I've noticed the print on demand or POD business has had a lot of interest from people on here so I thought I would make a datasheet sharing my experiences.
Years ago before POD was a big thing, I dabbled with trying to sell on sites like CafePress and Zazzle. It's kind of funny that POD has been around for ages, but hadn't really gotten popular until platforms like Teespring, Amazon Merch, RedBubble and others came into the space.
Amazon Merch was initially designed to be a platform for game creators and app developers to sell swag via their games, however it wasn't locked down to only developers so it quickly became popular among online marketers, graphic designers, and people looking to start tee shirt and/or clothing brands.
While there are a number of platforms out there, Amazon Merch is by far the leader in the space for one reason and one reason alone, organic traffic. 2/3 of households have Prime accounts, most people shop on Amazon fairly regularly and this is why Merch is so powerful. Let's think about it, have you ever gone on tee spring to search for a beer pong shirt? I'm guessing no. However have you ever gone on Amazon and searched for a beer pong set, a yoga mat, a camping item or really anything else? The answer to that question is probably yes.
Now when you search for something like a Yoga Mat on Amazon, there is a chance that an Amazon Merch tee shirt will pop up in your search and that is the power of Amazon Merch, your items are on the Amazon platform.
Why Most People Go About POD The Wrong Way?
I see a lot of people on here as well as on the internet wanting to create a brand or a clothing line. Nothing wrong with that, but realize it's an uphill challenge. Everyone and their mom is trying to start a POD brand. Unless you have a large social media following it's going to be an uphill battle. Someone like Jake Paul has millions of people who want to be part of his brand so he makes a fortune selling swag despite being a huge dooshbag. If you are internet famous, or even manage a large Instagram following about weed or surfing or anything else this can be a viable option for you, however if you don't have that, this will be a huge challenge.
It's not cheap to drive traffic, especially paid traffic, and POD is notoriously a low margin business. While some people sell IMHO crappy shirts with CustomCat, almost every other platform is $12 to $15 base price of a shirt plus say $4 for shipping so your looking at $16 to $19 as a base price. Personally I think any shirt over $20 is overpriced unless you have a REALLY strong brand so assuming you are using $20 as a price your making anywhere from $1 to $4, not nearly enough to run FB ads or Adwords.
Lastly, for someone wanting to start a brand, the quality of POD can be mixed. Sometimes the wrong shirts get sent out, sometimes shirts come apart after a wash, sometimes the ink doesn't go on well. Do you really want to try to build a brand with some perceived luxury and be sending out poor quality items? Do you really want to associate your brand with POD quality merchandise?
I think POD can be used as a testing ground to try out concepts, brands and designs before ordering blanks in bulk and screenprinting, but your not going to create a longlasting and sustainable brand with POD.
I know everyone has some friend making huge money selling $30 shirts, if that's true it's not the norm.
So How Do I Join?
Amazon Merch has kind of an odd way of joining. You have to be invited. Here's the funny part though, you request an invite by visiting Merch.Amazon.Com. Your asked for your name, e-mail, and if you have a website or blog. I would recommend putting something in, even if it's a social media profile, it shows you have some platform for driving traffic and will probably get you on quicker than putting nothing at all.
Basically while they call it an invitation your really just signing up and being put on a waiting list. Due to the popularity of the platform some people are waiting over a year to get on, while other people get on in 1 day or 30 days, there seems to be no rhyme or reason.
I'm In What Now?
So your in, your going to start out at tier 10. This means you can only list 10 shirts. Once you sell 10 shirts you're "tiered up" to 25 and can list 25 shirts. Once you sell 25 shirts your tiered up to 50 and can sell 50, next 100, then 500, then 1000 and so forth and so on.
Early on price your shirts near the base price, fuck making money, just tier up to 100 or 500, that should be your focus. Once you get 500 shirts up you can now start raising your prices to full price and making $5.68 per shirt.
