How to Start Print on Demand in 10 Minutes
For the last year, I've been sharing everything that I know about running successful Etsy shops that have made me life changing money online. And it's been making life changing money for you guys as well.
So in this article, I'm going to show you how I open and more importantly, design shops completely from scratch in under 10 minutes. That way your shop can look more like the shops that have made hundreds of thousands of dollars and less like the shops that nobody's heard of.
How to Start Print On Demand for beginners
Pick Out A Product
Now, in order to design a great shop, we first have to pick out a product to sell. Traditionally, you would choose some kind of niche to create designs for. So for example, if you made anime products, and you actually want to grow your shop, the most reliable way is to pick one product that you can still target multiple niches with. This will allow us to build out a shop themed around that product while still allowing us to target tons of unsaturated niches.
Instead of focusing on the small niche of anime products, our shop could be focused on selling mugs. And we could still make a ton of different mug designs that target anime lovers. This ensures that we're mastering one product at a time while not restricting the market that we're selling in. Of course, you could be selling a digital product, so for the sake of this example, I'll be using the poster because it could be a digital or physical print on demand print, kind of works both ways.
Business Name
But to start opening the shop, we need a business name. Some people get hung up on these little details, but the name of our shop actually has a very low long term effect on the success of our business, as long as it meets a few criteria. Starting with a few basics to avoid. Of course, we can't use anything that's already copyrighted or trademarked. We don't want a name that makes zero sense or a name that's nearly impossible to remember. We don't want to use any crazy numbers. These types of names overall just don't help us towards our goal. We are going for the inverse, which is memorable, charming and relevant to the product we're selling. The name needs to convey at least some element of trust.
Knowing those fundamentals, I like this free Shopify name generator. So we can just type in a description of the product that we're selling and then this will return us a decent sized list of potential names that we could use for our Shop.
Now, of course, we could use a different tool like ChatGPT, which can accomplish the same exact thing. Remember, we're not here to overcomplicate things, so just pick a name so that we can actually get started selling.
Now, that you have decided on the name, you have to see if it's available. And to do that, I'll be using this website called namechecker. And all I have to do is put in our name to see if it's available across different websites. Now, specifically, we're looking to make sure that it's available on Etsy since that's where we're starting our business. But it's nice if it's also available on other social media platforms and if you can buy the matching domain.
Once we know it's available, we need to use that name to create a free email for our business. So we'll just come to Google and click on sign up and just choose to create a free personal email. This is where we'll enter our details and we'll use the business name as the email address. This is really important to do for organization, customer service, and we'll be using this email address to open up all of our associated accounts.
Branding Elements
But the last thing that we have to do before we can actually open the shop is get all of our branding elements together, primarily the logo and the banner image. The logo will be shown at the top of the shop page as well as on the profile picture. And honestly, it also isn't too important. Again this does not have to be too complicated, but it does need to convey quality, trust and kind of a handmade, authentic vibe.
Now, I like the easy method of getting things done. So I'll be using Canva. Now, in Canva, I can literally search for Etsy shop logo and we'll see that they have hundreds of templates. These could really be used for almost any kind of shop that you would want to start. And the best part is, is that we can modify these to match our brand name. After selecting the logo you want, click Customize Template, and then you can change the name to match the nature of your business.
Now I could modify this a lot more, but again, instead of spending a ton of time worrying about the logo, I just recommend choosing something to get started with. While the logo does matter, just remember that your time is better spent making great products than it is worrying about little details like the name and the logo.
But we still have to get a great banner image. The banner is more important than the logo but again it just really needs to convey quality, trust and a handmade vibe. Just like with the logo, Canva has a ton of pre made templates that we can choose from.
So we can search for Etsy Shop Cover and see that they have over 3,000 templates to choose from. You could choose a banner that doesn't directly tell what the product is and it more so conveys the brand identity. Or you could go with a banner that does show the type of item you're selling. Just remember the vibe of your logo and try to match it.
