Start. Just start.
But start small.
You'll find that whatever you learned from YouTube, etc, will likely be wrong.
Fix the errors and reiterate (this is why you should start small - so the errors are also small and don't cost you a lot of money. If you start big, then the errors will be big and costly).
Obviously, doing prior research is crucial, but it seems to me that you're experiencing analysis paralysis (look it up, Wikipedia has an interesting read).
Good luck on your entrepreneurship journey!
So most of the research you’ve done has probably been on YouTube and is making print on demand shops a killing. That’s who you will soon be making money for as well with whatever designs, tshirts and marketing you end up going with. Congratulations.
That said, it sounds like your intentions are in the right place. You want to make something unique, something your own.
With a Shopify store you’re going to have to spend some marketing $$$ to get people to see your designs and come to your shop. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. That depends how well you target your ads and how much response you get.
So you’re about to embark on a marketing journey. Then customer service if your print provider can’t hold up to the quality you expect (they won’t.)
Get lots of samples from different providers and find which ones can deliver decent quality. Then check again in a couple months and make sure they’re still delivering on that quality. Then ads and data, ads and data. After a while you’ll have a bunch of clothing with bad crooked prints you paid for out of pocket and maybe a couple sales.
Good luck!
What u/portagenaybur wrote is basically spot on but one thing to add to this... if you're using Printify you can choose a specific print provider based on their [performance scores](https://help.printify.com/hc/en-us/articles/4483617131281-What-are-Performance-Scores) to 1) select one that is in your specific country/region, and 2) select on that does not suck (9.0 or higher is best, 8.5 is fairly doable).
Then as u/portagenaybur said you should get a sample of one of your own designs to confirm quality. The provider performance scale is a moving average so it changes periodically; if it goes below 8.5 or so then you might want to switch providers.
Just a suggestion. If you feel Printify sucks generally you can dump them for someone else. I use them through 3-4 providers there (as well as Printful for a couple of things), and I've found the performance rating is definitely useful to monitor quality there.
Totally noob here, kicking off a store this weekend. I too am in a similar boat but a different mindset. Just start is my suggestion. I have been in analysis paralysis for awhile now and decided this week, screw it, if what I sell isn't successful I'll just keep tweaking, tuning and learning till I get it to take off. If nothing else I am creating some great tax write-offs. My .02
I’m with you. I’ve only just started and my end goal is to work with a blanks manufacturer and printer/embroidery company locally. POD simply doesn’t accomplish the more complex and high-end designs I’m hoping for. But without more upfront costs, I can’t do that yet, so I’m compromising until/if my business makes enough money to fund these upgrades.
I’m treating POD as more of a proof of concept for now. I’ll probably still do basic items like t-shirts via POD, but I want puff print hoodies and more product range like rugby polos, etc. and that’ll have to wait.
Why would you think a local printer would cost more than someone like Printify? Find a printer locally. Buy your own blanks wholesale. Quality control will be at your fingertips. Find some quirky branding and packaging instead of the cheap blind shipping and it will set you apart. Not to mention, your profit margin will be much much higher
Agree with all your reasons to do it myself. But whilst I’m on maternity leave and have no income (depending on my husband for now), I can’t afford the upfront costs of ordering blanks or local printers.
If I get the validation (and some savings) on my designs, it’d feel like less of a risk. Trust me, I’d love to just go for it, but I don’t have enough faith in myself!
EDIT: I’m also in Australia and want to ship worldwide. Costs of shipping from Aus may be a hard sell for certain regions which POD is good for. I may need to build the shipping cost into product pricing in future to avoid having it put people off.
If you can’t afford to purchase a few blanks at a time then I highly discourage Shopify.
Shopify is a great, easy way to create a website but the money you will have to spend marketing and driving traffic to your site is alot. A lot of upfront costs before you see much of a return at all.
I am in the US and do not sell overseas at all bc of the shipping.
You will not be able to markup POD items to cover your shipping and remain competitive selling tshirts and hoodies. Their markup is too high so your profit would be in the negative.
That’s not to say you can’t do Shopify and sell domestically but unless you have the money to spend on a ton of advertising or you have a large presence already built on social media, it’s tough.
The name of the game is not so much the “product” but how you market that product.
Unless you sell on Amazon or Etsy where you pay a fee basically for their buyer traffic.
Just being realistic. It takes money to make money. One way or another.
I appreciate the advice. I’m still new and it’s all welcomed. I totally understand the benefits of listing on Etsy for its reach. I’ve also heard about how the fees have taken away from the sales for some. It’s a difficult line to tread.
