Review of March 2021

A lot has happened in the last two months. Between relocation, new features and fixes for problems of some users it has become a bit quiet around the announcements. So in the interest of transparency we would like to tell you what our main topics were in the end of February and the whole month of March as well as give you an insight into what will be planned or worked on in the near future.

• The captcha autosolver has been improved and can currently still be used for free.
• The upload process for Zazzle templates was implemented
• The upload process for Society6 has been completely renewed, allowing you to activate all products & sizes. Even if you only have a design of the MBA standard size.
• Performance updates for MacOS
• Filetype validation: The tool now warns you if you have loaded the wrong filetype by mistake
• Bugs that occurred when importing with Custom Excel Import have been fixed
• If Bad Words occur in the title or description of Spreadshirt, the upload for this design is aborted and the user is informed (so no more retries that consume an upload slot of the daily limit)
• Slow typing in MBA has been fixed for Mac devices
• Teepublic website changes were handled by LazyMerch
• Improved our auto-translation, especially for KDP, where html tags are no longer mistakenly detected as text to be translated
• Zazzle website changes were handled by LazyMerch
• Teepublic website changes (Adults Only query) was handled by LazyMerch
• Daily upload limits: LazyMerch now detects when the daily upload limit of all platforms or the slot limit of MBA has been reached, pauses the upload for the affected platform and issues an appropriate message to the user.
• Free accounts for users for whom a subscription is not yet worthwhile. The accounts are limited in the number of monthly uploads, but can make it easier to get started with POD.

As you know, we can’t always plan everything reliably in terms of time, because we have to react quickly to platform changes or bugs. But now let’s get to the things that you can expect in the next few months as part of your subscription and that we would like to implement as soon as possible:

• Whitelist & Blacklist: As helpful as our TM Check capabilities are, we weren’t completely satisfied with them. Your feedback regarding the many warnings when TMs were found was reason enough for us to come up with something smart here. We will implement whitelists where you can add TMs that you don’t want to be marked anymore. On the blacklists you will be able to enter words & phrases which will then make sure that you will be warned if one of these entries is in your listing. The blacklists will be very helpful for Spreadshirt, because on this platform sometimes bad words exist, which could hide somewhat inconspicuously in the listing and then lead to an error during the upload, such as the word “ball”. So that you don’t have to blacklist a word for all platforms here, you will be able to set this for individual platforms.
• Custom Excel Import Rework: This topic will be a very large task for us and is therefore difficult to explain in a few sentences. Our current Custom Excel Import feature is a bit cumbersome. Yes, it kind of works, but it’s not what meets our standards of a smart, efficient and innovative tool. It’s complicated and not intuitive to use. We want to change that. We want to design a rework that adapts to the different use cases of our users, and that doesn’t restrict anyone in their work. Along with this, there will also be significant improvements to our user interface, which should make the workspace even clearer and easier to use.
• Deepl API Key: This is a feature you requested and we are happy to implement. It should be possible to enter your own DeepL Pro Key in the tool, so that it is no longer translated via LazyMerch. Especially users, who did not get along with the free translation characters provided by us, were dependent on our additional translation character packages. Since we can’t offer the characters at the same price as DeepL due to taxes and additional costs, understandably not every power user was happy with it. Our translation character packages will continue to be available, but we want to make it possible for every user to opt out and enter their own key.