This is one of the biggest trends in side hustles. Print on Demand product shop.
Print on Demand is customizing a product and only when ordered does that product get made through a production company.
There are many different companies that offer Print by demand and you can use them to offer products on your own site, social media or through Etsy, etc. It’s a cool concept that allows you to design blank products and not carry an inventory.
Although production costs are higher you also don’t have to bulk order or sit on inventory your products are only made when you receive an order.
I decided to give this a try as the idea of creating something and not being stuck with inventory if it doesn’t sell.
There are so many print on demand sites, the thing to look for is:
Product selection – does it have the items you are looking to sell
Price – are the price points good
Shipping – where are products produced, a lot have different partners they work with in different countries which would make shipping cheaper and faster.
Connections – is it easy to connect to the platform you want to use.
The top platforms I found are:
There are a bunch more but these are the 2 I found kept popping up in my research.
I’m going to start with Printify but I might add Printiful as well and test them against eachother to see which I end up liking best.
Now getting started with a product.
I chose notebooks.
I like having notebooks around for my day to day work, and it’s easier to keep track of than post its. I also am in need of new ones so here we go.
I pop over to my favourite tool Canva and start creating a design.
The great thing about Canva is that they have so many different elements you can use to get started. I knew I wanted to do something Pink, pretty and not too much of a statement. I looked for elements that were free and I could easily create a background like image of.
I added a blank square and text, and here’s the finished product
Now Printify gives you some details to fill out and I’ll go into greater details on SEO and it’s importance but you want to fill out as much information as you can and tailor it around the term you are trying to get traffic for, ie Notebook.
For now I decide to use Etsy, although it’s more of a cost, it has traffic already so until a point where I have other traffic coming to my site, social etc, utilizing Etsy can get my product in front of potential customers.
The trick here will be to review your pricing. Make sure you are charging enough to cover production, shipping and still have a little profit. Printify has a little calculator within the listing that helps. Definitely pay attention to your margins, you want it to be worth it but also sell. You also want to double check your currency. Printify account is in USD but my Etsy account is in CDN, so I need to do the conversion.
To get started I kept the profit lower to try and get my first sales.
Printify also makes it easy to sync the products to Etsy. Once you have done that make sure to go over to your Etsy store and double check everything looks good. Also add any areas that might be missing, such as tags, dimensions, etc.
Now you’ve got your first product listed and you can go ahead and start promoting it!
Share products you’ve created using Print on Demand!
Whitney.
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