This article will discuss my experiences using Spreadconnect. I used this service on two different online stores—my small Dutch webshop (now gone) and my larger international webshop—to provide automatic fulfilment of merchandise (or “physical goods” in general).
This article is not sponsored, there are no affiliate links, I have no bias, nothing of the sort. I reluctantly created online stores because I needed some way to earn money as an artist and creative person.
Additionally, I don’t like being beholden to a single platform. (What if that platform suddenly raises all their prices? Or goes out of business? I’d lose my entire shop at once!) I tried ~8 different POD platforms behind the scenes, which means I’ll be drawing a lot of comparisons.
For more information, check out my longest (and first) review about Printful
As such, I believe my thoughts on this platform will be the most brutally honest out of any reviews you can find.
As always, I’ll try to keep it brief and practical! However, actually using multiple POD (print-on-demand) platforms on multiple large webshops that I custom-built myself … is bound to give me a lot of nitty-gritty in-depth experience with every part of it. And I don’t want to leave anything out.
What is Spreadconnect?
For a start, it is not the same thing as Spreadshirt/Spreadshop, though they are obviously part of the same general organization.
Spreadshirt/Spreadshop is an online store by itself. When you make an account there, you can design products and let them host your website or display the products in their marketplace. It’s meant for people who don’t want to (or can’t) host their own website or store.
Spreadconnect is a print-on-demand platform. You still need your own storefront (such as Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce). Within Spreadconnect, you merely design your products and then send them to your integration. They handle all the production and shipping, while you must handle the rest.
It’s one of the smaller players in this field. Many articles don’t even mention it. Then why did I try them? What’s different?
First of all, they are more local. Based in Germany, they have excellent coverage for any shipping zone I want to support on my Dutch webshop. It also means there’s no mismatch between our European rules, currencies and way of doing things and that of American companies.
Secondly, they have a higher focus on sustainability and a more usable shipping fee arrangement than some other places. After trying to use Printify, I was incredibly frustrated at their ludicrous and somewhat random shipping fees on EVERYTHING. Spreadconnect, with its simple and clear shipping policy, drew me in.
How does it work?
Go to Spreadconnect (not Spreadshirt/Spreadshop!), make an account, give your company and webshop details, and you’re good to go. They automatically checked my company tax ID (rather quickly). By installing their WooCommerce plugin, I had integrated them within a few minutes too.
There are no upfront costs. No extra regulations, steps, requirements, or gotchas.
Spreadconnect is probably the most minimal and barebones platform of all that I tried. Which has its disadvantages, of course, which this article will surely cover in-depth. But it has the advantage of making registration, integration and designing your first products a very fast process. Because there’s literally nothing else to do or configure in the entire system.
They are the most “pure” POD platform I have found: make a simple product, they’ll ship it for you, and nothing else.
The general workflow for creating a product is as follows:
- Go to an integration (such as my WooCommerce shop)
- Click “Add Product” > you’re taken to the designer interface.
- There you can pick the product type, upload/pick images, or use very very minimal design tools on the fly (such as place a text box somewhere)
- Once satisfied, continue to adding details (variants + mockups, title + description, pricing)
- After taking those 3 steps, press the button and it will automatically list the product in your shop!
Note that you can only see their pricing with an account. I hate it when POD platforms require you to sign up and already (partially) set up a store before you get full access to pricing and policy information. It’s either negligence on their part (refusing to build a better website) or a sleazy trick to get more sign-ups (and you know how much I hate shady tactics).
And it’s not even necessarily that they’re hiding something. Once logged in, you can easily view prices, and they’re reasonable. It would simply be nice to know this without an account, so I could do better research beforehand and not waste time on platforms that were never going to work.
The general workflow for selling a product is as follows.
- When someone places an order in your store, it’s automatically forwarded to Spreadconnect. (As long as the plugin is installed and properly connected. It disconnected once for me, without warning, so check it once in a while!)
- They will immediately invoice the cost of making it. (You are responsible for getting payment from the customer, through your storefront, of course. Usually, this arrives on your bank account a day or two later.)
- If cost recoup is successful, they instantly produce and then ship it. All of this happens automatically and should, most of the time, not need your intervention.
The crucial thing here is that this is a two-step process. It charges you immediately for the order. Some time later, you get the money that your customer paid from your storefront. As such, you need to make sure you have some reserves ready to pay for a sudden influx of orders (or delayed payment of the money owed to you). If not, no harm done, it just means all orders placed will not move forward yet—not until you then manually pay them and “continue” them.