Amazon is very very strict in terms of trademarks and protecting brands. For example the word hot sauce is pretty innocent right? Not a brand name or anything. Wrong it's trademarked so having hot sauce on a shirt or even in your item tags, title or description can get you a strike or possibly banned. Stay away from any brand names, sports teams, etc. This is one area Amazon is worse than other platforms, it's incredibly restrictive in the types of shirts you can make. No drug use, no swearing, nothing overtly sexual, nothing controversial, that is one shortfall of the platform. Moral of the story put your Game of Thrones shirts on Redbubble not Merch.
Advice & Strategy
Kind of touched on this but early on focus on tiering up. Once you have a good amount of shirts go hard. Don't put too much time or effort into creating designs. You can make the best fucking unicorn shirt in the world but if people aren't buying unicorn shirts you wasted your fucking time. Throw up half ass shirts, if something sells well then hit that topic hard ie if a bowling shirt sells well crank out 100 more bowling shirts and put a bit more effort in but early on stick to simple text or graphic designs that can be done in under 5 minutes.
Same overall strategy for web SEO, Amazon and eBay ranking applies, put in keywords that people who might buy that shirt will be searching for. Make it readable don't just keyword stuff.
Buying your own shirts works. Most times until you get a sale you won't have a BSR score or best seller ranking, once a shirt sells you will have one. Buy some of your own shirts, you'll get a bump in BSR and search and will likely have an organic sale follow that.
Going along with that, while technically this violates Amazon policy, on a small scale you won't get caught. List your shirts on Etsy, eBay, etc and use Amazon to dropship your shirts to those customers. Hopefully you can squeeze out a couple extra bucks and even if it's a break even your helping those shirts rank better and will organically sell more through Amazon.
Word of Caution
Amazon does what's best for Amazon. Don't rely on this for a full time income. At times Amazon will block people from uploading for a month at a time.At times Amazon will hide all your shirts so buyers can't buy them because they can't keep up with the printing. Amazon could suspend you at any time for any reason, they could close the program. This is a great little gig for a couple hundred bucks per month, some people even make thousands and tens of thousands but realize its not stable and could come to an end at any time.
In terms of a reasonable expectation, if your decent with design, SEO, marketing, online selling any of those things and build this for a few months you can very easily and very passively make a couple hundred dollars per month even if your not that creative and not that great at designing.
Years ago before POD was a big thing, I dabbled with trying to sell on sites like CafePress and Zazzle. It's kind of funny that POD has been around for ages, but hadn't really gotten popular until platforms like Teespring, Amazon Merch, RedBubble and others came into the space.
Amazon Merch was initially designed to be a platform for game creators and app developers to sell swag via their games, however it wasn't locked down to only developers so it quickly became popular among online marketers, graphic designers, and people looking to start tee shirt and/or clothing brands.
While there are a number of platforms out there, Amazon Merch is by far the leader in the space for one reason and one reason alone, organic traffic. 2/3 of households have Prime accounts, most people shop on Amazon fairly regularly and this is why Merch is so powerful. Let's think about it, have you ever gone on tee spring to search for a beer pong shirt? I'm guessing no. However have you ever gone on Amazon and searched for a beer pong set, a yoga mat, a camping item or really anything else? The answer to that question is probably yes.
Now when you search for something like a Yoga Mat on Amazon, there is a chance that an Amazon Merch tee shirt will pop up in your search and that is the power of Amazon Merch, your items are on the Amazon platform.
Why Most People Go About POD The Wrong Way?
I see a lot of people on here as well as on the internet wanting to create a brand or a clothing line. Nothing wrong with that, but realize it's an uphill challenge. Everyone and their mom is trying to start a POD brand. Unless you have a large social media following it's going to be an uphill battle. Someone like Jake Paul has millions of people who want to be part of his brand so he makes a fortune selling swag despite being a huge dooshbag. If you are internet famous, or even manage a large Instagram following about weed or surfing or anything else this can be a viable option for you, however if you don't have that, this will be a huge challenge.
It's not cheap to drive traffic, especially paid traffic, and POD is notoriously a low margin business. While some people sell IMHO crappy shirts with CustomCat, almost every other platform is $12 to $15 base price of a shirt plus say $4 for shipping so your looking at $16 to $19 as a base price. Personally I think any shirt over $20 is overpriced unless you have a REALLY strong brand so assuming you are using $20 as a price your making anywhere from $1 to $4, not nearly enough to run FB ads or Adwords.
