In this article, we're going to learn how you can start a print-on-demand business.
What is Print-On-Demand?
Print-on-demand is a low risk, simple way to start a hugely profitable business with no inventory. Whether you're an artist, writer, designer, or entrepreneur, physical products can be a great way to monetize your creativity.
You can put your own original spin on everyday products like t-shirts, posters, backpacks, and books, and sell them online. However, if you go the traditional route of buying and holding your own inventory, you may be left with a pile of products that just aren't selling.
Print-on-demand services are a good way to avoid this problem. You won't have to invest a ton of money in holding inventory, and it'll save you time in dealing with logistics. Print-on-demand allows you to start selling quickly and at a fraction of the cost.
What We’ll Cover
Here are the things that we'll cover in this article:
Define what print-on-demand is.
Discuss the pros and cons.
Provide a list of services to choose from and what they offer.
Talk about how to get your designs into the real world, even if you have no design experience.
Finish off with some expert tips for making your business profitable.
Understanding Print-On-Demand
Print-on-demand is a process where you work with a supplier to customize white label products. White labeling is when a purchaser or marketer uses its own branding rather than the manufacturer's branding.
What makes print-on-demand so enticing is that you can sell the products on a pre-order basis under your own brand. This means you don't have to pay for the product until after you've actually sold it. So there's no need to buy in bulk or hold any inventory.
The nice thing about print-on-demand services is that everything after the sale is handled by your supplier. That includes everything from printing to shipping. Once you make a sale, it only takes a few clicks to fulfill an order.
Flexibility of Print-On-Demand
Depending on your purpose, you can use print-on-demand services in a few different ways:
To tell a business idea without fronting money for inventory.
To test a new product line for an existing business without holding inventory.
To monetize an audience you've already built.
Printing on demand is also a great option if you're an artist or an influencer, but you'd rather focus on doing what you love rather than fulfilling orders. It’s also a fantastic business model to create original products for a niche of customers.
For example, you can create apparel for people who are passionate about gaming.
Pros and Cons of Print-On-Demand
Pros
There are some pros and cons when it comes to print on demand. Print-on-demand sites can be used to build a business based on a drop shipping model, where the products and shipping are all handled by a third party.
It's one of the most accessible ways to source products or start an online business, but you should know there are perks and limitations before diving in. Some advantages include:
Quick Creation: Once you have the design, you can create the product and put it up for sale in minutes.
Nimble and Trendy: You can capitalize on trends effortlessly.
Shipping: Shipping is fully taken care of by the supplier.
Lower Costs: Your cost to run the business will be lower since you're not carrying physical products.
Less Risk: It's easier to add or remove products, test ideas, and pivot your approach.
Cons
Now let's take a peek at the cons. Your cost per item will be higher than if you were to buy in bulk. On-demand products are known to have thinner profits, so depending on your pricing and customer acquisition, making real money will require volume with print-on-demand.
Other drawbacks include:
Less Control: You'll have less control over your shipping costs and options may be limited.
Customization Limitations: Customization availability depends on the vendor and product.
Recommended Print-On-Demand Services
By now, you should have a better idea of whether print-on-demand will work for you. Let's hop into the services that I recommend. It might seem like all print-on-demand services are similar at first glance, but that's not the case.
You're going to want to carefully consider who you go with based on the products you want to create, where you'll be shipping to, and the retail prices you’ll offer.
Popular Services
Here are some popular services that all meet different needs:
Printful
A popular Shopify app because of its wide selection of products and brands to choose from. It allows you to mock up your designs easily. You can add your own logos, stickers, custom notes, and inserts for a more customized unboxing experience.
For apparel products, Printful offers a number of printing techniques. One of the more common techniques they offer is direct to garment, which prints ink directly onto the material. This is good for simpler designs like slogan tees.
You can also do a cut and sew, also known as the all-over print. In this method, the article of clothing is printed on in many pieces, and then sewn together for a seamless print across the entire piece. The base cost will be higher for this technique, but it also lets you create a more premium product at a higher price point.
Embroidery is perhaps the most complex printing technique, because the final product is actually a threaded design with a 3D effect.
This is best for simple designs that involve only a handful of colors and for products like hats that traditionally feature embroidered designs. You should also be mindful of how additional customizations will affect the price.
Printing on the sleeve, for example, will usually mean paying on top of the base cost. Besides apparel, Printful also offers mugs, pillows, framed posters, beach towels, aprons, and more.
Lulu
A self-publishing print-on-demand service for books. With the Lulu Express Shopify app, you can choose from a wide selection of book sizes, binding types, and page quality for your books.
You can't design your book within Lulu Express, but they offer downloadable templates to get you started.
It even has a transparent pricing calculator to help you cost out your project, including various shipping options. There are also discounts if you'd like to order in bulk.
Guten
A Shopify app that offers a wide range of products you can customize, including unique items like calendars, mugs, and dog beds.
However, since Guten uses an international network of vendors to print their products, there's more variance between their items in terms of quality and shipping.
This also means your product prices and shipping prices are lower as well. Guten has an intuitive image editor that gives you a good sense of what your final product will look like.