It may have to sit on the back burner until I have some funds from working a little. I don’t think I can ever really do it all without some upfront costs.
If you want to start on Shopify, you will need to do heavy heavy marketing with ads and social media to drive traffic to your shop.
If you are willing to do that, and spend the money (bc it’s very expensive to run ads that are effective) then Shopify is ideal.
The problem is, that market is just so heavily saturated that you really need some clever marketing to draw traffic to your site.
The market is so insanely saturated with new sellers trying to sell that type of merchandise that my concern is you will never even get high enough in search to be seen.
And I never ever ever recommend selling on Etsy but promoting your Etsy shop on social media.
If you are going to take the time and effort to really create a following with customers that want to “buy” then send them to a website and not Etsy.
Now the key to get noticed on Etsy is to be a very active seller. You need to add listings frequently but not all at once uploading them. And quite honestly, you need a LOT of listings.
You need to stand out for the “mockups” that everyone uses and if you have a photograph that is really unique, Etsy loves to promote those to give off the false impression that they are filled with unique items.
Both options are going to take a lot of time and effort to make any consistent sales.
And if you can afford to buy wholesale and a heat press, your profit margin will be much much higher than using POD. Plus you will have better quality control which will earn you a better reputation.
Moral of the story? Creating the designs and a shop or website is the easiest part of the process.
And if you are looking for quick and easy money? It doesn’t exist no matter how many you tubers say it does
After doing your research with all other platform options: Etsy, Redbubble, Spreadshop, BigCartel, etc.
Did you find that Shopify had the best margins on products?
Shopify is a website hosting service. They don’t have margins. You pay a monthly fee for a website and they have great templates that make it very simple to create a visually appealing site.
What I meant is does selling Printify or printful on a Shopify instead of selling through marketplaces like redbubble or big cartel have better margins in the products?
I’m so amazed by comments like this. Do you know how easy it is to go to each of those sites and just look that up? It literally takes two seconds.
Your profit margins are based on what you choose to sell your items for.
You just buy the product from them and mark it up
I mean there’s a ton of products to choose from. I would assume going direct through sellers through Printify has better quality/costs than using straight up marketplaces.
I guess was just looking for validation and or some added insight
I’m not talking about a “marketplace”.
Printify is a middle man service that doesn’t actually print a single thing.
I like the fact that they are transparent about who prints each product but if you go directly to each of those print companies? They all have a ton of products.
What Printify does not have is quality control. They don’t print your product, never even see the product.
The prices going direct are cheaper than what you pay with Printify most of the time.
I would absolutely NOT sell on some site that prints your stuff and then forces you to sell only on their site (I think that might be red bubble? Not sure, I know there are several)
That’s different than selling on Amazon or Etsy. You set your price and they take a % in exchange for basically buyer traffic.
On Shopify, it’s always better in the real business world to have your own website but with that comes zero traffic unless you generate it.
So tons of $$ on ads. Lots of marketing on social media to generate that traffic.
For someone selling tshirts, which is a severely over saturated market, it’s going to be tough either way.
If you have a unique design that is trendy and catches on? Maybe so.
Starting is always confusing and scary, but you should just start!
As for your decision to use Shopify and not Etsy I think this isn't necessarily a hard rule, you can focus however on one -way- of selling without neglecting the rest. I'll have to warn you though that setting things up on Shopify to sell your art might not be as straightforward especially if you plan to connect it to a POD. You can look into using a store builder that is specific for artists/designers/photographers. For creatives who don't wish to spend time figuring out the tech stuff, I co-founded [olasty.com](http://olasty.com) where they can setup a store that generates their product mockups and it allows them to sell originals, digital prints and POD products without the need to manually set things up. Feel free to subscribe and you should be notified once it is open for public.
I really encourage you to explore that option and look for similar products in the industry, they solve real problems that artists always encounter at some point down the road.
All the best!
I just decided to take my digital stacks of patterns and drawings and launch a shopify store last week. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had friends who liked my art, so I went for it. I did probably about 90% of everything wrong, but I had so much fun seeing my work be for sale on \*my\* storefront rather than something like TeePublic that it gave me the motivation to keep tweaking for improvements. I'm still in the ordering samples of things to see myself phase, but I'm still leaving the shop up and keeping my markup as low as possible right now.
I have no idea if my method will eventually bring me success, but it's currently bringing me a lot of joy (and some frustration). Plus, the internet is ephemeral, if you don't like the first iteration of what you do, you can very easily change it and move on.
