59 – Setting Up Print on Demand on Your Own Website

Nikki

0:00
Now that we’ve explored print on demand marketplaces like Society6 and Spoonflower in more detail, we want to dive into how you can add Print on Demand products to your own website through providers like Printful, Printify, Gooten, and more.

Laura

0:15
In episode number 50, introducing you to print on demand, we talked about all of the pros and cons of the different options and having print on demand products through your own website gives you the most control over your pricing, your profitability, and your overall customer experience. Nikki has a ton of experience in this area and I’ve just gotten a few products launched on my own website. So we’re really excited to share our experience and advice with you.

Nikki

0:44
Let’s dive in.

Laura

0:51
Hi, this is Laura Lee Griffin.

Nikki

0:53
And this is Nikki May with the Startist Society, inspiring you to stop getting in your own way and start building an art biz and life that you love.

Laura

1:02
We are artists who believe strongly in the power of community, accountability, following your intuition, taking small actionable steps and breaking down the barriers of fear and procrastination that keep you stuck.

Nikki

1:15
Follow along with us on our creative business journey as we encourage you on yours.

In Episode 53 we went into pretty specific detail about setting up shop in Spoonflower and Society6. But in this episode, since there are so many variables between different website platforms and print on demand companies, we’re going to be just a little more general.

Laura

1:41
Yeah, all the POD companies work pretty similarly on how you set up an account and upload your artwork onto products. We’ll go into more detail about this process on Printful, which is very similar to Printify and other platforms. But the way you link up your Printful account to your website will differ slightly depending on the platform that you’re using. So we’ll discuss this aspect in more general terms.

Nikki

2:05
Yeah, let’s explain again, briefly, what services these companies actually provide.

Laura

2:11
Okay.

Nikki

2:12
In essence, you can design, make and produce your own products. These companies have all the equipment and the shipping capabilities, so you don’t have to deal with all of that. You just upload your designs, they source the materials and the providers, they do their printing, the packaging and the shipping. And basically, they just charge you a fee for all of this. You can then take the product and sell it in any channel that you have.

Laura

2:35
Yeah, though today we’re focused on talking about selling through your own website, just know that you could just as easily have these products directly shipped to your home studio and then you can sell them locally, in person or at holiday markets. Or alternatively, you can even sell through marketplaces like Etsy and eBay.

Nikki

2:55
Alright, so why use this over Society6? Really, you can make a lot more of a profit selling through your own website because you can totally control the markup on every single product. On Society6, for example, there’s only a couple of products that you can choose your own markup. Most of them, it’s just a flat 10%. I think it’s only it’s only prints and…

Laura

3:20
Canvases or something?

Nikki

3:21
Yeah, yeah, it’s only prints on paper and canvas prints that you can choose your own markup. And with Spoonflower, you have no control at all over markup.

Laura

3:31
Yeah, Society6 also has a lot of overhead associated with running a marketplace which is embedded in their pricing and is something that isn’t an issue with non-marketplace POD companies like Printful and Printify. You’re basically paying for visibility and for the managing the tech side of things in a marketplace, which can be helpful if you don’t have an audience yet.

Nikki

3:52
And when we say on your own website, we mean on your WordPress website with WooCommerce as your shopping plugin or a Shopify, Squarespace or Wix site with print on demand integration, or even an Etsy store linked up with one of these POD services. We’ll link to the pages on Printful and Printify that lists all the integrations that they offer.

Laura

4:15
Now, before we get into detail in how to set up shop and connect that to your website, let’s chat first about how you make money with these services and what kind of costs are involved. Now of course, every provider will have different fees, so you’ll have to do a bit of research on whatever POD service you choose to use. Plus you’ll have your website platforms fees as well. But for the sake of this conversation, we’re going to say that we’re going to use Printful service. So to be able to be profitable with your products you need to ensure that the money that you collect from your customer is more than the money that’s going out the door.

Nikki

4:54
Profit 101 as taught by Laura. Laura, you’re the finance half of this operation, so I’m gonna let you take the lead on this money talk. Don’t mind while I nap over here.

