Here is a great write-up summarizing the recent beating apparel gave to computers:

http://www.901am.com/2007/apparel-sales-beat-computers.html

The only reason I can guess is because it’s hard to wear computers.

I recently started receiving emails from MyBlogLog telling me they were adding me to the communities of people’s blogs I visit. This is not something that I have checked a box to do nor is it something I particularly care to do. The option has always been there for me to join communities at my leisure and I valued being able to make the decision myself. I think it is fairly intrusive of Yahoo (acquired MyBlogLog last year) to add this new feature without asking members first. I doubt it lasts long but we’ll see……

You Design It just received its first cancellation because the event the merchandise was ordered for was canceled. This was tough for us because we want to produce every order we receive. Here was our response in an email:

“Hey Richard,

It is not too late. We will be glad to credit your card back today and cancel the order. Thanks again and please keep us in mind in the future.

Blake Poutra
You Design It “

Here was his reply in an email:

“Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I will definitely use you in the future. Your website is great!

Thanks,
Rich”

All in all it wasn’t so bad. We want the process to be easy and it seemed easy enough.

I have been in Las Vegas for the past couple of days for a friend’s wedding. We are heading home tomorrow and I will post pics then. You know the saying, “what happens in Vegas gets blogged about”.

Within an hour of adding the colored shirts in the “Digital Studio” we had our first order. This was around midnight too. Feast your eyes:

Things are going great at You Design It so we decided to go for it even more. We just added colored products on the Digital Printing side. We stayed with the same offerings of the Affordable and Premium T Shirts, Long Sleeve, Ladies T, and more. The only hitch is that we are only doing light colored shirts as we continue to get better with the digital printer. Check them out here in the Digital Studio.

At You Design It we have been increasing our spending on pay-per-clicks heavily even without tracking our users into the “Design Studio“. This may sound like a stupid plan but we have been more than covering our cost with profit throughout every increase of ad spend. We knew this would hurt us in the long run so our last round of development consisted of creating some custom javascript to work with our actionscript inside the Flash of the Design Studio. We dropped the javascript inside the main pages of the site as people navigate into the Studio catch the entry point and delivery of each user (what search engine, keyphrase, landing page, etc.).

The results have been great because we can track each step of a successful conversion. We are watching some key tracking points of each user with the knowledge of which search engine and keyphrase brought them there. This just changed the game for us. Smarter spending = less spending + more return. Who said math was my weakness?