We just couldn’t find a good option in a ladies v-neck that came in yellow.  But this one comes with a Warning – this shirt is not stocked deeply by our warehouse vendor.  So if too many people start ordering them, product procurement could result in some delays, possibly long ones.  Unless you really need to sell this shirt, we recommend you stick with the Bella Deep-V or the Canvas Unisex V-neck.

We now also have a mens/unisex tank top – the Canvas Unisex Tank (3480).  This is a great lightweight tank, available in a number of great colors, and many of them are in-stock on our own shelves for super-fast turnaround.  And speaking of inventory, we’ve started to stock more colors of the Gildan Short-Sleeve, to speed up turnaround times on many orders for those shirts.

PRODUCT ISSUES

There are just a couple issues we’ve been having lately.  In the Gildan Short-Sleeve, in colors Charcoal, Indigo Blue, and Military Green, we’ve been having some staining issues when the shirts come off the press.  This may just be a temporary problem due to a bad or different dye lot.  But for now, we are substituting the Fruit of the Loom shirt for those colors of the Gildan.

The Gildan Full-Zip Hoodie is another recent addition.  We’ve discovered that the garment image we have may not be very accurate and the pocket is actually much shorter, at least on some sizes of that product.  We can’t print on the pocket, so the available print area in the app is shorter than it needs to be in many cases.   We are working on this, and hopefully will get some new product images.  In the mean time, we recommend you only use this product with designs that are wider than they are tall, and position the artwork roughly in the center of the print area.  Short and wide designs work best.  We’ll update as soon as we can come up with a solution and more information.

PRODUCT SUGGESTIONS

As always, we welcome your suggestions on products that you would like to see in the app.  If you have a suggestion, just send us an email to support@teescape.com and let us know.

Please keep in mind, we get lots of suggestions, and we can’t add them all.  Except in one case I mentioned above, we are sticking to our policy of only adding products that are readily available so we don’t run out and have delays in getting products to your customers.

Thanks to all of you for your business!

Talk again soon,

Jeff

The post Product Updates and Issues appeared first on Teescape.

Shopify store owners often ask questions like “What’s the best format for the artwork I upload to the Teescape App?”

While our Uploader and Design Studio support a number of formats, some are better than others.  So I thought I would make this post to let you in on the best way to format your artwork and get the best results with your printing.

Because a LOT of our users are using Adobe Photoshop to create their artwork, I’ll explain this based on how to do this in Photoshop, although any other programs you are using should have similar features.  After that, I’ll talk a little about steps you should take in Adobe Illustrator.

The #1 best way to upload your artwork is in transparent PNG format.  Technically, your image should be at least 12 inches wide, at 200 dpi.  But I prefer to think of sizing in pixels, because if you do, things like “DPI” don’t really matter.  In those terms, your artwork for a full-width design, should be between 2400 and 3000 pixels wide.  If it’s much smaller or larger than that, it’s possible some distortion could result from the way we dynamically size the artwork when preparing it for printing.

In addition to all that, I recommend you trim any excess blank transparent space from around your image, just because that may make it easier to work with in our Uploader or Design Studio.

OK, so here’s how you do all this in Photoshop.  So let’s say you’re ready to create a shirt and you’ve designed the following artwork:

The first step is to trim all that extra space around the image.  In Photoshop, you click the Image menu, then click Trim, and you’ll see a window that looks like this:

You’ll want to select the options as shown, and then click OK.  Your artwork will now look like this:

The next thing I do, to make sure it’s saved in the correct format, is to click the File menu, then click Save for Web and Devices.  This opens a window with several options on the right side.  You should choose the options as shown in the screenshot at the right.

Most importantly, choose the PNG-24 options at the top, make sure that Transparency is checked, and check the box for Convert to sRGB.

Also, you can see that I’ve entered 2400 for the width in pixels.

After you’ve done all that, you can click the Save button, and your artwork will be saved in the optimum format and size for uploading either to the Uploader or the Design Studio in the Teescape App.

More below…

Let’s Talk About Adobe Illustrator

Vector art, created in Adobe Illustrator format, is actually a great option.  I probably could have said at the beginning of this post that vector art in an Illustrator AI file is #1, except I have to make it #2 just because so few of our users actually have Illustrator and work with it.  But if you do, that’s great, and here’s what you should know.

You could use the Save for Web and Devices option in Illustrator to save your file to a PNG, similar to what we did in Photoshop above, but the Teescape App can work with Illustrator AI files directly.  There are some limitations, so you need to use the following steps to get the best possible results.

First, go to the File menu, then Document Color Mode, and make sure that RGB Color is selected.

Next, make sure that any text included in your design is converted to outlines.  To do this, you select each text element, and click the Type menu, and click Create Outlines.  Otherwise your text may end up looking funny because our system does have the fonts you used.