Laura

5:09
Okay, so let’s talk about your costs first. For this conversation, we aren’t going into all of the complexities that are possible with ecommerce websites; we’re just talking about the very basics of getting started with selling POD on your site. There’s a lot more functionality that isn’t necessary to get started that can basically up your game later. But just to get going, costs are fairly minimal. Sites like Printful generally don’t make you pay anything upfront with the free version of their service. There’s no product creation fee or listing fee, just a base price per product, plus the cost of shipping to your customer. And sales tax if the end customer that the product is delivered to is located in a state or country where you don’t collect the sales tax yourself. So that covers the fees that you’ll get charged from the POD service.

Nikki

6:01
Okay.

Laura

6:02
However, you’ll also have things like bank merchant fees for your payment processor, for example, if you have Stripe or PayPal on your site to be able to collect money, and that fee is usually around 30 cents per transaction plus 3% of your retail cost. Some platforms may charge a surplus if you don’t use their own preferred payment processor. So for example, Shopify has their own payment processing, and if you choose to use someone else, I think, like PayPal or Stripe, they charge an extra 2% on top of their merchant fee. So that’s just something to be aware of.

Nikki

6:39
Sneaky.

Laura

6:40
Very sneaky.

Nikki

6:42
So what Laura and I use, which is WordPress with WooCommerce, there’s no extra cost from our hosting provider to add basic ecommerce to our sites. If you’re using Shopify, that commerce functionality is built into your monthly hosting costs, and for Squarespace, at the time of this recording at least, upgrading to a commerce plan its only $8 more a month to add basic ecommerce functionality.

So let’s talk about revenues.

Laura

7:10
Okay, so we talked about costs, let’s talk about revenues. So you collect whatever amount you want to charge your customer for the product itself. And you can mark that up to ensure it covers all of those other fees that we just chatted about. You’ll also likely want to add a cost for shipping. Now, what’s really great about integrations like the WooCommerce plugin that you and I use, Nikki, is that it will actually calculate the shipping that Printful, for example, will charge you for that customer, and it will add that amount to the customer’s cart. So essentially, it’s just a pass through cost.

Nikki

7:43
Right.

Laura

7:44
The only time this becomes an issue is if you want to give your customer free shipping if they spend over a certain dollar amount. So I know in a lot of cases, people might give free shipping over 50 US dollars, for example. And in that case, I’d just up your retail price a little bit to compensate for that hit that you’re going to take on the free shipping.

Nikki

8:03
Yeah, and it’s worth noting, if you’re selling not just print on demand products, but some products from your own studio as well like your own original art, you may end up having multiple line items for shipping in the shopping cart. And that can be a little confusing for the customer. So I have a custom note on my checkout page that says “A note about shipping: If you’re purchasing a variety of items, they may come from a combination of my studio and directly from the manufacturer. So don’t be surprised if you see more than one line of shipping below. If you have any questions or issues about shipping costs, please get in touch.” And that helps the customer feel a little less confused about Well, why are you charging me for shipping twice? Right?

Laura

8:48
Yeah, that definitely helps avoid that confusion. If there’s two rows of shipping and they think they’re being duplicate billed, then they’ll know oh no, this is the reason why there’s two lines of shipping.

Nikki

8:56
Right. But to keep things as simple as possible, we definitely recommend starting with only one print on demand integration on your website.

Laura

9:04
Exactly. So let’s just look at a quick example, using Printful, on how in the world you would price your products. So Nikki, what do we want to sell today?

Nikki

9:17
Well, Laura, let’s sell one of my beautifully designed t-shirts for $28.

Laura

9:23
Okay, so based on what I mentioned earlier, if we want to know if that $28 is a good price point or not, we need to understand our costs. So what costs do we need to ensure get captured in that price?

Nikki

9:35
Okay, well, first there’s the base cost of the t shirt. And the cost of shipping and the payment processing fee.

Laura

9:44
Exactly. So let’s say we want to have a really high quality unisex Bella + Canvas tshirt in your shop and the base cost of that on Printful starts at $12.95 for XL to XL size and then it goes up from there, I think I think it is capped at $17.45 for a 5XL size.

Nikki

10:09
Okay, I’m gonna bust in here for a minute and get on my soapbox about how strongly I feel about charging the same amount to my customers for tshirts at any size. I know it takes more fabric to make a 5X than an XS, but I don’t want to punish my customers financially based on their size. So this is something I feel really, really strongly about. And I take into consideration when I set my prices for clothing. I set my price based on an average of the of the price range. And I might make a bit more on smaller sizes and less on larger sizes. But I figure it all averages out in the end.

