SpreadSimple

Product details
nextlevelbrosnextlevelbros
nextlevelbros
Jan 19, 2021

Q: Congratulations on the product and on answering all the questions here ;) I love the idea behind this and am ...

glad to see you here on AppSumo, where I will can and will buy this deal.

Now to my question and concern. I noticed someone mentioned the issue of loading speed and you responded that your are using AWS infrastructure. It's good to know that, but the hosting is half the story. The other half is how things load on the site, and on that end, there are problems that I hope you are willing to address since site speed (along with with usability and smooth checkout process) is make or break for any ecommerce website.

I noticed that in practice, even on my home connection on my desktop, the sites, the example templates are noticeably slow. The problem is 100% the size of the product image thumbnails, both the resolution (too large) and the compression (not enough), and is causing document complete load times in excess of 10 sec, much worse on mobile. The rest of the page loads fast enough.

We need a short term solution and a long term solution.

A short term solution is to load a separate thumbnail image and a separate details page image, each sized correctly. It's on the user to upload something resized and well compressed to google sheets in each case, but at least let it be possible. Is this possible currently in SpreadSimple?

Long term, having users upload the right images is precarious. At the very least, the thumbnail images should be served by Spread simple in the resolution required by the product listing/home page, and keep the full res for the details page. Or also resize details page image to what is actually needed. Integration with something like Shortpixel would be super, but there are a ton of free options out there for good image compression if this is something that is at all possible to integrate with SpreadSimple.

The ability to connect with our own CDN is also something I would like to see.

Another question, in my country we often use payment upon delivery, so they check out without paying, is is possible to setup this option?

More questions about the checkout process, if a user buys something on my SpreadSimple website, via Stripe or another method, and they return in the future, will they have to enter all their data again in order to checkout and pay? Is there any 'user dashboard', 'my orders' or 'log' in functionality of any sort for returning users?

Somewhat related to my previous question, is there any way at all an Abandoned Cart email could be triggered from a SpreadSimple site? You would need to have captured the email address beforehand, with a form, but if you have the contact info, is it possible?

I also would like add my voice to those who mentioned the importance of the checkout fields and being able to define what fields are required and to add fields as required for your use case.

This tool has such great potential, I hope it can provide a great overall ecommerce experience and functionality too.

Founder Team
Alex_SpreadSimple

Alex_SpreadSimple

May 14, 2024

A: Hi nextlevelbros!
First of all thank you for the congratulations and such a great feedback!

Let me try to answer to your questions

As for images at the moment we don't track what image size user uses for the website. And for now it is completely users responsibility to use compressed and web optimised images. We have some thoughts how to optimise this process in future as well as how to make the experience of adding images to the spreadsheet more comfortable for user.
The short term solution that you mentioned (to separate thumbnails for the list and for the details page) is absolutely possible even now. You just need to add an extra column to your table.

As for payment upon delivery. It is like the default cart will work. If you don't use our integration with PayPal or Stripe an order will be received to your email. With a little improvement of adding Zapier you can also receive the order to another spreadsheet.

We don't keep any data about your users, so, if they return - they need to enter their info again.
But you can add your own CMS to track information. For instance here is an article how to add Trello as a CMS https://medium.com/spreadsimple/create-online-store-based-on-google-sheets-free-crm-made-on-trello-2952d816b8c3

As for checkout fields, I agree, they need to be updated and become more flexible.

Finally your questions are highly reasonable and inspiring and will help to make SpreadSimple better in future!

Thank you!

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Verified purchaser

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your well written reply, I appreciate it. Glad that you also appreciated my remarks :)

Great to hear that I can load images separately for the thumbnails, I will try to set that up on my first experiment site I am creating.

So far I am loving Spreadsimple, I exported a csv from my CRM with 100 or so products and had them live online within minutes, amazing. Looking forward to see what the future brings!