Who Can Start a Print-on-Demand Business?
Whether you’re an original artist or someone who would like to create designs using text and/or graphics that someone else created, you can start your own print-on-demand business with very little money upfront.
What Can You Sell Using Print-on-Demand?
Shirts and sweatshirts are the most popular choice for print-on-demand items, but you can also put your creations on items such as mugs, home decor, and even jewelry.
Where Can You Sell Your Products, Do You Need to Provide Customer Service, and Who Does the Marketing for Your Business?
You can choose to create and sell your designs on a platform such as RedBubble which handles all of the orders, customer service, and marketing. Or you can sell your goods in a popular marketplace like Etsy or Amazon Merch on Demand, which is like opening a store in an existing shopping mall with customers looking to purchase goods. You handle customer service in these marketplaces.
You can also open your own e-commerce store using online software such as Shopify or WooCommerce, where your store is like a shop on the corner of Pine Street and Park Place. You have the responsibility of driving your own traffic to your store through search engines, social media, and other forms of marketing and you provide customer service. You also get a larger percentage of the profit.
What Steps Do You Need to Take to Open a Print-On-Demand Business?
- Figure out what items you would like to sell and find a print provider for those items. Would you like to sell shirts and sweatshirts? Home decor? Jewelry? You will need to find print providers for these items. Some selling platforms, like Amazon’s Merch on Demand and RedBubble, provide the printing. But platforms such as Etsy, Shopify, and WooCommerce require you to find your own print provider and can integrate with some of them. Integration means that your customers’ orders are automatically sent over to your print provider for their order to be fulfilled.
Two of the most popular print providers are Printify and Printful and both integrate with various platforms you can sell on, like Etsy, Shopify, and WooCommerce. Integration isn’t mandatory though. If you wish to sell an uncommon item where you can’t integrate your print provider that sells that item into your selling platform, you can always manually place your customers’ orders. - Decide where you want to sell your items. Do you wish to provide customer service? Do you want to sell in a marketplace like Etsy or Amazon’s Merch on demand, or open your own e-commerce website?
Consider whether or not integration into a print provider is a must, or if you have the time to manually take your customers’ orders and place those orders with your print provider.
You don’t have to limit yourself to just a single platform for selling your goods. When you’re first getting started though, I would just choose just one platform to sell on and see how your items sell, refine your categories, designs, keywords for listings, and even the items that you sell. Etsy is a great place to get your feet wet. It’s essentially a trendy shopping mall with customers looking to make a purchase. It’s a great place to discover what sells best for you before changing or adding more platforms to sell on. - Choose and research the niches you want to design for. Research is incredibly important because some niches are saturated with items for sale already. For instance, the teacher niche is highly saturated on Etsy. If you spend your time creating a shirt for teachers and put that shirt up for sale on Etsy, the competition will be huge, and you minimize your chances of making any money on that item. You need to find niches that aren’t so saturated. How do you do this? You need to drill down and discover sub-niches, or even combined niches, that have little competition and enough people searching for those sub/combined niches. You could do this by manually studying the market you wish to sell your items on, or you can pay for one or more of the marketplace research tools available for a monthly or yearly fee to greatly speed up the process. The most popular research tools are Erank, Everbee, and Merch Informer.
Examples of sub-niches and combined niches would be: instead of just the niche teacher, a sub-niche would be a first-grade teacher, which is also a saturated niche. Combining niches could be a first-grade teacher who loves German shepherds and it’s a sweatshirt for Christmas. A tool like Erank can help you drill down to find sub-niches and combined niches with enough search volume and also isn’t saturated with items for sale already. - Create your designs. If you’re an original artist, you may already have software to create those designs. If you’re not an original artist and wish to piece together someone else’s graphics and maybe add some text, you will need software to do this. Online software with graphics available for you to use is the easiest choice. Two very popular websites to do this are Canva and the newer site, Kittl. There are pros and cons to each, and some people use both. Canva is wildly popular and has more graphics, but a stricter license for use. For instance, you cannot simply take one of their graphics and put it on a shirt for sale. You have to combine graphics and make it a unique design. Kittle is newer with fewer graphics, but their pool of graphics is growing every day. Their licensing terms are broader than Canva’s. As of this writing, their premade designs can even be used as-is, but you are highly encouraged to customize the designs to fit your chosen niches. You can use all or part of their existing designs to create your own or start from scratch. This is a great way for a new designer to learn how well-thought-out designs are put together.
Both Canva and Kittle have artificial intelligence (AI) built-in for creating designs. Both come out with new features on a fairly regular basis.