Laura

10:44
Yeah, that totally makes sense. So let’s say the average base cost that Printful will charge you for a tshirt, if we average all those sizes together is around $14.

Nikki

10:56
Okay.

Laura

10:56
So the shipping will vary depending on the buyers location, since we’re setting up our integrations to just charge the customer the actual amount that will get charged from Printful, we’re really not too worried about that affecting our profitability. The merchant fee will be let’s say around 30 cents a transaction plus 3% of the overall customer order. And when I say customer order, usually that’s the product, like the shirt plus the shipping. So let’s say my customer is in Oklahoma. And the shipping charge should run about four US dollars per Printful if it’s shipping to Oklahoma. So I’m looking at a total cost to me now of $14 for the t shirt, $4 for shipping and $1.26 and payment processing fees.

Nikki

11:42
And what about sales tax?

Laura

11:45
Great question. Disclaimer, I am not a tax accountant or consultant. However, since my business is based in Texas, and my customer is in a different state where I don’t yet collect sales tax, and I don’t have a resale certificate to upload to Printful, for that, Printful is going to charge me the sales tax on the base cost and shipping of the order. So let’s say the tax for the destination in Oklahoma runs like 8%, which would be around $1.44. So in total, my cost for that lovely tshirt going to Oklahoma is around $20.70.

Nikki

12:22
Well, damn, I need to raise the price of my tshirt. That tshirts now gonna cost at least $32.

Laura

12:30
So assuming your customers actually paying for the shipping, your original profit would be around $11.30 if you kept the price at 28 bucks. But if you increase it to 32, you’ll make more profit. It won’t be exactly $4 More because you’re going to have to pay a little bit more on the payment processing fee to PayPal or whoever you use. But it’s definitely a good idea to look at setting up your prices in such a way that compensate you for all the things that we mentioned plus your art and your design work.

Nikki

13:03
Okay, so now my T shirts gonna cost you $872. Okay, not maybe not.

Laura

13:11
Does it have gold embroidery on it like 14 carat or?

Nikki

13:14
No, it would go even higher than that.

Laura

13:19
So remember that this is all based on charging your customer for the actual shipping fee that you’ll get charged. So if you decide to give free shipping to your customers, you’d automatically lower your profit by $4, which is a lot out of your own pocket.

Nikki

13:34
Ouch.

Laura

13:35
Yeah, so I’d recommend only offering free shipping if people place an order above a certain dollar amount.

Nikki

13:41
Okay, that all makes really good sense. So what happens if my gorgeous tshirt is getting shipped to Australia?

Laura

13:48
Well, depending on the fulfillment center, the cost to ship is a little bit more expensive for someplace like Australia. But if you’re passing along those fees to your customer, you won’t have a huge hit to your profitability. You just want to make sure that the customers from other countries are aware that they may get charged customs fees.

Nikki

14:07
So if there’s a customs fee, where in the process does that charged? When it gets delivered?

Laura

14:12
Yeah, it’s the customer’s responsibility. And I specifically include this in my shipping and returns policy page on my website, which I do recommend everybody having and it states international shipments may incur customs fees. This fee is not in our control and is assessed by your local customs office. For each country. The customs policy is different. And the fee is usually based on a variety of factors like weight, value and size. We do not take responsibility for customs fees.

Nikki

14:44
Yeah, Printful actually has a page that lists this and all kinds of other policies that they recommend that we should copy for our shops and we will link to that in the show notes. So what if someone orders more than one of a single product, does the shipping amount go down?

Laura

14:59
Yeah, generally, the POD company you use will have discounted pricing when more than one item is ordered, as long as those items are in a single shipping box. So if it’s a special item that needs to be in its own shipping box, then they won’t necessarily have that extra discount.

Nikki

15:17
Yeah, and this can get rather complicated depending on the number of products in different categories. But for example, Printful has a detailed FAQ section that we’ll link to that explains all the different scenarios for different shipping costs.

Laura

15:30
One thing we want to mention is that there are some ways to get discounts on the pricing. But it only really benefits you if you have pretty significant volumes. So we don’t really suggest that you even worry about this when you’re just getting started. Printify offers a premium plan that is currently $24.99 a month, and that’ll give you 20% off on all of your orders. Plus, it lets you create custom products. So when I say custom products, that means like a customer could enter in a name on a tshirt that they ordered, right Printful has a pro membership too, but it only gives you access to things like additional design and mockup tools. Printful offers discounts, however, through bulk order pricing. So basically, if you order like 25 of the same item, then you can start getting a discount. You can also earn discounts if your overall sales are greater than $1,000 in a month.

