How To Start A Successful Print On Demand Business Today

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So, you want to start an online store? BUT, I bet you don’t have the money to buy all the inventory you need to stock a store, right? Or perhaps you don’t have the technical knowledge to build an ecommerce website? Or maybe you just have no clue where to even start!

Well, don’t worry. You can create AND stock your own online store without technical knowledge, without needing to invest a lot of money or even needing to buy inventory upfront.

Print On Demand is exactly that. Your supplier will print your products only as your customers order them. They will also take care of all of the packaging and shipping too.

Let’s go through the essential steps to build your online store and fill it with products to sell.

FIND A NICHE TO FIND YOUR AUDIENCE

First, you want to decide what kind of products and designs you want to make and sell. I personally think, when starting out, it’s a good idea to target a smaller, more specific niche rather than a generalised, wide niche.

So, what I mean by that is you could design products for dog lovers or coffee addicts or people who like mountain biking. Those are small but highly targeted niches. A generalised store would sell designs for a whole range of different, unrelated interests.

You should be able to find a customer base for a smaller, more specific niche whereas when you create a generalised store your customer base will be so broad, it will be hard or at least very expensive, to try to find the customers who want to buy your products.

Now, where can you find what niches there are that might be a good fit for selling your designs on products?

If you’re struggling to think of potential niches start looking at what’s trending. What’s going viral? You can see what’s going on in the explore page of Twitter or Instagram. What’s coming up on Google Trends? What are people talking about at the moment?

Take a look to see what’s popular or already selling on websites like Redbubble and Teespring. These are both print on demand websites with their own marketplace. So, these are places where people are already purchasing print on demand products. This can give you a clear idea of what’s popular and what people are buying.

Browse through Etsy and again, take a look at what’s popular there. Something as simple as doing a search for “t-shirt” (even if that’s not what you are planning on selling) will bring up a huge range of different designs for inspiration.

Go through Pinterest and take note. What are people pinning?

DESIGN RESEARCH & INSPIRATION

Once you have chosen or at least narrowed down what niche you want to sell products in, you can start to look at creating some designs.

Use the same places as you did in your niche research phase, to also do design research. Now, you are looking at other people’s designs not to copy them. You are looking to get ideas and inspiration.

Then you need to come up with something different and unique to you. Never just blatantly copy someone else’s designs, that’s just not cool.

The type of designs you come up with will also depend on what product you want to sell. I think that when you hear print on demand, everyone automatically thinks “t-shirts” but just because you are doing print on demand doesn’t mean you have to sell just t-shirts.

There are so many different kinds of products available to sell through print on demand.

BRING YOUR IDEAS TO LIFE WITH DESIGN CREATION

The next step in your process is actually creating your designs. You’ll need to go to the website of the print on demand supplier you choose to use and read through their creative specifications.

Trust me! Do this before making any designs so that you know exactly what they require for you to be able to upload your designs and files and have them printed. Otherwise you’ll most likely have to go back and change all your designs to match what they need later on.

If you are going to be creating the designs yourself and are experienced with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, then you already know what you need to do to create your designs.

If you do not know how to use Photoshop or Illustrator then sign up for Canva.com, which is a very beginner friendly and user friendly, web-based platform where you can basically do the same kinds of things that you can do with Photoshop.

In Canva, you have access to stock images that you can use in your designs as well as fonts. Now, a disclaimer with stock images and fonts – please read the licenses that tells you what you can and can’t use the creative for and make sure you can use it for print on demand products.

You can get in hot water for using images for things they are not allowed to be used for. And this goes for any stock image website, not just Canva.

I’d highly suggest that you sign up for the Pro Version of Canva where you can get the first month free. The reason for this is that you will need your designs to have a transparent background on them.

And this is what I mean by that:

See how one image has a square white background and the other doesn’t? Unless this is the look you are going for, most of the time you’ll want your designs to have no background and you’ll need the Pro Version of Canva for that.