Designing
The biggest difference with other POD platforms, is that there is no concept of “product templates” or “blueprints”. Once you start designing a product, you have to finish it without leaving the page, or all that progress is gone. Products are tied to specific stores, so reusing the same product across multiple ones is annoyingly hard.
All of this is caused by the “designer” just being a single screen, basically. Whenever you edit a product, or add a new one, you arrive at the exact same screen—just with a few settings handled differently. It remembers your previous product and details.
For example, I quickly threw some test image onto a bag when I just registered with the service. When I came back a week later to add actual products, I pressed “Add new product” and the designer opened to, you guessed it, that bag and test image.
As stated, this is a bit flimsy and makes duplication of same/similar merchandise hard. The options for actual designing or customization are incredibly barebones. It feels like products are “thrown into the void” upon completion, instead of having sturdy templates or “saved designs” to fall back on and polish.
On the other hand, as stated in the previous section, this also makes adding new products faster and more streamlined.
For example, at one point I created 6 kids T-shirts of the same size/type, the only difference being the print on them. Because it remembers your previous settings, and it’s all just one screen, I could do the following.
- Pick that T-shirt product + variations wanted
- Upload my 6 images at once, pick the first for now.
- Then add the details (unique title, desc, price) => send to store
- … and then just immediately do the next T-shirt! Just swap the image, add details, send to store.
- Swap image, add details, send to store.
- Etcetera.
You can just stay in the designer and rapid fire the designs you prepared beforehand.
Is this good? Is this bad? That’s up to you. As stated, it feels “flimsy” and as if the products might vanish into thin air at some point, but I also recognize that the interface was clean, solid, bug-free, and the important options were all there and easy to select.
My biggest gripe is that they do not communicate requirements beforehand in any way. This mug needs a panoramic image … but HOW LARGE? What are the dimensions? What are the exact files you need? Does it cost extra to print front and back, and how much?
Yes, like most POD platforms, their product prices are “starting from X”. The first print is “free”, or basically included in the cost price. But if you want to print front and back of T-shirt, for example, the price quickly skyrockets.
Not clearly communicating this is disingenuous, I find. There isn’t a single POD platform that is actually honest about what a full design would cost. They just show the cheapest price, for minimal print/customization, and hide further information a bit. Not communicating ANYTHING AT ALL about this, like Spreadconnect, is just frustrating.
You have to just make the design and hope for the best. Figure it out as you go back-and-forth with their “designer”.
That’s not professional or efficient, to me, and not how I want to work. As a “solution”, I just made my designs ludicrously high-resolution to be certain I could place and resize them however needed.
Their product catalog is very limited. Not the worst I’ve seen, also not the best. They’re clearly mostly focused on clothing. (And a weirdly large variety of mugs and aprons.) If you know that going in, that is fine. I specifically chose this platform for a brand that I knew only needed the things Spreadconnect offered (most likely). If you expect the same kind of diverse offerings like other major POD platforms, you’ll be disappointed.
Listing
After making a product, it almost instantly appeared on my webshop, exactly as intended. If a product has multiple variations and mockups, though, this can take quite a bit longer (30+ seconds).
Here’s an important gotcha: these listings are set to Draft by default. You still need to manually publish the product, otherwise it won’t show up.
The details sent over to your store are, again, a bit barebones. It does not automatically send categories/tags, size/weight, legal stuff (such as the required GPSR info in the EU), or anything else.
It does add a much better image and size chart right into the description. It looks so much more professional and useful than just a row/table of numbers (which other platforms mostly send), that I wish everyone did that.
A nice benefit of this integration is live stock numbers. Both behind the scenes (in my WooCommerce dashboard, for example) and on the store itself, it dynamically polls the current stock numbers for products and displays them. This is really nice. Getting an exact number of units in stock at any time gives the webshop an even more professional feel, and of course prevents people buying things out of stock that get delayed/canceled/lost in the system somehow.
As stated, the only real “meat” to Spreadconnect’s system is in the important options provided in the designer. Whatever product I made, there was always a good number of variations/colors, or simply buttons to press that do what I wanted to do :p But outside of that, there is basically no configuration and no other settings or features.
Of all the platforms, Spreadconnect made me spend the most time editing product listings after they were already published. Because I needed to add a lot of information myself within WordPress.
As for their prices … I don’t know. Some are considerably higher than the price (for the same item) competitors give, some are lower. They’re different enough that many products don’t have a clear match at other platforms, which means I can’t compare. Especially with their reasonable shipping fees, as explained in the next section, I feel my final prices for products were all reasonable if not slightly lower than elsewhere.
