Selling and Shipping T-Shirts with TypeScript
Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats
Navigating Direct-to-Consumer Sales and Accessibility Tools
This chapter explores the hurdles of selling direct-to-consumer, emphasizing the need for better control over sourcing and logistics as opposed to relying on third-party fulfillment. Additionally, the speakers discuss web accessibility and introduce a tool for developers to improve site inclusivity.
In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes talk about selling and shipping t-shirts, and how to do it all in TypeScript!
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Show Notes01:58 - T-Shirts 101
- T-Shirts are cool
- I sold 100 right away to get the kinks out
- Then I did pre-order
- The stack
09:08 - Selling: Front-end
- Snipcart
- It’s a button
- When Someone buys, they scrape the site for the HTML
- If you only have a client-side rendered button, you use the JSON API instead
- Integrated into Gatsby pretty easily
- Wrote one custom hook to count inventory and disable when sold out
- I thought Snipcart would be enough, but I soon realized it wasn’t. I needed something to fulfill the shipment.
10:10 - Selling: Shipping Quotes
- Snipcart has integration for USPS, etc.
- You can also do custom shippers
- It’s a webhook
- They also take care of customs declaration
13:30 - Selling: Backend
- Next.js Dashboard
- Integrate with ChitChats, Stallion Express, and SnipCart.
- The tech
- Shipping Labels
- Packing slip
18:05 - Fulfilling
- Printing labels
- Designed with CSS + React
- Print CSS is wild
- Fan Fold labels were way better
- I switched to Stallion Express
- Cheaper
- Printing packing slips
- Batch scanning
- Scanning → Mark as shipped
- Started with webcam
- Bought scanner for cheap
- QR code was better because my tokens were long
- Data matrix is often better
- Sending notifications
- Hit the endpoint via Snipcart
28:48 - The physical part
- T-Shirts printed from local supplier
- U-Haul to get them here
- Bags printed in China (about 40 cents each)
- I wrote a bunch of code to organize by size
- This cut down on moving around (14 hours if you save 30 seconds per shirt)
- Some got stickers
- Multiples were the hardest
- 24 different types of shirts
- some wanted 4xl
- some wanted tall
- 24 different types of shirts
36:30 - Common questions
- Why did you do this yourself?
- Fun project
- I learned a ton
- This is how you don’t burn out
- Why not print-on-demand? (DTG)
- Tonal
- Embroidery
- Quality
- Money
- Pay people in my community
- Control
- Bags, stickers, etc…
- stickermule
- Why not $companyThatHandlesIt
- I want to do stickers
- I want to do decks
- Why not Shopify
- Large orders still need major fulfillment strategies
- Code has to be written or money spent
44:16 - Other lessons learned
- Queues would be good here
- Sometimes you had to wait 3+ seconds for the confirmation of shipping
- No one reads, it was pre-order
- Don’t buy shipping right away — people email about incorrect addresses
- Over-order by a few each (out of 1550 orders, five got partial refunds and three got full refunds)
- Pre-order is great because you can offer many sizes
- Async JS to do things at most 50 at a time
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