So, you want to start print on demand (POD)? Alright, here you go, but first – here’s the quick answer:
You can set up a print on demand website using a platform such as Wix, Shopify, WordPress, Teemill or SquareSpace. Try to create original designs, and make sure to do really good marketing, as your site will almost certainly fail without it.
I’ve only set up one Print on Demand website before – and it didn’t go that well, so I am not an expert. However, I do have experience, and in this post I will discuss what I would do if I were to start again.
But this entire post is pointless if you don’t know what POD is. So here we go!
What is POD?
Print on Demand is a form of dropshipping. I can already hear you asking, “but, what is dropshipping?!”
Dropshipping is where you sell a product, almost always online, without actually ever touching, storing or delivering the product yourself. It works by getting the manufacturer to send its products directly to your customers, and you keep the profit.
You have to pay the manufacturer’s price, which is usually really cheap, and your customers pay a higher price, which you keep the profit for.
Here’s an image to explain it better:
This example is actually probably a little under the possible profit margins. Some dropshippers make more profit than what they pay their supplier.
Dropshipping is also very risk-free, as you only pay for the product when the customer has already paid.
POD is a special type of dropshipping, where you instead create a design – usually for a t-shirt, some type of clothing, a tote bag or something similar. This means that that other dropshippers can’t offer the exact same product as you.
The other upside of dropshipping is that there is no waste. You only print a t-shirt when it is ordered, so you don’t waste money on printing extra.
However, the downside to this is that the market for POD products has now become oversaturated.
How much can POD earn?
The answer is: it depends – a lot! But that’s not helpful, nor what you came for, so let’s at least help you figure out how much you could earn.
There’s quite a few factors that could change it, so let’s have a look at a few of them:
- Marketing. This is probably the most important factor. If you are bad at getting people to your site, like I was, then you probably shouldn’t even start POD. If you’re a pro, though, it shouldn’t be a problem to replace your job’s income – as long as you work hard. Social media is usually a really good way to do this.
- Your site itself. We’ll go over this a bit later, but if you have a slow, bad-looking, glitchy site – you won’t get any sales. A fast, clean site will do the job well.
- Your products. If your producs are the same as other designs, bad quality and make small profit margins – you won’t sell a thing (and even if you do, you will barely make any money)! Make sure that you have original designs at a reasonable cost.
- If you have anything to set you apart. For example, my old site was carbon-negative and planted a tree for every product sold. Something like that should work well, but if you are just bog-standard then there is no reason why anybody should buy from you than elsewhere.
Obviously, there’s a lot more to it than that, but the main one is marketing. My old site ticked most of the boxes – but I did hardly any marketing. So I only sold a few products (but it was costing more to run than what I was making back).
If you can tick all the boxes confidently then there should be no reason why you can’t make it your job.
Where are the best places to start?
Below I have listed some of the best places to start your POD journey:
- Shopify. Probably the most popular platform for Print on Demand, because of its capability, cost and integrations sith other platforms. It isn’t the cheapest option, but it isn’t the most expensive either. Shopify also gets your site onto Google quickly – at least from what I’ve seen with other sites.
- Teemill. This one is interesting. This comes with everything you need to build your store, plus their own supply chain, and everything is eco-friendly. This is the platform I used for my site. It costs £10 a month, as well as your domain cost, if you want all the features, and is free with very limited features. Their website builder is also very simple and looks good.
- WordPress. This is not made specifically for POD, but it is very good for it. WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder, and what this site here is built using. You can either code the site or use a normal builder, and it is perfect for almost any task because of the thousands of integrations and plugins it offers. WordPress is completely free and he only thing you need to pay for is some website hosting. This makes it by far the cheapest option, but it is probably one of the most difficult options – but it is also probably the most powerful.
- Wix. Wix is a popular place to build a website – and for good reason! It’s easy to build and has a lot of integrations. It’s also quite powerful and has an interesting scaleability feature for traffic spikes (which helps you in a few ways). It isn’t cheap, though.
- Squarespace. You can imagine Squarespace as about the same as Wix, but based on my research Wix is slightly better, especially for POD. Squarespace is slightly cheaper, though.
How much does it cost to start POD?
I’m not going to mess around: POD is pretty cheap, at least for most businesses. It’s incredibly low-risk, and only costs about £100 every year – much lower if you’ve decided to use WordPress (you could probably get it to £50 or less).
Now you have the answer, here’s why. Essentially, you don’t have to pay for anything apart from the website. And websites can be dead cheap.
You only pay for your products when a customer has already bought it, and sometimes that’s all automatic anyway, so you never have to pay a penny for your actual stuff. So the only other cost is the website (and tax, if you’re over 16 (in the UK), so I dont yet have to pay that).
You could pay practically nothing for your site, using – for example – Teemill without a load of features, but I don’t recommend that. Realistically, you need to have a custom domain name and no branding from your supplier/website provider.
Eithwr way, the answer is: practically nothing.
Is POD better than dropshipping?
I’ve already written a longer, more detailed post answering this question, so I’ll keep this brief.
It depends a lot on what exactly you’re aiming for. For this (as we’re trying to make a profitable POD store), I’m assuming our main goal is to make money.
It also depends a lot on your skills. If you’re a great graphic designer, then the choice is obvious (POD), and if you’re incredibly good at (the very weird skill of) finding interesting, surprising and actually useful products, then you should go for normal dropshipping.
Typical dropshipping is slightly more risky, as it typically relies heavier on ads, which need to work to make money. However, this risk does come with much higher rewards.
In general, as dropshipping is more suited to making a brand, normal dropshipping is more profitable, and also because it usually has higher profit margins. However, this most certainly is not the entire case, as it depends on so many factors.
In general, though, you should think of POD as lower risk, but lower reward. However, this is not at all reliable, as I’d say that it’s more likely that any actual store will follow that rule than not.
Thanks for reading. Visit my blog for more, or here for more stuff on dropshipping (and POD).