Pricing & Payment
Shipping Fees
Most POD platforms have the following shipping fee structure.
- The fee for the first item is quite high, and also depends greatly on the destination
- But for every next item (say, you buy 5 stickers instead of 1), the shipping fee drops quite a bit
Some call this reasonable. I don’t like it. If your intend is to offer free shipping, and thus mark up product prices with the fee, this is very annoying. (And I do recommend free shipping, purely because many people trick themselves into liking that far more and paying for products more easily.)
- To prevent selling things at a loss, I need to cover the entire shipping fee within the product price.
- But that means that I barely make a profit when somebody buys one item …
- … while my profit margin is far too high (and thus the retail price far too high) if someone buys multiple items of the same type.
There’s no good single price for a product here. Especially if you ship to many different places, you can’t really “guarantee” that you don’t sell something at a loss, even if you price a T-shirt 40 dollars.
The issue here is that the pricing structure is a very indirect, overly complicated way to solve the actual (dynamic) cost of shipping: weight and size. It costs a few dollars to simply do the movement from A to B. But the rest of the shipping fee should only grow when the items are heavier and larger, because that is when it’s more costly to ship them.
Instead, most platforms use this fixed shipping fee per product that is often just a shady way for them to earn more profit.
Spreadconnect was attractive to me because they use a very different shipping fee structure. It doesn’t, unfortunately, use the sensible solution (total weight and size). But it uses something close to it.
On their website, you can find a clear list of shipping fees per destination, depending on total order cost. For example,
- Orders below 12 euros cost 3.99 in shipping (to Netherlands)
- Orders below 40 euros cost 4.99 in shipping (to Netherlands)
- Etcetera
This means I can do the following with every product.
- Check its price (say 10 euros)
- Then check the shipping fee for that price bracket (3.99)
- As long as I price the product 14 euros or more, I won’t ever sell at a loss.
This allows far more competitive pricing. My Spreadconnect products are all a few euros cheaper than identical/similar products on other platforms, while having roughly the same profit margin.
At the same time, if someone does offer more at once, this just means a much bigger profit for me. (Because the shipping fee rises more slowly than the order cost required for it, as seen in my example numbers.)
If you want to ship internationally, this is even better. Yes, shipping to many countries is more expensive than my example numbers, because they’re further away from the company’s headquarters in Germany. But it’s still far more predictable and controlled than the other system. You can simply look at the maximum shipping fee and incorporate that in the product price, and you are certain you’re never selling at a loss.
Do keep in mind, that because shipping rates work like this, there is no “automatic shipping fee calculation” available through their integration. No live feed is being polled on checkout to display the cost of the order. It is up to YOU to either mark up products and allow this free shipping OR set a custom shipping method in WooCommerce/WordPress that is applied to Spreadconnect products.
Otherwise the interface either displays “no shipping available to your address” or you accidentally give free shipping to EVERYONE, while paying through the nose for it yourself :p
Shipping Methods & Times
On the flip side of that, however, I must make a few negative remarks.
They offer multiple shipping methods (like most POD platforms): Standard/Economy, Premium, and Express. The later in the list, the higher the shipping fee, but the faster it will be delivered.
I’ll repeat what I say everywhere: any shipping option but the cheapest one is just not doable for most online stores. The cost of an Express shipment is ludicrously high compared to standard shipping. Additionally, delivery often isn’t that much faster.
For example, a quick check on some random countries showed me the following delivery times. (Just using my own experience/the Netherlands as data isn’t fair, as we’re literally next to their printing facilities.)
- Standard = At least 1 week, at most 2 weeks
- Premium = At least 1 week, at most 2.5 weeks
- Express = At least 3 days, at most 1 week.
These aren’t terrible, but also far from great. All other platforms I used could give delivery times within 1 week, even on the cheapest shipping method. Only if everything goes wrong, delay after delay, will it take longer (in my experience).
It’s even worse that they mention themselves that “tracking and delivery data not guaranteed”. If delivery takes this long, the very least you want is tracking. Customers don’t mind knowing their package will arrive in 7 days—they absolutely hate not knowing anything about when it will arrive.
Payment
As stated earlier, you’re free to decide your own price. Spreadconnect will just invoice their costs for making the product; they don’t care how you get your profit or where it comes from. As such, it’s up to you to price your products high enough to cover shipping, taxes, any other costs for running your webstore, and the slight risk of damages or returns.
In my case, I found that a profit margin of 20%-30% on “Spreadconnect price + shipping fee” gave me some sustainable margins without creating ridiculous prices for products. (Remember that this allows free shipping, but this price is excluding VAT.)
