Are you a comic or a poet? Do you seem to always have a snappy saying or comeback for every situation? Are you a meme queen? Or maybe you like to create digital art? Or do you just want to add an additional revenue stream to your bank account with very low start-up costs? If any of these fit, try launching a Print On Demand (POD) dropshipping website.
Why start a POD business?
POD sites are a low-cost way to earn money from home without storing inventory. After your initial set-up work, it can be an almost passive income stream, requiring only a handful of hours a week to upload new designs, review on orders, and check on your website. Successful POD website business can earn $2,000 or more a month in the first year.
How to start your POD business
First, you will need a website. You don’t need to hire a designer or get really fancy. Start off with a simple free template from your web host. As you grow, you can always upgrade. The important thing is to get started today, and not wait to save up a bunch of start up money or wait until your little cousin who’s good with web stuff can help. Get your business off the ground today. Time is money.
I recommend NameHero for those with a bit of web skills. Their starter plan is on sale for $2.69 per month. With this account, you can quickly auto-install WordPress with Woocommerce and be up and running in an hour.
For those without web skills, I recommend Squarespace. It’s super “click and go” easy to set-up and includes everything you need for a starter website. For $23 per month, you can get up and running and ready to sell your designs in an hour or less.
Two top Print On Demand (POD) services for your new business
Printify is an excellent starter service for your new business. It has no monthly fees for its intro plan. Its interface is intuitive and easy to use. And its service integrates easily with WooCommerce and Squarespace.
With Printify, you can upload your designs to over 300 different products, including t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, coffee mugs, and more. Once you make a sale, Printify sends the order to print to the designated print vendor, who creates the item, packages and ships it to your customer.
Printify’s pricing per item is pretty good and allows a good margin for you to make a nice profit on each item. However, Printify is a distributed network of print vendors, so quality and shipping time can vary. Printify supplies ratings for each print vendor, so you can restrict your offering to only top rated vendors.
Printful is also an excellent choice for your new business. No monthly fees for its starter plan and it also integrates with WooCommerce, Squarespace and over a dozen more platforms.
With Printful, you can upload your designs to over 200 different products, including the standard t-shirts, hoodies, coffee mugs, and more. Unlike Printify, however, Printful produces all its products in-house. Printful receives your orders, produces and ships them to your customers from their facilities.
Printful’s pricing per item is a bit higher on average than Printify. So if you use Printful, you will need to charge a bit more for your products or accept less profit. However, because Printful produces all the items in-house, the print quality and shipping times are a bit more predictable and uniform. Printful also offers a bonus of expanded branding opportunities, where you can customize the apparel tags and order slips with coupons and other advertisements.
So, all those cute ideas and digital doodles you’ve been thinking about? Gather them up and start slapping them on products and sell!