My first attempt to make $$$ with POD

Reposado said:
So you uploaded the designs to RedBubble, didn't touch it, and received a sale? Isn't POD wonderful? :)
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Yep, that's exactly it! Like I said, I started uploading there, then changed my mind and focused on Spreadshop, and received a nice motivating email from Redbubble haha

aristocratic said:
Good luck!
Following
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Thank you!!
 
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I am not familiar with pintrest marketing but I would look into making a dedicated website for your business so you can control more. Maybe wait till you have made enough money to justify it. There are some good pod options for shopify and woocommerce. Idk your niche but I would also look into setting up an affiliate program and use send it to social media infulencers to basically get free marketing. Also after you have made enough money you can setup ads on social media.
 
FusedTogether said:
I am not familiar with pintrest marketing but I would look into making a dedicated website for your business so you can control more. Maybe wait till you have made enough money to justify it. There are some good pod options for shopify and woocommerce. Idk your niche but I would also look into setting up an affiliate program and use send it to social media infulencers to basically get free marketing. Also after you have made enough money you can setup ads on social media.
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I thought of all this, but the thing is that the POD business is not doing well nowadays because of the coronavirus and I'm waiting for things to go back to normal before jumping into the Printful wagon. I don't want to start now and get a lot of negative reviews and feedback because of the slow delivery and shipping. The most popular items take weeks to be produced and shipped... But I thought of doing affiliate marketing with specific coupons using Teespring or simply Etsy. I don't think I'll go with Shopify or Woocommerce, though. I think I'll just use the power and influence of the famous platforms. But one day, maybe, if I see that I'm getting a lot of sales and can afford to do this.
 
Goodluck man! I make a supplemental income with pod, and here's my $0.02 based on my experience:

While I always list my products on etsy, eBay and Amazon, since I'm making the products anyway and it doesn't take long to list them elsewhere, my personal site has always been the biggest seller.

Not only are the existing marketplaces full of competition, but when you send traffic to a design it's really, really easy for people to get sidetracked and start browsing and find other things and completely forget why they're there in the first place.

The beauty of your own site is you can now send targeted traffic and build your brand, instead of being just another random shop on an existing marketplace. The other benefit is its easier to drive traffic to your own site. They should all work together to bring you sales, but having a site makes scaling a lot easier.

I also use multiple pod providers since there are so many different products to be found, but so far printify is my favorite.

I hope you hit the $100/day mark in your near future!
 
addictedtolearning said:
Goodluck man! I make a supplemental income with pod, and here's my $0.02 based on my experience:

While I always list my products on etsy, eBay and Amazon, since I'm making the products anyway and it doesn't take long to list them elsewhere, my personal site has always been the biggest seller.

Not only are the existing marketplaces full of competition, but when you send traffic to a design it's really, really easy for people to get sidetracked and start browsing and find other things and completely forget why they're there in the first place.

The beauty of your own site is you can now send targeted traffic and build your brand, instead of being just another random shop on an existing marketplace. The other benefit is its easier to drive traffic to your own site. They should all work together to bring you sales, but having a site makes scaling a lot easier.

I also use multiple pod providers since there are so many different products to be found, but so far printify is my favorite.

I hope you hit the $100/day mark in your near future!
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Thank you for the support and the great tips! I think all of your points are accurate and make total sense. Actually, the reason I decided to go with Spreadshop is because it's an option Spreadshirt gives you to run your own store. I thought that it would be a great idea to avoid people getting sidetracked. Once they're on my shop, they just see my designs. I can also set the prices I want. The downside is that the margin is pretty weak compared to Printify or Printful.

I watched a lot of videos on POD and most "gurus" tend to say that the printing quality of Printify is pretty low compared to Printful. That and the fact that is seems to actually be a marketplace with many businesses made me want to choose Printful in the long run. And I don't understand the concept of paying a monthly subscription to have better margins. It sounds weird to me. But I'll probably order samples from both to judge the quality and the shippind speed for both Printful and Printify.

I'd be interested in reading your opinion on Printify, actually!
 
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Best of luck on this your journey. It's always tough at first but if you keep grinding you will always find a way
 
Thanks for sharing your journal! Good luck. What is POD? (Sorry for the noob question, I'm new in this wold)
 
MrOusho said:
Thanks for sharing your journal! Good luck. What is POD? (Sorry for the noob question, I'm new in this wold)
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POD is "Print on Demand" -- services like mentioned Printify, Redbubble, Printful, Amazon Merch, etc...