Nikki

16:26
Which we’d be happy to get to that.

Laura

16:30
Yeah, but I wouldn’t anticipate that happening right off the bat.

Nikki

16:34
Any minute now, Laura.

Laura

16:38
So what’s nice for beginners, though, with Printful is that they provide a 20% discount on sample orders, and you get one sample order per month, with up to three products per order with free shipping to select destinations. And then you can even earn up to five sample orders a month if you reach certain sales thresholds. But again, starting out, you’re going to be at the one order a month. So you can order a tshirt for a really low price, because it’s not your retail price. It’s your cost that you’re ordering. And then you get that discount. So maybe it only cost you $10 or so for the t shirt. And that’s a great way to look at the samples and see if they’re at the quality and the color that you want.

Nikki

17:18
For sure. Yeah, I don’t think Printify offers the same product discounts like that. They only offer discounts if you are paying for their membership.

Laura

17:27
Yeah, you’re right. Another cool thing that you can do on Printful is order a print color swatch sampler. And that’s really similar to what we mentioned in a past episode when we talked about Spoonflower. So you can basically test the print outcomes and the colors on several different products like you can order a mug or a tshirt or a pillow and it will come with all those little color swatches on it so you can see what it will look like when it prints out.

Nikki

17:52
Okay, Laura, I’m sure we could go on forever about all these details. But I think it’s a pretty good overview. So let’s move on and talk about how things are packaged and shipped. I know that some people don’t want their products to be shipped by another company because they want to have specific branding, and a special unboxing experience of their products.

Laura

18:11
Yeah, but it’s helpful to know that some POD sites do actually offer white label services for an additional fee. So you can get a tshirt with your logo on the inside label. You can get custom packaging, stickers, business cards, all kinds of things.

Nikki

18:27
Yeah, you’d definitely want to build that into your pricing if you want that level of customization in the packaging. One of the reasons we like Printful is that you can add your logo to the return label and that doesn’t cost you anything extra. And they also have warehousing options that you can send them your own custom packaging and inserts that they can include in each customer’s box. And we’ll link to the info about that in the show notes.

Laura

18:52
Yeah and that one will cost a little bit extra money if you want to ship them your own things, and then they have to store them for you and put them in your packaging.

Nikki

19:00
And if you’re adding custom packaging inserts, labels, that can really add up to more than just a little.

Laura

19:08
Yeah, there’s costs for that that you incur before you even send it to them too. So yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about what you should consider when choosing your POD provider. Since we’ve mostly been talking about Printful and Printify, let’s use them as examples, but do your own research on any other providers that you might want to consider, especially if there’s one that’s located near your local region or in your country. I know that I was really torn between starting with Printify or Printful.

Nikki

19:39
Yeah, when I first started using print on demand sites, I did a whole bunch of research on different products on different sites because I really had some very specific ideas of what I wanted. For example, I tested phone cases on Printful and Printify, because there are so many different options and even even within one type of phone, there’s slim cases, padded cases, thick ones, thin ones and all different materials. So I tested a whole bunch of them to find just the right ones. And I chose mugs from one site because I like the shape better. I chose calendars and journals from another site because I liked their shape and paper options better. But basically, I don’t think there’s one that’s best overall, you just need to find the ones that work for you.

Laura

20:31
And just a reminder, we suggest starting with just one.

Nikki

20:34
Yeah, this is a case of do as I say not as I do. Just find the one that has the most products that you think you want to offer, or the price points that are best for you. Some other things to consider with Printful, for example, it’s one company, so there’s a lot of consistency around the product printing. But that can also cause an issue in a situation like COVID, because they don’t have a backup supplier to help fulfill orders, and they could really get behind on production and shipping.

Laura

21:06
Yeah, I could see that. But that being said, they actually produce the products themselves in several different locations across the world. So when a customer places an order on your website, they’ll automatically choose the location that is most convenient and would take the least amount of time and cost to ship to your customers location, which is kind of nice.

Nikki

21:28
Yeah, and although I’ve heard that people have had issues with delays, personally, I’ve been using Printful for years. And with the exception of face masks at the beginning of the pandemic, I haven’t really noticed any big delays in orders being fulfilled.