Now finally we can open up the shop. Now, when you click on "Open Shop today", you can put your email address in as normal, but then what you can do is come inside your email address and put the plus sign and then write Etsy. And this will still send you the emails, but it will show you the email address that they're being sent to.
So you could also do this for Canva or Printify or your bank or down the road if you start selling on Shopify. And this just helps you stay even more organized. And if customers or scammers get a hold of your email address, you'll know exactly which site they came from. It's just a small feature that kind of helps you stay organized.
A lot of brand new shops that sign up for Etsy get banned within a few hours or a few minutes. And while it's not entirely clear why this happens, it's usually one of two issues. First is if you're using a VPN to change your IP address. And second is if you enter your banking details incorrectly, they'll usually charge you a 20 cent listing fee for the first listing that you create, which you have to create during the signup process. Especially if you don't use the link I recommended And if that payment doesn't go through, you're almost certain to get banned.
Etsy's just a sensitive site and they don't want a lot of people just signing up and spamming all over the place. Now, sometimes you get suspended while they verify your details, regardless of if you entered it correctly or not. And if that happens, it isn't the end of the world, just contact support.
Now in our shop, we can finally start designing it. So we can change the shop logo to the logo that we created in Canva. We can change the profile picture also to the logo that we created in Canva. And finally, we can add our banner image to the top of our page. We also want to just write a brief description of the shop in here.
Again, it's really not that complicated, this just helps with SEO. Now I would recommend leaving the location blank if you haven't already set one. This will prevent issues from customers thinking that the items will arrive sooner than they will if you're drop shipping with print on demand.
Again, just remember the things that we're going for, we're going for quality and trust and an authentic handmade style vibe. Those things will help our shop have the best chances of getting sales.
Mockup Images
The final thing that we need to set the aesthetic of our shop and the most important are the mockup images. We need mockups to display our designs that match the vibe that we're going for and convert customers. The next step is to find and buy mockups similar to the ones that we know already work. So we'll want to look at shops selling the product that we're going to be selling and then bonus points if it fits the vibe that we're going for.
Again, we're just paying attention to their mockups, you can usually find winning mockups right on Etsy for just a couple dollars. These might be too or the exact mockups that top performing shops use.
Now, I know you guys love to start for free. You love the cheapest methods of doing anything, but the trade off is that you might waste a lot of time. So I'd just recommend investing a few dollars in getting the right mockups that we already know work and it'll pay off many times over. You can't expect to reach $10,000 a month if you can't even invest to get your business started.
A.I. Generated Mockups
The other option is you could use AI generated mockups if your product permits it. Our picture frame for example works perfectly since it's super simple, we could use Midjourney to generate some mockup images that look quite nice as well. This also works for other products, you just have to make sure that the mockup accurately represents the product that you're selling. The risk you take here is that the mockups aren't necessarily already proven to work like the ones that you can buy right on Etsy.
Connect Etsy shop to a Printify account
And finally, if you're selling print on demand products, the last step is to connect our Etsy shop to a Printify account. Once again, you can sign up for Printify using my link, and that email address that we created earlier. When you use my signup link, it allows you to use the coupon code "alek" to receive two months of free premium after the signup is complete.
Of course you can use Printify completely for free as you're getting started, but I would recommend upgrading to the premium plans once you're making about 20 orders a month. Then we just have to come into Printify, hit add a store, choose Connect to Etsy, and this will prompt us to connect our Printify shop to our Etsy account. From here we can create and publish products directly to our Etsy shop and any orders that come in for those products will be taken care of by Printify, we don't have to do anything else.
Of course, using Printify instead of other platforms allows you to take advantage of my Printify product uploader, which is a huge time saver as well as some other bonuses that I've talked about in many other articles.
Now that your shop is open, you'll need to start creating products for that shop and I've got a ton of articles on how to do just that, as well as a bunch of free resources on my website, which you can go check out.
