thread Re: Hello everyone, in Community Corner

Hello everyone,

LTCLAYCO — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 14:02:23 GMT

I just set up my Square shop and I am very excited to start! Have you got any advice for a new seller? I will be launching it soon.

This is my shop:

https://ltclayco.co.uk

Best, Lianie

Re: Hello everyone,

tranguyen — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 15:29:36 GMT

Hi Lianie, welcome to the Seller Community! Glad to have you with us - and I love your products ❤️.

Is there anything in particular you are unsure about? I'll be happy to help! I'll defer to more knowledgeable sellers like @MJD @tonydow @Sam_400º and @Twiggy who will have more practical advices to give than myself.

One thing I did note is that some of the images look a bit pixelated. It's worth updating these to make sure they showcase your products fully. We also have a handy guide on what ratio or image size you should use in our Support Centre here.

Re: Hello everyone,

MJD — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 16:14:43 GMT

First of all, thanks tra for tagging me in on this, second of all, I’d agree with tra, you want to make sure the images are of a small file size for optimal loading times, but also that they load in high enough quality for the product to be clear, this means not making them excessively large pixel wise but making them large enough, but it’s a nice website that should do you well! I’d recommend getting out there on social media, Instagram reels seem to do me best out of everything as it’s the only place on Instagram that’s all user content and no ads making it attract a lot more attention, but to get the sales coming in, just make sure you’re posting on social media and spreading the word in your local community, I don’t exactly recommend Facebook ads, how often do you find yourself clicking on those? Most will say rarely or never, just make a presence people want to see across the social game and soon enough, especially with the type of products you sell, you’ll hopefully have sales rolling in, and once you do I’d upgrade your square site and make it more personal, connecting your domain and removing square branding! Any particular questions feel free to add them to this thread and I’ll make sure to input where I can : D

Re: Hello everyone,

Sam_400º — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 09:41:56 GMT

@LTCLAYCO - I’ve not really got any advice, I’m still making it up as I go along 😂

From seeing stuff in the community though I think it’s worth not trying to pre-guess every situation. Square & the online stuff is great, but it is’t perfect. It’s designed to be good for as many different use cases as possible - but if you try & deep dive into every possible thing you think your customers could do/try then you’re going to create problems that might never happen!

Like most things there are loads of different ways of achieving most things - so sure someone can help with workarounds.

Re: Hello everyone,

tonydow — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 20:04:39 GMT

@LTCLAYCO Hi and welcome. As others have said, there’s usually someone in this group who can answer most of your questions or point you in the right direction. One thing I noticed on your site - the Shop All page has a number of face masks but in the face mask category there is only one.

Re: Hello everyone,

meganclarke — Thu, 13 May 2021 19:15:52 GMT

Hi!

Ive noticed your reply about the image sizing.

My images load really slowly! Any idea what pixel/image size I need for optimal loading?

Thank you!

Meg

Re: Hello everyone,

MJD — Thu, 13 May 2021 19:21:19 GMT

To me this all depends on where it’s being exported from, if I’m exporting from Adobe lightroom I tend to drop the quality 20-50% as the images only have to load in very small spaces, if you could give me more information about the images being used and where they’re coming from and their file types, I may be able to help you discover a way to speed up loading times : )

Re: Hello everyone,

meganclarke — Thu, 13 May 2021 19:47:38 GMT

They're being imported onto laptop (Macbook), roughly coming out at 20x20cm, 72 pixels/inch.

Resulting size - 100% 183KB

Not sure if thats the info you need?

Re: Hello everyone,

MJD — Thu, 13 May 2021 19:52:11 GMT

And is this on a live site or the preview site that things aren’t loading correctly, if the site is live, could you send me a link so I can see what’s going on and how it could be solved?

Re: Hello everyone,

meganclarke — Thu, 13 May 2021 19:55:43 GMT

Hey, its live - they are just crazy slow! sure www.piggyandtutes.com

thanks!

Re: Hello everyone,

MJD — Thu, 13 May 2021 20:01:02 GMT

It appears to me that the images are loading at a standard pace to me, the only advice I could give is just downsize the images to the size they display so that they display clearly but there’s less pixels for the browser to load, the website is looking great though and seems really user friendly so congrats on such a great site, if you have any questions I’m always around and you can always tag me in on anything for speedy answers on the topic of square online and anything to do with images!

Re: Hello everyone,

meganclarke — Thu, 13 May 2021 20:57:49 GMT

Thanks so much - your answers are already very speedy. Your help is much appreciated! Thank you - still lots to adjust but it will always be a working progress! What pixels do you recommend?

Thanks

Meg

Re: Hello everyone,

MJD — Thu, 13 May 2021 21:06:46 GMT

Give me a day or 2, I’ll log on via my PC and check the source code of your site and see how many pixels the width/height is being displayed at, then I’ll be able to find an exact pixel count, if you match this then your images will load at full quality in optimum timing!

Re: Hello everyone,

MJD — Sat, 15 May 2021 10:55:34 GMT

Hey @meganclarke sorry for the delay...

I've checked the image sizes for your site, it appears the images on your product pages have an HTML equivalent to:

{max-width: 599px;}

which is:

<img data-v-53ab3db7="" data-v-257565e8="" alt="Natural Pet Cow " class="zoomable__image" id="1" source="/uploads/1/3/6[Redacted]/s6[Redacted]4404899_p92_i2_w604.png" source-set="[object Object]" sizes="(max-width: 599px) 600px,

this means the images cannot render wider than around 600px, it also appears that you're using square crop, this means that your images could possibly be shrunk down to 600 x 600px, if you want an easy way to do this, try Adobe Spark (watermark can be removed free of charge an unlimited amount of times).

I have tested your image load size on a virtual display at 2560 x 997px and they load to as high as 580 x 580px, this means even on 4K displays the images will display just fine at 600 x 600px.

If you have anymore questions on this matter, I'm always around to help out so just tag me in @/MJDPhotography and I'll get back to you as fast as possible.

Good Luck,

Matt.

Re: Hello everyone,

Sam_400º — Sat, 15 May 2021 14:01:10 GMT

@meganclarke wrote:
Hey, its live - they are just crazy slow! sure www.piggyandtutes.com
thanks!

One of the reasons you might feel it being slow is that the images load as your scroll down (rather than the site trying to load *everything* all at the same time.

So, if you go to your store page & wait 1 minute it won't try to load (for me on a laptop) the 3rd row until you start to scroll down. Also, if you instantly scroll all the way to the bottom it won't load the ones in the middle unless you scroll back up to them.

While you're testing & clicking on every page it could seem slower than it does to a customer, who will click & browse. It'll be designed to do this to load the content being looked at fast as far as I know (but I'm not a web developer by far!).

All this said, the Square servers aren't the fastest for image loading etc. & that's one of the cost balances I guess.