Lastly, for someone wanting to start a brand, the quality of POD can be mixed. Sometimes the wrong shirts get sent out, sometimes shirts come apart after a wash, sometimes the ink doesn't go on well. Do you really want to try to build a brand with some perceived luxury and be sending out poor quality items? Do you really want to associate your brand with POD quality merchandise?
I think POD can be used as a testing ground to try out concepts, brands and designs before ordering blanks in bulk and screenprinting, but your not going to create a longlasting and sustainable brand with POD.
I know everyone has some friend making huge money selling $30 shirts, if that's true it's not the norm.
So How Do I Join?
Amazon Merch has kind of an odd way of joining. You have to be invited. Here's the funny part though, you request an invite by visiting Merch.Amazon.Com. Your asked for your name, e-mail, and if you have a website or blog. I would recommend putting something in, even if it's a social media profile, it shows you have some platform for driving traffic and will probably get you on quicker than putting nothing at all.
Basically while they call it an invitation your really just signing up and being put on a waiting list. Due to the popularity of the platform some people are waiting over a year to get on, while other people get on in 1 day or 30 days, there seems to be no rhyme or reason.
I'm In What Now?
So your in, your going to start out at tier 10. This means you can only list 10 shirts. Once you sell 10 shirts you're "tiered up" to 25 and can list 25 shirts. Once you sell 25 shirts your tiered up to 50 and can sell 50, next 100, then 500, then 1000 and so forth and so on.
Early on price your shirts near the base price, fuck making money, just tier up to 100 or 500, that should be your focus. Once you get 500 shirts up you can now start raising your prices to full price and making $5.68 per shirt.
Amazon is very very strict in terms of trademarks and protecting brands. For example the word hot sauce is pretty innocent right? Not a brand name or anything. Wrong it's trademarked so having hot sauce on a shirt or even in your item tags, title or description can get you a strike or possibly banned. Stay away from any brand names, sports teams, etc. This is one area Amazon is worse than other platforms, it's incredibly restrictive in the types of shirts you can make. No drug use, no swearing, nothing overtly sexual, nothing controversial, that is one shortfall of the platform. Moral of the story put your Game of Thrones shirts on Redbubble not Merch.
Advice & Strategy
Kind of touched on this but early on focus on tiering up. Once you have a good amount of shirts go hard. Don't put too much time or effort into creating designs. You can make the best fucking unicorn shirt in the world but if people aren't buying unicorn shirts you wasted your fucking time. Throw up half ass shirts, if something sells well then hit that topic hard ie if a bowling shirt sells well crank out 100 more bowling shirts and put a bit more effort in but early on stick to simple text or graphic designs that can be done in under 5 minutes.
Same overall strategy for web SEO, Amazon and eBay ranking applies, put in keywords that people who might buy that shirt will be searching for. Make it readable don't just keyword stuff.
Buying your own shirts works. Most times until you get a sale you won't have a BSR score or best seller ranking, once a shirt sells you will have one. Buy some of your own shirts, you'll get a bump in BSR and search and will likely have an organic sale follow that.
Going along with that, while technically this violates Amazon policy, on a small scale you won't get caught. List your shirts on Etsy, eBay, etc and use Amazon to dropship your shirts to those customers. Hopefully you can squeeze out a couple extra bucks and even if it's a break even your helping those shirts rank better and will organically sell more through Amazon.
Word of Caution
Amazon does what's best for Amazon. Don't rely on this for a full time income. At times Amazon will block people from uploading for a month at a time.At times Amazon will hide all your shirts so buyers can't buy them because they can't keep up with the printing. Amazon could suspend you at any time for any reason, they could close the program. This is a great little gig for a couple hundred bucks per month, some people even make thousands and tens of thousands but realize its not stable and could come to an end at any time.
In terms of a reasonable expectation, if your decent with design, SEO, marketing, online selling any of those things and build this for a few months you can very easily and very passively make a couple hundred dollars per month even if your not that creative and not that great at designing.