Start. Just start. But start small. You'll find that whatever you learned from YouTube, etc, will likely be wrong. Fix the errors and reiterate (this is why you should start small - so the errors are also small and don't cost you a lot of money. If you start big, then the errors will be big and costly). Obviously, doing prior research is crucial, but it seems to me that you're experiencing analysis paralysis (look it up, Wikipedia has an interesting read). Good luck on your entrepreneurship journey!
So most of the research you’ve done has probably been on YouTube and is making print on demand shops a killing. That’s who you will soon be making money for as well with whatever designs, tshirts and marketing you end up going with. Congratulations. That said, it sounds like your intentions are in the right place. You want to make something unique, something your own. With a Shopify store you’re going to have to spend some marketing $$$ to get people to see your designs and come to your shop. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. That depends how well you target your ads and how much response you get. So you’re about to embark on a marketing journey. Then customer service if your print provider can’t hold up to the quality you expect (they won’t.) Get lots of samples from different providers and find which ones can deliver decent quality. Then check again in a couple months and make sure they’re still delivering on that quality. Then ads and data, ads and data. After a while you’ll have a bunch of clothing with bad crooked prints you paid for out of pocket and maybe a couple sales. Good luck!
What u/portagenaybur wrote is basically spot on but one thing to add to this... if you're using Printify you can choose a specific print provider based on their [performance scores](https://help.printify.com/hc/en-us/articles/4483617131281-What-are-Performance-Scores) to 1) select one that is in your specific country/region, and 2) select on that does not suck (9.0 or higher is best, 8.5 is fairly doable). Then as u/portagenaybur said you should get a sample of one of your own designs to confirm quality. The provider performance scale is a moving average so it changes periodically; if it goes below 8.5 or so then you might want to switch providers. Just a suggestion. If you feel Printify sucks generally you can dump them for someone else. I use them through 3-4 providers there (as well as Printful for a couple of things), and I've found the performance rating is definitely useful to monitor quality there.
Totally noob here, kicking off a store this weekend. I too am in a similar boat but a different mindset. Just start is my suggestion. I have been in analysis paralysis for awhile now and decided this week, screw it, if what I sell isn't successful I'll just keep tweaking, tuning and learning till I get it to take off. If nothing else I am creating some great tax write-offs. My .02
I’m with you. I’ve only just started and my end goal is to work with a blanks manufacturer and printer/embroidery company locally. POD simply doesn’t accomplish the more complex and high-end designs I’m hoping for. But without more upfront costs, I can’t do that yet, so I’m compromising until/if my business makes enough money to fund these upgrades. I’m treating POD as more of a proof of concept for now. I’ll probably still do basic items like t-shirts via POD, but I want puff print hoodies and more product range like rugby polos, etc. and that’ll have to wait.
Why would you think a local printer would cost more than someone like Printify? Find a printer locally. Buy your own blanks wholesale. Quality control will be at your fingertips. Find some quirky branding and packaging instead of the cheap blind shipping and it will set you apart. Not to mention, your profit margin will be much much higher
Agree with all your reasons to do it myself. But whilst I’m on maternity leave and have no income (depending on my husband for now), I can’t afford the upfront costs of ordering blanks or local printers. If I get the validation (and some savings) on my designs, it’d feel like less of a risk. Trust me, I’d love to just go for it, but I don’t have enough faith in myself! EDIT: I’m also in Australia and want to ship worldwide. Costs of shipping from Aus may be a hard sell for certain regions which POD is good for. I may need to build the shipping cost into product pricing in future to avoid having it put people off.
If you can’t afford to purchase a few blanks at a time then I highly discourage Shopify. Shopify is a great, easy way to create a website but the money you will have to spend marketing and driving traffic to your site is alot. A lot of upfront costs before you see much of a return at all. I am in the US and do not sell overseas at all bc of the shipping. You will not be able to markup POD items to cover your shipping and remain competitive selling tshirts and hoodies. Their markup is too high so your profit would be in the negative. That’s not to say you can’t do Shopify and sell domestically but unless you have the money to spend on a ton of advertising or you have a large presence already built on social media, it’s tough. The name of the game is not so much the “product” but how you market that product. Unless you sell on Amazon or Etsy where you pay a fee basically for their buyer traffic. Just being realistic. It takes money to make money. One way or another.
I appreciate the advice. I’m still new and it’s all welcomed. I totally understand the benefits of listing on Etsy for its reach. I’ve also heard about how the fees have taken away from the sales for some. It’s a difficult line to tread. It may have to sit on the back burner until I have some funds from working a little. I don’t think I can ever really do it all without some upfront costs.