You don't keep an inventory of the products -- instead, you upload your designs to a service and they will print the image on their shirts\mugs\backpacks\etc... "on demand" (ie. right when a customer orders) and ship it out to them. You get to keep whatever "profit margin" you set (so if shirt costs them $10, and you list the item for $15, your profit margin is $5 per shirt).
 
So here is an update!

I uploaded more designs on Redbubble and Spreadshirt. I also finished setting up the Spreadshop I was working on. And it's been a couple of weeks since I did all this, but I haven't made any sale at all.

So far, I've gotten 24 views on Redbubble, 19 favorites and 1 sale. And I made €1.49. I'm sure I would have had more sales if I had done some outside promotion, but the margins the Rebubble offer are just not worth putting to much effort into the marketing. It's good for autopilot earnings, though.

I had absolutely no success on Spreadshirt. And I can't even tell how many views I got over there, they just show you the sales you made. The thing is that everything is super expensive there and the margins are not better than on Redbubble. So I think I'll give up on Spreadshirt and Spreadshop. However, I found out that they have a Shopify app with every single product they offer on their Marketplace and they are cheaper than on their other platforms and I make better margins! For example, a shirt that you would sell on Spreadshirt for $29 gives you a profit of $5 and the same shirt that you would sell on the app for $15 gives you a profit of over $8.

So here's the new plan: I'll use Printify and sell products on Etsy and use SPOD and sell products on Shopify. I'll see which one works best for me and scale. I already ordered a sample from both POD services to see the quality of the printing. I don't feel like selling garbage to anyone.

It might look like I'm not doing much, but I'm learning as I go on with this journey. I'm not giving up!

Things I'll focus on:
  • Get more designs done.
  • Set up the Shopify store, which is something I've never done.
    • Find a good free theme that I'll customize as much as possible to make it look cool and original (might have to buy one or pay someone to do it for me).
    • Add important apps that will help me boost sales.
    • Add an app that allows people to leave reviews and ask a few friends to buy something from me and leave a positive review to increase the "trust score" of my store.
  • Set up the Etsy store with products from Printify.
  • Work on the brand of my store: I'll start building Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter pages for my store. This is something I'm really experienced in and it should help me get consistent traffic to my stores.
  • See what works best between Etsy and Shopify and focus on the one that gets me the most money out of the two.

Let's do this!
 
So here is an update!

I had to take a break for a week, so I just got back into it a few days ago. I'm almost done with the Shopify store. It took me more time than necessary, which is ridiculous. But I made the whole thing myself, including the logo. I spent even more time trying to find a good domain name. I was running out of inspiration. Everything I wanted was already taken and I tried at least 50 different domain names. But I got one now. I might change it later, who knows.

Like I said, I was waiting for a sample from Printify to see the quality of the printing. It's honestly not as good as I expected, but everybody seems to like it and use it to sell on Etsy with good reviews so I guess I'll go with it for my Etsy store.

I'm still waiting for my samples from SPOD (it's been over 2 weeks), which are 3 different items. One of them is of the same design as the Printify sample. I'll be able to compare the quality of both printers and I'll go with the best one. I hope it's SPOD, they have so much more diversity in their products...

So the plan hasn't changed: I'll use Printify for my Etsy store and SPOD for my Shopify store and decide after a while which platform I'll focus on.

I also started doing designs myself. I'm not going with anything too complicated, and I come with ideas and niches really fast actually. I have almost 100 designs ready to be uploaded. I uploaded about 40 designs on SPOD, each design being on about 15 different products. I think I uploaded the same amount of designs on Printify.

I still upload on Redbubble. I actually uploaded almost 80 designs there. I'm growing slowly. I have over 40 favorites, 4 followers and made a total of 3 sales.

Earnings so far: $5,56

Things I'll focus on:
  • Get more designs done.
  • Set up the Shopify store, which is something I've never done.
    • Add important apps that will help me boost sales.
    • Ask a few friends to buy something from me and leave a positive review to increase the "trust score" of my store.
  • Set up the Etsy store with products from Printify.
  • Work on the brand of my store: I'll start building Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter pages for my store. This is something I'm really experienced in and it should help me get consistent traffic to my stores.
  • See what works best between Etsy and Shopify and focus on the one that gets me the most money out of the two.

My biggest priority of the next few days will be to finish setting up the Shopify and Etsy stores and upload every design I made so far on both SPOD and Printify. This is going to take a lot of energy out of me! :D

Let's do this!
 
Are you using local(the same Country you are in) service? so you get fast delivery times?
You should do amazing once you get Pinterest traffic flowing trust me ;)
 
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