Printify
Another print-on-demand Shopify app that features the usual selection of t-shirts and hoodies. What's notable about Printify is that it has an international vendor network with a number of unique white label products that you're not likely to find anywhere else.
They have items like jewelry, clocks, and shoes, and the platform actually has over 200 products that you can print on. While Printify is free to use, you can pay $29 a month for a premium subscription that gives you 20% off all of their products. This is a solid option if you're looking to scale up later and improve your profit margins.
Expert Tips for Maximum Profitability
Working with Designers
You don't need to be a full-time designer to have a successful print-on-demand business. If you don’t have a design friend, you can outsource.
You can find designers on Behance, 99Designs, or other freelance sites. When working with designers, specify that your design is for printing to ensure it's prepared correctly.
Tips for Clarity
Share Insights: Tell your designer what it's for and who your audience is. Showing them your website will help give more context.
Clear Instructions: Make sure that you're clearly explaining what you want. You'll have time to explain this in your initial introduction and through revisions.
Incorporate Revisions: Include one or two revisions in the scope of the project and be clear by over-communicating what it is that you're looking for and providing guidelines.
Provide Inspiration: It helps to show them a reference to base the design on or point to other works that you like.
When working with designers, you should specify that your design is for printing. This tells them that it should ideally be 300 digital pixels per inch and have a transparent background. The designer will know how to properly prepare these artwork files for print, so you won't have to worry about that.
Note that the print file specifications will change depending on the printer and the printing technique used. So when in doubt, send the designer the print specs for the specific product and any printing guidelines so they understand the context.
The designs you upload should be large enough for the printing area of the actual product. Keep in mind that resizing a smaller image to make it bigger will result in a loss of quality, so you want to avoid doing that.
And if you want to take a crack at designing and you don't have access to Photoshop, try using Pixlr for free. I'll also drop a link in the comment box for another 16 free photo editing tools if you're not interested in paying for Photoshop.
Quality Control and Marketing Strategies
Always order samples. The best way to ensure quality is to be your own customer so that you can experience firsthand what it's like to receive your products.
That said, you're going to want to always order samples before sending products out to customers. It's always possible that something gets lost in translation from the design you see on your screen to your printed product.
By ordering samples, you can double-check the overall quality of how it looks and feels. If you find any discrepancies, just reach out to your vendor's customer service support for advice on how to fix any issues. Beyond ensuring product quality, samples are also good to have on hand for taking your own product photos for your website and social media.
Even when you're not shipping products yourself, you're going to want to make sure that you're setting the right expectations with your customers about costs and shipping time. Make sure that you're accounting for how long it takes for something to print first of all, and then adding that to shipping time.
Rule of thumb is to add anywhere from two to four days for production. It can sometimes be more, depending on the product. Always be upfront about your shipping times, or you're going to get customers with questions and complaints.
Outline what to expect on your FAQ page, or you can consider creating a separate shipping page to explain lead times to customers. If you can, try to partially or fully absorb your shipping costs into your retail price. Year after year, studies show that surprise shipping costs added at checkout deter customers from buying.
On the flip side, you can use shipping deals as a tool to entice customers to make a purchase. Free shipping is a great sales sweetener. So try using conditional free shipping to encourage customers to add more to their cart to reach a certain threshold. You can use free shipping to justify longer wait times.
At that point, you can go for less expensive, slower shipping services, as many consumers will wait a little bit longer for an order that they know will save money on shipping.
Model Pictures and Mockups
Model pictures help drive sales, but mockups are also an effective alternative for your product photography. Many print-on-demand services can help you create your own mockups by showing your products on a person or as a flatlay.
These mockups are what will sell your products to customers, so it can literally pay to go the extra mile. Placeit is an easy-to-use mockup generator that lets you create photo and video mockups for $8 each.
Check out Mockup World or Behance for Photoshop templates if you're comfortable in Photoshop.
Niching and Audience Engagement
Finally, niching in is crucial. Having a clearly defined audience can help create products in demand and lower the cost of acquiring customers.
Importance of Niching
Often, people think that if they niche in, they're going to lose potential customers. But the opposite is actually true. If your audience is too broad, you'll appeal to no one and lose potential customers in that regard.
There are countless possibilities for acquiring a niche audience with marketing. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Start an Instagram account and create or curate content for your target audience, get followers, and build relationships among your prospective customers.
Try running Facebook ads, targeting the interests of your target customers. You can also use Facebook ads to test out your designs for as little as $10 to see which ones resonate with your audience.
One of my favorite tactics is collecting emails from visitors. Once you start to pick up some steam, you can continue to market to them for free.
Finally, get your products into the hands of influencers who can introduce your products to their audience and help you make sales.
Conclusion
Print-on-demand services offer an accessible source of inventory for new entrepreneurs or anyone wanting to test an idea before committing. If one of your online business ideas pans out and you start to generate a meaningful number of sales, you can always graduate from using a print-on-demand site to holding your own inventory.
In this article, we covered what print-on-demand is, some services you could use, how to work with a designer, and strategies to keep your business smooth and profitable.
I'm curious to know why you clicked on this article. Let me know in the comments what you plan to use print-on-demand for. I'm excited to see your creative ideas. If you've already launched, drop me a link to your store so I can check it out.
Remember, we're a website for small business owners with big plans.