Spreadconnect allows connecting a credit card or PayPal. I chose the latter, to be able to use the same bank account for all POD platforms I tried.
You can create products and even add them to your store without entering any financial information. BUT, as stated, those orders will be put on hold when the system realizes it can’t invoice the costs. You cannot get anything printed or shipped without paying first.
Taxes
Also, as usual, Spreadconnect will add extra tax fees on top of the product costs unless you have verified yourself as a business. In that case, you buy their services without paying tax, but are now responsible for handling tax matters with your local government yourself. It’s what you want to do.
Information about this is very scarce—barebones like the rest of their system. But I assumed it worked like anywhere else, and it seems to be the case. I gave them my (Dutch, sole proprietorship) tax ID, they instantly verified, and I haven’t seen any tax shenanigans yet.
Anything Else?
Pfew, I covered every part of the process and gave you my most important pros and cons. Below is just a final list of remarks that didn’t fit anywhere else.
Gotchas & Other Policies
I want to reiterate, one final time, how barebones their integration and website is. You basically have to use whatever settings you get from them. There are a few more settings within their own dashboard (not the WooCommerce plugin, for example), but that’s equally limited.
They don’t offer paid memberships or premium tiers, unlike most POD websites. Absolutely fine with me. It allows their interface to be less cluttered and I’m not bombarded with their ads trying to sell those premium subscriptions.
The only bug I found was in their product catalog. If you press a specific category/tag to search (such as “Mugs” or “Kids & Babies”), it sometimes just … loads a completely different category? And then it takes a few clicks, and some waiting, before it seems to have loaded the actual thing you wanted. Nothing too bad, still … weird.
And what if we care about things other than money?
Ah yes! The most important part that every other review leaves out!
How sustainable is Spreadconnect? How ecologically sound? Does it use best practices in terms of labor, local production, etcetera?
Here in the Netherlands, we have some (admittedly stereotypical) jokes about Germans. One is that they are meticulous, structured and precise about EVERYTHING. (Just like they have a precise WORD for EVERYTHING, even if that means having 30 syllables in a single word!) The other is that they care about being solid and building on strong foundations—you will never catch a German being flashy or all show, no substance.
I feel these core value are reflected at Spreadconnect. There are no superficial features, no extra knobs, no grandiose statements on their home page. They provide the exact thing you want—“create and ship these custom products for me”—and they do it well.
Similarly, it’s actually not easy to find this information, but Spreadconnect is one of the more sustainable and ecologically conscious platforms. All their suppliers must follow strict EU regulations on this, and they regularly check their seals and certificates on this. At least in the EU, they can print very locally.
The company has existed for quite some time, and was originally founded on core values of sustainability: they have their own sustainable brand, they use ecologically sourced material, their EU services completely work using sustainable energy sources, they have taken specific provable steps to improving labor conditions, etcetera.
They themselves admit this is an ongoing process. I believe that. Not all their products use responsibly sourced material, but most do. Their interface, for all its lack of features, has sustainability icons, searching and information built in. That says a lot. For example, my webshop has offered plush toys made from recycled material from the start, and people are willing to pay a few extra euros for that.
Conclusion
I like Spreadconnect for its shipping structure (especially for Europe-based shops), its streamlined interface (I am a minimalist and started to like their lack of other buttons and features as I used them more), and its focus on a smaller catalog of more sustainable/better supported products.
I don’t like the somewhat flimsy design process (lack of requirements/guidelines communicated, all in a single screen, no templates/blueprints or file-folder structure) and how each product is tied to a specific store.
I barely encountered bugs. The biggest “scare” was when the integration had suddenly disconnected, which would have been really annoying if anyone placed orders in that time period. This was probably due to me switching my JetPack account on the WordPress installation, though. I thought it worked fine at first, but maybe it only discovered the disconnection later—once I started adding a new product.
Honestly, this website feels like it has only just started to grow. In a way, that’s true, because it only recently “merged” (and changed name) with Spreadshop/Spreadshirt. What they have is solid. But I’d be interested to see how it changes in the future and whether they enhance usability, catalog, or simply the amount of information they provide. Many, many features that Spreadshirt does have … are not copied over to Spreadconnect yet.
At time of writing, I’ve added all products for one brand on their platform. This has been mostly painless and I haven’t needed to intervene once a product was set up. I intend to use them more, but only for typically Dutch/European merchandise, as that’s the area they really provide different/more value compared to competitors.
Until the next review,
Tiamo Pastoor