Laura

21:42
Now with Printify, they’re more of a middleman. So they don’t actually own the equipment, they don’t print any of the products themselves. They basically connect you with dozens of different, if not hundreds of different pod suppliers all over the globe. So if one is having an issue, you can see the delivery time impacts of each company and then you can select a different one for that product. And we’ll link to that printify page in the show notes. But they also have a bit more variety of products to choose from, I think Printful is fairly apparel heavy. But the downside to having all of these global third party providers is that the product that you’re interested in might not be printed in your primary customer shipping zone. And the printing quality may not be consistent across all those different suppliers.

Nikki

22:31
And another thing to consider when choosing your provider is the level of support they offer. Printful and Printify both have a fairly robust blog and support documents on their sites. But Printful offers 24/7 live customer support through phone, chat or email.

Laura

22:49
And I have to tell you, with Printful, I had questions about sales tax, and they got back to me, within like an hour or two with a super detailed custom response that to me was pretty impressive. Like I would have expected them to get back to me in like three days. So to me, the customer service responsiveness is huge, especially if you run into any problems with an order. And with Printful, they can take immediate action because they’re also the folks that printed the item versus someone else like Printify having to go get resolution from a third party provider.

Nikki

23:22
I do want to say though, that I’ve had very few actual problems with either Printful or Printify. And when I have had to contact them for help, because a mug arrived broken or a tshirt was printed crooked, both of them responded right away and shipped replacements out almost immediately.

Laura

23:39
That’s cool. So another thing to consider is the product cost. So we talked about that earlier in this episode, but you will pay a small premium with Printful versus Printify for that customer service level, their prices are generally just a tad bit higher. But I do think that their shipping is pretty reasonable since they offer shipping centers across the globe. Now let’s talk a bit about the technical side of how all of this works. And as I mentioned, Nikki has been using Printful since like 2016 and Printify since when?

Nikki

24:13
Oh 2018. So I’ve been doing both for a while.

Laura

24:18
Yeah, so you have a pretty substantial catalog of products on your website, I do have to say.

Nikki

24:24
Maybe too many.

Laura

24:26
I, on the other hand, have never had a POD site before this past month, and only a small ecommerce shop for my classes. So this is something that’s sort of brand new to me and I just only have a few products

Nikki

24:39
But yay you for just getting started.

Laura

24:41
Yay me. So to demonstrate how this process works, we decided to work together and create our own Startist Society product shop from scratch using Printful which we’ll absolutely share with you in our show notes.

It was really great for me to go through this process step by step so that I could setup by own site with Printful as well.

Nikki

25:02
Alright, let’s get into how you actually get your shop started. First, you’ve chosen your POD provider, let’s say Printful. The first thing you need to do is sign up for an account, which it’s pretty much like signing up for any account anywhere across the web, right?

Laura

25:19
Yeah, you just confirm your email, you set up a means of payment. So either PayPal or credit card, basically, so Printful can charge you for any orders that come through. And before you ever link your site up to Printful, though, you’ll want to create a product template using their super easy design tools, you basically can choose a product from their catalog, like the tshirt we mentioned earlier. And then you can drag and drop your custom design into the printable area of the product.

Nikki

25:50
Yeah, and I really love the design tools that Printful offers. I used to think you needed to complete your entire design in Illustrator or Photoshop, and then just upload the finished design, which meant that if you wanted to offer it on different products that had different dimensions, you’d have to go back, reconfigure everything, save it, upload it again…

Laura

26:13
Right, re-upload everything.

Nikki

26:14
Yeah, but you can actually save each design element individually, upload them all, and build your design in layers through Printful’s – and Printify does the same thing –through their design tool in layers, like you would do in a design program. So that saves you time and effort over creating a whole bunch of finished files.

Laura

26:34
That’s kind of awesome, actually, that you can do that. Yeah. Although I will say I have, I have one little pet peeve…

Nikki

26:41
Just one?

Laura

26:42
Well, I have lots of pet peeves. But when it comes to POD design, I have seen some fabulous artwork that people have created. And then they’ve put it on a tshirt in a big square, instead of actually having a transparent background. And so if you are a fine artist, for example, or a watercolor artist, and you’ve made an incredible design, rather than loading it as a JPEG with a white background, go ahead and select and delete that background create a beautiful transparent background, and your shirt is going to look like a million times better. Just saying.

