Print On Demand is it worth it?

Over the past few months ever since the lockdown had started I wanted to do something productive, maybe learn a new skill or maybe start some kind of side hustle, this lead me to search the internet for something I could do. There where so many suggestion from surveys(they are quiet useless because of the time to money earned ratio)to drop shipping to affiliate marketing to print on demand to even a pyramid scheme. Almost all of the above mentioned gigs are quite popular(not the pyramid scheme one)but print on demand well that I have never heard of and so I dug deep, searched about it in YouTube and many google searches later I was actually very fascinating about this possibly new side hustle.

Print on demand is somewhat similar to drop shipping, the only difference being we in some cases do need to take care of inventory or hosting a site for the sales. Based on the Print on Demand platform we use we can actually start hustling with no money upfront. So what does print on demand means? Well print demand sites use designs we upload in their site, the uploaded designs are then printed on t-shirts, mugs, stickers, bags, posters etc. The site then uploads the designed merchandise on to their market or platform and when someone buys the merchandise we get paid for our design. Well you can have man questions like but I am not a designer what can I do? Well it is not necessary we need to know graphic designing for doing it. We can use simple typographic design that are catchy or funny we can also upload normal photographs on as designs or create designs based on ongoing trends. There are many Print on Demand sites online like Teesprings, Redbubble, Merch by Amazon, Printify, Teepublic, Society 6, Etsy and many more. Each have their own pros and cons.

OK so for those who don’t know about shopify, it is a platform where we can develop an online store which we can use for dropshipping. In this way we will need money upfront since we have to pay shopify for a domain where we will list our product. These products can be anything from simple key chain to even gym equipment. For stating a shop we need to find a product that sells then we can check online mostly Alibaba for the product, we can then list the product in our shopify store for a marked up price. When people visit our store to buy the product we can collect their information which we then pass over to our supplier who then fulfills the orders. Many young hustlers or entrepreneurs who jumped on the idea since its inception have become successful but the steam on dropshipping on recent years has come down a bit. This decrease in popularity can be attributed to various reasons some of which are the poor quality of the products getting shipped, long waiting times, poor return policies etc. Things have got worst now due to the pandemic since waiting time have now increased three folds. Plus the upfront cost related to the domain purchase and advertisements we have to use for driving traffic. It does not means that we cannot still earn through dropshipping but we can list a product that is unique or belonging to an untapped niche we would still succeed but there are other ways to.

Coming back to Print On demand, There are many pros in comparison to dropshipping such as we don’t need to spend whole lot of money for starting. We can just upload simple typographic design that can be created for free in sites such as canva or Pixlr, the user interface is easy to understand and within few minutes we can create a very interesting cool looking typographic design granted we can think of interesting or funny quotes. Most of the print on demand sites are simple which means we upload a design which in turn is displayed on various merchandise which we can choose to be displayed. Once someone purchase’s the product the site personally takes care of fulfillment from buying the base material to printing the design to shipping. Some site even help us in marketing too. This means with simple designs we can make some sweet passive income without any hassle of customer care or shipping issues. But this make it too good to be true.

Nothing is this good right? Now when we think about the best print on demand sites based on popularity we can bring the list of almost thirty to four to five best. The most popular being Merch By Amazon They have a monthly visitor count of almost forty millions.The next two are mainly Redbubble and Teespring with a visit count of almost sixteen million. Then what is the problem you may ask? Well to enter into Merch by Amazon we need a request or we will have to draft a reason why they should upload our design, the draft is later heavily analysed who know’s for what and then we may get a confirmation e-mail congratulating us on getting accepted or if not chances are our application might be rejected, then comes the tier system which limits the number of uploads we can uploads. We can move up the tier system by getting more sales which will be hard due to the tough competition we will face.

Coming to the second popular platform it is Teesprings again the layout and ease of use is there but we will not get free marketing by Teesprings until we become part of their boosted network, that is only possible if we have a significant higher trust score. The so called trust score can be earned by bringing in sales of our own and not creating copyrighted designs. Now yes getting traffic is not easy until you are an influencer or a YouTuber (then it is somewhat easier) but let’s say you are not both then you have two main options, you can pay for Facebook ads or Instagram influencers for posting on their page. The second option is to do your own Instagram marketing which is somewhat difficult until you have a enough trust score then you will be added to the Teesprings boosted network. Another bigger concern is that we will never be able to find our trust score don’t know why it is like that but it is not great.

The third most popular platform is Redbubble, although it has a poor interface it’s is the most easy one to earn some money mainly due to fact that they market the merchandise from the point you have listed. But many people post on redbubble and that means unless your design has the right keywords added to your listing, it will not be there on the top( Basically Search Engine Optimization). The next big problem is base price of every single product including shipping is quiet higher comparing to other sites especially for the quality provided. This means we cannot set a good markup price since it is already quiet expensive which in turn affect our profit Margins.

The other popular sites include Printify, Etsy, Printful, Teepublic etc. Most of them only provide printing service which means we will still have to spend money on a shopify domain.Other reasons not to use them are mainly due to regional constrains.

Well the answer is “yes”. Because if we get accepted by Amazon and we did make a great design that sells, that’s passive income on each sale. On other side in Teesprings we may need to spend money on ads but if you know the right tactics for building a following on Instagram we can market our merchandise on our own and create traffic until we get on to their boosted network, there are various videos on YouTube that teach us on how to create a following on Instagram using simple but not sneaky ways. As for Redbubble we can use online tag generators for tags or keywords. And one final way we can drive traffic towards all Print On Demand platform is target a specific set of audience or go for a specific niche with your design,it can be cats,dogs,coffee,yoga etc, the other possible designs can be based on trends or special days like Election edition merchandise or Black Lives Matter merchandise or something like father’s day etc. Other than paid Ads there are other paid ways such as subscription on platform that help us on researching trends and niches that are popular and keyword searches.There are endless possibilities in what we could achieve using print on demand and as far as which platform is best well it is best when we can upload designs on all platforms and then whichever is bringing traffic go with that. To find more about Print On Demand head over to YouTube and search for it there are countless results available were we can start .

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