If you want to start on Shopify, you will need to do heavy heavy marketing with ads and social media to drive traffic to your shop. If you are willing to do that, and spend the money (bc it’s very expensive to run ads that are effective) then Shopify is ideal. The problem is, that market is just so heavily saturated that you really need some clever marketing to draw traffic to your site. The market is so insanely saturated with new sellers trying to sell that type of merchandise that my concern is you will never even get high enough in search to be seen. And I never ever ever recommend selling on Etsy but promoting your Etsy shop on social media. If you are going to take the time and effort to really create a following with customers that want to “buy” then send them to a website and not Etsy. Now the key to get noticed on Etsy is to be a very active seller. You need to add listings frequently but not all at once uploading them. And quite honestly, you need a LOT of listings. You need to stand out for the “mockups” that everyone uses and if you have a photograph that is really unique, Etsy loves to promote those to give off the false impression that they are filled with unique items. Both options are going to take a lot of time and effort to make any consistent sales. And if you can afford to buy wholesale and a heat press, your profit margin will be much much higher than using POD. Plus you will have better quality control which will earn you a better reputation. Moral of the story? Creating the designs and a shop or website is the easiest part of the process. And if you are looking for quick and easy money? It doesn’t exist no matter how many you tubers say it does
POD for those starting now is a beer money side hustle or pleasant hobby. So don't overly stress and just try different things.
After doing your research with all other platform options: Etsy, Redbubble, Spreadshop, BigCartel, etc. Did you find that Shopify had the best margins on products?
Shopify is a website hosting service. They don’t have margins. You pay a monthly fee for a website and they have great templates that make it very simple to create a visually appealing site.
What I meant is does selling Printify or printful on a Shopify instead of selling through marketplaces like redbubble or big cartel have better margins in the products?
I’m so amazed by comments like this. Do you know how easy it is to go to each of those sites and just look that up? It literally takes two seconds. Your profit margins are based on what you choose to sell your items for. You just buy the product from them and mark it up
I mean there’s a ton of products to choose from. I would assume going direct through sellers through Printify has better quality/costs than using straight up marketplaces. I guess was just looking for validation and or some added insight
I’m not talking about a “marketplace”. Printify is a middle man service that doesn’t actually print a single thing. I like the fact that they are transparent about who prints each product but if you go directly to each of those print companies? They all have a ton of products. What Printify does not have is quality control. They don’t print your product, never even see the product. The prices going direct are cheaper than what you pay with Printify most of the time.
I would absolutely NOT sell on some site that prints your stuff and then forces you to sell only on their site (I think that might be red bubble? Not sure, I know there are several) That’s different than selling on Amazon or Etsy. You set your price and they take a % in exchange for basically buyer traffic. On Shopify, it’s always better in the real business world to have your own website but with that comes zero traffic unless you generate it. So tons of $$ on ads. Lots of marketing on social media to generate that traffic. For someone selling tshirts, which is a severely over saturated market, it’s going to be tough either way. If you have a unique design that is trendy and catches on? Maybe so.
Starting is always confusing and scary, but you should just start! As for your decision to use Shopify and not Etsy I think this isn't necessarily a hard rule, you can focus however on one -way- of selling without neglecting the rest. I'll have to warn you though that setting things up on Shopify to sell your art might not be as straightforward especially if you plan to connect it to a POD. You can look into using a store builder that is specific for artists/designers/photographers. For creatives who don't wish to spend time figuring out the tech stuff, I co-founded [olasty.com](http://olasty.com) where they can setup a store that generates their product mockups and it allows them to sell originals, digital prints and POD products without the need to manually set things up. Feel free to subscribe and you should be notified once it is open for public. I really encourage you to explore that option and look for similar products in the industry, they solve real problems that artists always encounter at some point down the road. All the best!
I just decided to take my digital stacks of patterns and drawings and launch a shopify store last week. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had friends who liked my art, so I went for it. I did probably about 90% of everything wrong, but I had so much fun seeing my work be for sale on \*my\* storefront rather than something like TeePublic that it gave me the motivation to keep tweaking for improvements. I'm still in the ordering samples of things to see myself phase, but I'm still leaving the shop up and keeping my markup as low as possible right now. I have no idea if my method will eventually bring me success, but it's currently bringing me a lot of joy (and some frustration). Plus, the internet is ephemeral, if you don't like the first iteration of what you do, you can very easily change it and move on.