Nikki

27:19
Yeah, I make sure when I do that, that all of these elements are saved as PNGs, they have transparency. And then that just gives you lots more options when you’re putting the images together.

Laura

27:32
So you mentioned before you can do it in layers. So I think that’s pretty cool for certain products where you do want to have that background, like you don’t want to necessarily be transparent on something like a water bottle, where you could have like a gradient colored background. And then you can add a transparency layer on top like with the pattern, and then maybe a logo on top of that. And then you can resize all of those so that they could fit on a water bottle, a tshirt, a notebook without having to custom upload each design.

Nikki

28:01
You mean like we did for our Startist Society products? Hint, hint.

Laura

28:05
Exactly. And if you haven’t seen it yet, you have got to check out our new shop at startistsociety.com. Now similar to Spoonflower, or Society6, you want to ensure that the artwork you upload is high resolution and large enough to fully cover the products that you want to sell. You can resize your artwork inside of Printful’s design tools, but it will alert you if your resolution is good, or if it’s too low.

Nikki

28:32
And this is a case where bigger is definitely better.

Laura

28:36
Yes.

Nikki

28:37
One of the great things about setting up shop on Printful is that as soon as you sign up, they give you this handy little checklist of all the items you need to complete in the correct order. And they give you helpful links so that you get to the right spot. So when it’s time to connect your Printful shop to your ecommerce platform, there’s a link that takes you exactly where you need to go to choose the right platform, in our case, WooCommerce. And then it walks you through step by step through the integration.

Laura

29:05
I’m pretty sure there was even a video, it was great like it had some really great step by step instructions. Basically, I just had to install a free plugin on WordPress that works with WooCommerce. And then it guided me through making the connection to Printful. And then once it was connected, I went back to the product templates that I had made in Printful. And then basically you can kind of publish them to your store. You basically say like push to store, move to store, something like that. Once you’ve done that Printful will push that product to your WooCommerce shop and it syncs them up and it’ll even add the mockups to your media folder. It’ll create the listing for you in WooCommerce and you may want to tweak the wording a bit on the listing or add some extra photos inside of your WooCommerce listing. For example, if you’re selling apparel, I absolutely recommend making sure there’s a sizing chart. And I know Printful has a sizing chart on every single product they sell. So just make sure that’s on your site, so it’s super clear.

Nikki

30:09
And what’s great about the way that Printful synchronizes the products when you make them is it’s a two way sync. So if you need to change any wording or add images, you can do it through either Printful’s design tool, or WooCommerce. And once you’ve made those changes, all you have to do is go back into your Printful store and click a button that says refresh data. And that forces a resync.

Laura

30:34
And we learned that the hard way.

Nikki

30:36
Don’t tell, I’m the tech expert, remember?

Laura

30:41
Learn from our mistakes, refresh data, very important button. Click that if you need to.

Nikki

30:47
Or you’ll wonder why your changes aren’t showing up.

Laura

30:50
So WooCommerce, we’re talking about WooCommerce, because that’s what Nikki and I use, but I’m assuming this works very similar for Shopify and other platforms. If you use Squarespace or something different, it should work very similar. So since we created the Startist Society shop, I actually linked up my own website to Printful and created a few products and the process was way simpler than I’d imagined it all these years. Which is another reason why overthinking doesn’t serve you well.

Nikki

31:21
Okay, but that’s pretty much true about everything we’re scared to do. Don’t you think that the anticipation is so much worse than the reality?

Laura

31:30
Absolutely. Pretty much every day in my life, I experience these things where I was so scared to do them. And then I do it and I go, what was the big deal? Like why did I wait a whole year to do that?

Nikki

31:41
Let’s remind ourselves, let’s remind each other of that.

Laura

31:44
Yes, yes.

Nikki

31:46
Alright, what’s next?

Laura

31:47
Well, what you want to do next is order some samples of your products just to ensure the quality of the product, the printing, the colors are what you expect them to be. And then you can start taking some custom photos with those for social media marketing, and begin adding additional products to your store after that, and I can totally get Nikki the addiction now that I have a few products, like I want to create 300 products and put them all in my shop. It’s pretty cool.