Also, if your AI file includes any bitmap images, they need to be embedded in the AI file, rather than linked to the bitmap file on your hard drive.  If they are only linked to a file on your hard drive, our system won’t have that part of your design, or may just get an error when you upload it.

Then, I recommend you remove excess empty space from around the design.  I like to click the File menu, go to Document Setup, and then the Edit Artboards button and resize the artboard so it’s close to the size of the design itself.  This is probably not required, but it’s something I like to do.

Finally, when saving the file, I recommend you choose CS3 as the format, just because we know that the CS3 format is reasonably-well supported in the Teescape App.

Lastly, you should know that the Illustrator support in the Teescape App, although it has worked pretty good in our own testing, may not work perfectly with every design, especially if it includes any of the more “advanced” features of Illustrator.

The best, and most important, thing you can do is pay attention to what your design looks like when you upload it to the Teescape App.  What you see is what you get, so if anything looks wrong, it’s almost guaranteed to print wrong.

If you have any problems using our App with Illustrator files, please let us know.  You can try to fix your design and make it work by taking any parts of your design that use any advanced features and converting them to simple outlines.  You might also try saving your file to an even older version, like Illustrator 9, to get Illustrator to simplify the artwork automatically.

And remember, if all else fails, you can always use the Save for Web and Devices to save your file as a PNG.  Just remember that when you do this, check the Image Size.  Illustrator will almost always want to save the file too small, and you’ll need to increase the pixel dimensions to a size between 2400 and 3000 pixels wide.

I hope this helps answer some of those questions.

If you still have questions about artwork, or anything else, please contact us at support@teescape.com.  We’re here to help and sincerely want you to produce the best looking shirts possible.

Thanks,

Jeff

The post Formatting Artwork for The Teescape Fulfillment App appeared first on Teescape.

So I should start off by letting you know that I’m not a writer, and not very creative.  I don’t even know how to write a blog or what should be in it, so I’m just going to share some information here, and hopefully you’ll find it helpful.  If not, well, then, I guess you don’t have to read it.  But I hope you do.

New Things at Teescape

Our development team has been working on a lot of “behind-the-scenes” stuff, the things you wouldn’t really notice if I didn’t tell you.  They’ve made some big improvements on how we process artwork files for stickers/decals.  They’re also working on some updates that will further improve how artwork is processed for printing on shirts.  Not that there’s anything wrong with it now, but they’re always looking for ways to make it better.

We’re looking at adding a couple more product styles soon.  If you have any suggestions or anything specific you would like us to make available in the App, please let us know and we’ll see what we can do.

The biggest addition lately is that we just added Paypal as a payment method for both automatic and manual order processing.  So here’s more info on that…

About Using Paypal with the Teescape App

First, I’ll talk about Auto Order Processing with Paypal in the Teescape App.  To configure Auto Order Processing with Paypal, you go to the Settings page in the Teescape App, and when you click “Select Auto Payment Method” or “Select Backup Method”, you’ll see an orange button to “Add New Paypal Account”.  When you select this, you’ll be taken to Paypal.

If you’ve used Paypal to buy things online before, you’re probably familiar with the Express Checkout, which takes you to Paypal to authorize a one-time purchase for something you are buying online.

In our App, when you Add a New Paypal Account, it works like an Express Checkout, but instead what you are doing is completing a billing agreement, basically authorizing Teescape to charge your account when needed for processing orders, automatically, without any interaction from you.  This makes your Paypal account able to work just like a Credit Card that you’ve provided to us as a payment method.

In order for this to work, you need to have what Paypal calls an “instant” payment method setup in your Paypal account.  This means it has to be either from available balance in your Paypal account, or a credit or debit card.  I don’t think it will work if you just have a bank account set up as the payment method, because I don’t think that’s considered “instant”, because it takes some time for bank transfers to complete.

Using Paypal for Manually Processing Orders

If you do not use Auto Order Processing in the Teescape App, you can still process orders with Paypal.  When you select orders on the Order page in the App, and choose to Manually Process them, you will now see a button to “Pay with Paypal Express Checkout”.  You can use this to process orders this one time with Paypal, without even storing your Paypal account as a payment method in Teescape.

At the same time, you can also click the “Set Alternate Payment Method” button to add a stored payment method, and there you can add a Paypal method just like you would for Auto Order Processing.  If you add your Paypal account this way, you can still continue to manually process orders, but you’ll be able to do so just by selecting your Paypal method when you process, without having to go out to the Paypal Express Checkout site.

That’s about it for now…

That’s really all I have to talk about for now.  But I’ll be adding more soon.

If you have any issues or find any problems with the new Paypal processing, or anything else, please be sure and send us an email and let us know.

Thanks!

Jeff

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