If you aren’t comfortable creating the designs yourself, you can always outsource this part of the process to a professional through a freelancer site like Upwork or Fiverr.

Another tool that you’ll need is PlaceIt for mockups. This will make such a huge difference to the quality of your products and online store.

It’s the different between:

How much more professional does the right image look? PlaceIt gives you access to thousands of different mockup images that you place your design on and you can then download the image to use in your online store and to promote your products.

I’ll pop links to both Canva and PlaceIt in the description below so you can go sign up for them.

FINDING A PLATFORM TO LAUNCH FROM

Now it’s time to choose where you want to host your online store. The two main choices here are Shopify and WordPress.

If you already use WordPress and Woocommerce and know what you’re doing, then that could be the best choice for you.

If you have never used WordPress before, I wouldn’t suggest that now is the time to give it a go. It really is for those who do have some experience in websites or blogs and have some level of technical knowledge with running an online store.

The learning curve of WordPress is quite substantial and it will really increase the amount of time it’s going to take to get your store up and running.

Your best bet is going to be Shopify. Shopify is great for beginners as well as those who are already advanced in ecommerce. Shopify is sort of like a click and go, drag and drop type of deal.

It’s an ecommerce platform combined with website hosting in one. You can get a free 14 day trial to take a look and see how easy it is to use Shopify.

So, to compare, with WordPress you need to get your own domain, set up your own web hosting, install WordPress and all the other plugins you need to create an online store, get and install your own theme and customise it. Once that’s all done you can integrate it with the print on demand supplier you choose to use.

With Shopify – everything is all done for you. Once you’ve signed up and entered some set up information, your store is basically ready to go. You’ll just connect the Shopify store with the print on demand supplier and that’s it.

If you’re new to ecommerce, then Shopify is definitely the way to go.

PICKING A QUALITY PARTNER

Now it’s time to choose a print on demand supplier. Who you choose will largely depend on what products you want to sell as they all specialise in particular items. For example, Printful have one of the best range of t-shirts to choose from. Pillow Profits would be who you choose for print on demand shoes.

You also need to look at which ecommerce platforms they do integrate with to make sure they work with whoever you have set up your online store with. All of them integrate with Shopify – another great reason to set your store up with them.

Quite a few of them do integrate with WooCommerce too if you have chosen to use WordPress to set up your store.

The integration between the two platforms is to allow a seamless gateway between the two to make everything as hands off for you as possible and to automate as much as possible.

When you integrate your website with your supplier, the products you choose from your supplier are automatically populated on your Shopify store and then when you receive orders, they automatically go through to the supplier so they can start printing and shipping ASAP. They don’t have to wait for you to see you have an order and forward it to the supplier.

Here is a list of 10 Print On Demand Suppliers:

SHOW IT OFF TO THE WORLD

Now that you have done everything you need to, to set your online store up and add your designs to it, you’ll need to start promoting it and generating sales.

How you go about this will depend on whether you have a marketing budget and how much you are able to spend.

You don’t have to spend money on advertising, although it can be helpful. If you do have an advertising budget, you would run ads on Facebook as well as Instagram and possibly even Pinterest.

If you don’t have any money available to spend on advertising concentrate on building a Facebook page and Instagram account and reaching potential customers that way. The reason I suggest these two social media platforms is because they are both highly visual which is perfect for retail products.

Also, Pinterest is also a great option for retail products, especially fashion too so focus on creating a Pinterest strategy to promote your brand.

Pinterest will work especially well if you take advantage of the mockups available through PlaceIt.

If you look on Pinterest, most of the print on demand type products are either just the mockup provided by the supplier, which is usually just the product on a white background. Or some people use a flat lay type of mockup, so using mockups of your products actually being worn will really help you stand out on Pinterest.

So that wraps it up! By now you should have learned the basics of finding your niche and audience, coming up with some design ideas and how to create them, deciding which print on demand supplier is best for you and how to get your brand seen by your potential audience.

The things we have talked about here is everything you need to start a successful print on demand business today.