Inspiring success stories from T-shirt seller working in the Print On Demand (POD) industry has made a strong growth rate to now, selling t-shirts online with POD became a great business model for start-ups to make money online. Today, the POD online t-shirt business is one of the most trending sectors, which is convenient, easy to implement with low risk and highly profitable. So far, this industry is attracting a large number of participants, the young generation. Next section, we will talk about the principle of POD and how to start the T-shirt business in the POD industry?
WHAT IS POD?
Print on Demand (POD) is a form of making money online through which you will sell your designed products such as t-shirts, mugs, hoodies, blankets, quilts, … With POD, you don’t keep any physical inventory, instead of connecting with a third party that will be responsible for printing and completing the entire process for you through a platform and ship it to the customer.
WHY IS POD?
Print on Demand is also a form of Dropshipping, which means you just run an online store and sell. The fulfillment of customer’s order (including manufacturing, packaging and delivery) will be done by a third party to handle the products following your requirements. Your business will receive great benefits, all you need to do is focus resources on design and marketing, cause the pros of POD are
– Save the maximum investment costs as well as minimize the risks
– Do not have to worry about warehouse, inventory or production and transportation
– In particular, do not need a lot of capital
– Convenience for those who want to earn more income
HOW TO START SELLING T-SHIRTS ONLINE IN THE POD INDUSTRY?
Firstly, you need to know the business process of Print on Demand
1. Create the designs and upload them on POD platforms
2. Do search for traffic to drive customers to your products (traffic has two sources: free-traffic and paid-traffic)
3. When having the orders, the fulfillment process will be started (manufacturing, printing, packaging and shipping) to the customers
4. Services after-sales to solve problems arise
Next, what do you need to prepare to get started?
– Searching: Search the blog posts, tutorials are written about this field to understand what business we are participating in to have careful preparation. After grasping the basics of this industry, we embark on a practice to get experience gradually
– Preparing capital: You need to have capital in the beginning before generating revenue to hire designers and use other related services such as creating a website, buying software or running ads
– Design: You can learn by yourself how to use basic software design like Photoshop, CorelDraw, etc. If you don’t feel like having a talent for it, then let’s outsource! Contacting quality designers, like Fiverr, Behance, Dribbble, etc. With the cost is only about $5 for a simple design to even $100 for a complicated hand-drawn design. The best way is buying available t-shirt designs at Buyteedesigns, that would save your money and time.
– Search for POD service providers: The criteria for choosing a good POD platform in order are printing quality, the base cost, production time, product diversity and finally after-sales customer service. Some of the best POD platforms today are Printful, Printify, Customcat, etc. Besides that, some large platforms not only provide POD service but also bring huge traffic sources such as Merch By Amazon, Teespring, Redbubble, Spreadshirt, etc.
– Searching for ideas is considered one of the two most difficult and important steps in this field, finding out hot quotes and attractive designs to upload them on the POD platforms. We will write a detailed article on this topic for you to understand more deeply
– Lead customers to the product: If you use free-traffic POD platforms like Merch by Amazon, you should not pay attention to this stage because all you need to do is find ideas and design, creating profit is Amazon’s business! For a new start-up, starting with platforms with huge free traffic sources to generate revenue as well as understand the market is the best. After doing fine with free-traffic, you can move on to paid-traffic. It is all about spending money to run advertising and drive traffic to your products. Currently, the two biggest paid-traffic sources are Facebook ads and Google Shopping
– Handling fulfillment : Normally with this stage, POD platforms will solve completely for you, but for some simple POD platforms (only providing printing service) without customer traffic, which might have problems of delivery as defective products, slow ship, etc. Then you will have to take action as an intermediary for processing
If you’re a new e-commerce merchant looking to add customization to your products, Print on Demand (POD) is a very viable option. You need to remember that the success of selling t-shirts online with POD business depends a lot on your understanding customer insight of each niche. So BUYTEEDESIGNS is here to consult and tackle the first critical stages of finding ideas and design. Contact us to hear our proposals!