Nikki

32:16
Right. But don’t let the idea of having to buy samples of all those products freak you out. Because you don’t actually have to do that. It’s not like Spoonflower, where you can’t sell a product until you’ve purchased a sample. You’ll want to purchase some. But I actually have samples of almost all my products, really, because I just enjoy living with them myself. And I get comments and sales just by carrying my own phone case or wearing one of my face masks.

Laura

32:43
Well, I remember that time that you showed a picture of your leggings, and didn’t you sell like seven pair that day or something?

Nikki

32:49
Yeah, I was just wearing a pair of leggings that I made and posted a picture of myself wearing them on Instagram. And yeah, instantly just had all these orders come in. So…

Laura

33:01
Awesome. You should do more of that.

Nikki

33:02
Yeah, apparently marketing works when you actually do it. We we have a marketing problem, Laura. So it’s a good thing we have an interview with a marketing expert coming up soon.

Laura

33:14
Yes, definitely. Now marketing is actually the key to having print on demand on your own website work. Since it isn’t a marketplace, people don’t just accidentally find you. You have to drive them to your website somehow either via social media, Instagram, Pinterest, paid advertising, you know different ways.

Nikki

33:36
I know, it’s amazing how you make sales when you actually remember to promote them. And then you don’t make sales when you forget.

Laura

33:45
Shocking, shocking. Now remember, this is largely a numbers game, you’ve got to get it in front of a bunch of eyes. And I actually plan to have both a Society6 shop as well as my own print on demand shop on my website. But I’ll have some unique products in my own shop and work harder to promote my website print on demand products in my emails. Since I know the profit is so much greater. If you think about the example that we gave earlier in the episode for the t shirt. It’s the difference between making over $11 profit on a tshirt versus $2.90 on Society6.

Nikki

34:24
And that’s a really big difference.

Laura

34:26
Yeah, it is.

Nikki

34:28
Another thing to note on Society6, you don’t even know who bought your products because they’re not purchasing them directly from you. So you don’t even own your own customer relationships. When you sell on your own site, you can collect contact information about the buyer and even ask them if they’d like to join your email list during the checkout process.

Laura

34:48
Yeah, I have one of those little checkboxes in WooCommerce when people check out and it just says would you like to join Laura’s newsletter list? So that’s a great way to expand your your list.

Nikki

34:58
And then when I remember to actually send out a newsletter.

Laura

35:03
Well, first things first.

Nikki

35:05
First things first.

Laura

35:06
And one other thing I wanted to mention is that if you are a fine artist, and you can’t ever see yourself putting your artwork on products like tshirts or mugs, you can totally set up a print on demand art print shop Printful sells giclee quality prints in size 8 by 10 inches and up. And I know several successful watercolor artists, for example, that use Printful in this way. You can even hook it up to an Etsy shop to get additional eyes on your work. You just may have to pay a few more fees to Etsy in that case, right. We covered a lot of ground in this episode Nikki.

Nikki

35:43
I know and I still feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface. I feel like we could talk about this for days. In fact, we have

Laura

35:51
Yeah, behind the scenes for sure.

Nikki

35:54
So I can’t really ask what our key takeaways are for this episode, because pretty much just POD is awesome, do it. But maybe don’t expect to get rich by next week.

Laura

36:05
Yeah, this is just another revenue stream to add to your income; every little bit helps. And in the case of print on demand, there are like no real upfront costs, so it’s perfect for Startists to be able to get their artwork on products. Speaking of, we’d love for you to join us in our Startist Society Facebook group to talk more about print on demand and let us know if you’ve tried it already or if we’ve gotten you excited about giving it a shot,

Nikki

36:32
Or even if we’ve scared you off. But don’t let us scare you off. It’s super fun.

Laura

36:38
And if you’re scared or overwhelmed with starting your own website to connect to print on demand, I personally know a really awesome WordPress web designer who could build you an awesome site and connect your POD shop for you. And yes, I’m talking about Nikki May.

Nikki

36:54
Hey, I’ve heard of her. Oh my God, I’m such a dork.

Laura

36:59
You are, but so am I. And if you want to see samples of our own shops, head over to lauraleegriffin.com or nikkimay.com

Nikki

37:10
I believe you meant head over to lauraleegriffin.com AND nikkimay.com.

Laura

37:16
Ah, yes, of course I did. If you want to show your support and love for your fav podcasting duo, to check out this week’s show notes and to pick up your own Startist Society swag, head on over to startistsociety.com/podsetup.

Nikki

37:35
Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.