Print on Demand: How to design and sell your brand?

Print on Demand: How to design and sell your brand?

The age of online publishing – and the development of new digital technologies – has created a lot of unprecedented business opportunities. We can all become online personalities and do prosperous online businesses.

Print-on-demand is one business opportunity that allows aspiring entrepreneurs to establish on-demand print businesses to create and sell printed goods online.

What is print-on-demand? You may trigger

As you can guess from the name, Print on demand merchandise includes merchandise printed when ordered. Thus, making your goods has become a more efficient process.

While older models of merchandise printing may include buying (and printing) hundreds of units and storing them in a cardboard box in your back bedroom or storeroom – pray every day that you don’t want to sell them all.

Your customers place orders sent to the print facility, where the product is printed, packaged, and shipped directly to their door. You make a profit on every order, and you have to upload the design and market / sell your product.

Traditional branding vs print-on-demand

In short, print-on-demand removes most of the hurdles I just talked about. It involves minimal risk, no advance financial costs, no logistical infrastructure set up – and anyone can do it.

Why use print-on-demand?

There are many reasons why you might need to invest in print-on-demand services, especially at the beginning of your business development. Here are some reasons why you might want to merchandise through a print-ondemand business.

Sell goods to your audience.

We’ve written a lot about effective marketing. Influencers who make a name for themselves through social media like YouTube and Instagram can influence your sales with suitable campaigns.

YouTube influencer

However, there are other ways for influencers to earn some income, including creating goods to sell to their fans.

Read More: 7 Tips to boost up your Print on Demand Online Business Sell in a niche market.

Speaking of specific markets, this is another reason why you might be interested in merchandise printing. Perhaps, you have entered an extraordinary place. It is so confident that you have found a demand for products where the supply is deficient. Creating a product for this audience can be very appropriate (at least it can be tested).

Testing a new product

Another great reason to use Print on demand products is, at least initially, if you want to test new products and see if they are really in demand.

As we mentioned earlier, the most significant advantage of the print-ondemand model is that, as a seller, you do not have to invest in a large inventory of products.

If you want to sell products to a niche or your followers, check the items first and minimize your risks. Then, if you see success, you can take steps to increase your profit margins in the future.

Choosing the right e-commerce platform

So how do you get started? Well, the first step is to create an online store through which you can sell your products. There are many options for e-

commerce platforms, but the names you will be most familiar with include Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and 3 Descartes

Many different factors come into play when choosing the ideal platform for you, but I strongly recommend that you do your homework with a lot of thought: What is the current monthly subscription fee – and how much commission will the platform charge on each transaction, if any? This easy pricing breakdown is a good starting point but make sure you do your homework to establish what’s included in each package.

Integration

These are tools and plugins that come directly to your store and help you run your business. At the very least, you want to make sure that your chosen print-on-demand partner has an integration that connects to your chosen eCommerce provider.

Customer service

When things go wrong in your store, how much help can you expect – and how soon?

Scalability

Maybe you’re just starting small, but you need to prove your business in the future. Make sure you can quickly ‘scale up’ your subscription so you can accommodate the extra traffic and avoid the potentially massive task of rebuilding a well-established store in the future.

Are you still struggling? Capra is a software comparison tool that lets you evaluate features, prices, and ratings on various platforms.    

Compare Capterra preview Click on the image to see a more in-depth comparison.

Google Trends search reveals that Shopify is by far the most popular eCommerce platform.

Success shopping on Google Trends On balance, Shopify also gets my vote – simply because of its low entry cost, wide range of integrations, and growing incompatibility with your business.

Choose your print-on-demand partner.

Once you’ve set up your online Print on demand store, you can associate your chosen print-on-demand service with your online store. Shopify makes it easy to do this, with a quick search for ‘print-on-demand,’ bringing several options that can be installed in seconds.

There are many other ways to integrate print-on-demand services with your store, although much more complex and may require programming or coding.

Once you have the store platform and Print on demand store, look at the partners you want to work with and identify options to integrate the two.

Choose your Print on demand products.

‘Print-on-Demand’ is a big label for an almost endless list of different products. We are all familiar with Print, canvas, and apparel. Still, increasingly we see new commercial products available for print-ondemand—everything from bags and towels to coffee cups and flip flops.

When you’re trying to identify the right print-on-demand partner, compare their product categories to ensure they’re the perfect fit for your audience.

For creatives like artists, photographers, and illustrators, your design is probably already pretty good – however, if you work on paper, you’ll want to spend some time digitizing your artwork.

This also applies if you are a business and already have a design that will work on merchandise. Print-on-demand is used by many traditional businesses as well as influencers! If you don’t currently have a design and want to create one yourself, you can use professional design software.

Final thoughts

However, you are just starting and working on a budget, some of the more expensive bits of software may be out of your reach. I recommend checking out several free/open-source options.

While they may not be as powerful as their subscription-based options, yet let you do great work for free! They do a great job playing bells and whistles!

Check out GIMP, Inkscape, free options for Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, respectively.

If you’re not very design-savvy – or don’t want to waste your time creating a design – you can always leave it to the pros. You can buy royalty-free vectors from sites like Shutterstock, run a design contest, or identify quality freelancers through sites like Upwork and other platforms.

When you upload your design to your chosen print-on-demand partner, you’ll probably be able to preview how the design will look on products as well as tweak how it’s located. This creates mock-ups of your products to go to your store.

How do I build extra income with print-on-demand services?