What Is Print On Demand (POD) E-Commerce Business And How To Start One?

Print On Demand or also known in short as POD is a form of E-Commerce business whereby you sell your custom design products online.

The products can be such as T-Shirts, Mugs, Jewelleries, Pillows, Shoes and Jackets.

What’s so cool about this business model is you don’t even need to have a printing device to get started.

You’re just required to find a Print On Demand supplier to do this for you.

After you have found one, you’ll be sending them your design and they’re going to print out your design on the products you want whenever there are orders from your customers.

And the supplier is going to ship them out directly to your customer address after the printing work is done without you lifting your finger on this part.

I bet you’ll be happy to hear this.

Advantages Of Print On Demand

Dealing with shipping process like packing alone can be really time consuming and energy draining.

Now with the time saved, you can use them more productively on other more important parts of your business.

With Print On Demand, you can start you business immediately without having to buy the stocks beforehand.

This leads to another important point worth mentioning…

…which is the risk level.

If you were to keep stocks on your own, you’re only going to increase your business risk dramatically.

WHY???

Because if the stocks you kept not able to sell, you’re going to lost the money you spent on them.

It makes a good sense to start a business as low risk as possible whenever you can.

Why put yourself in a danger situation when you’re able to avoid it, right?

Print On Demand is existed to help you eliminate this risky part.

It doesn’t require you to spend money upfront on the stocks, so it wouldn’t impact you too much even if the product cannot sell.

You can just simply upload new design and try again. Nothing much to lose anyway. This is the beauty of Print On Demand E-Commerce business.

What’s Next?

You might be very excited about this business model right now but your mind could be asking these questions…

…”How do I going to find customers to buy my POD products?”

…”Where can I put up my products for selling?”

…”I don’t know any Print On Demand supplier, how do I even can get started?”

…”How do I get started if I don’t know how to design?”

Good news. I have you covered on these.

I’m going to reveal to you…

…2 powerful sources of traffics where you can have truckload of interested buyers for your products.

…how you can have your own online shop the easiest way.

…a reputable supplier which you could get started.

…how to get people design for you.

Stay tuned and keep on reading the remaining of this post.

How To Start Print On Demand (POD)?

To get started, there are few components you need to put together before you run a Print On Demand business.

So that you can have a long-term sustainable business that’s going to generate income for you.

Ready for me to break down each of the component?

Awesome…Let’s get started.

i) Creating A Shopify Store

Shopify is a powerful platform that allows you to build your own online store easily without being a techie.

You don’t have to know any programming language or coding skill in order to do this.

This platform only requires you to drag-and-drop and clicking buttons in the process of building your online store and managing it.

I believe that’s not going to overwhelm you too much.

It’s important to have a store whereby it served as a place for you to list all your Print On Demand products.

So that visitors who visiting it could proceed to make purchase from you and make payment immediately if they’re interested with your products.

Shopify is a Print On Demand friendly platform.

As it has wide varieties of apps to help you connect directly with your supplier’s platform.

With this powerful integration, it would provide automation process that helps you offload a lot of manual tasks…

..Such as automatically send your customer order details directly from your online store to the supplier platform, so that they can process the orders and fulfill them on behalf of you.

The tracking number given by supplier would also be reflected in your own online store automatically.

If you run the Print On Demand business without automation, you’ll need to manual copy each of the customer order from your store and place the order in the supplier platform.

Then you’ll also have to manual copy the tracking number from supplier and enter into your online store.

See how tedious it’s going to be if no automation is in place?

Because of the apps available in the Shopify platform to help you eliminate the manual process, you’re going to save a lot of time especially when you’re having many orders every day.

ii) Finding Print On Demand Supplier

In order for your Print On Demand business to kick-start, you must have at least one supplier which you can rely on and collaborate with.

To help you do the custom printing of your design and fulfill the orders for you.

Finding reputable suppliers are essential to ensure they can deliver good quality final works. This is important to ensure your customers’ satisfaction.

Because your customers are buying from you, any problem they’ll definitely find you.

You love to have happy customers rather than unhappy customers, right?

One way to check the quality of the supplier is by placing order of your own design and have it be delivered to you.

So you can see the real product by yourself and make the final judgement.

There are many Print On Demand suppliers out there and the types of products they offered for custom printing can vary.

If you don’t know any supplier yet, you can start with ShineOn.

It offers a high quality custom design printing specifically on jewelry.

The best part, it’s providing the Shopify apps to integrate effortlessly into your Shopify store to help you run your business in automation mode.

iii) Getting Your Design Done

As Print On Demand E-Commerce business revolves around the custom design, you need to provide yours to the supplier.

So that they can start printing your design on the products immediately when you have orders from your customers.

If you have great graphic design skill with high creativity, that’s would be good because you can create one immediately on your own.

But if you don’t have graphic design skill, fear not because there is a solution for you.

You can get someone who has graphic design skill to make the design for you.

One of the cheapest place you can have your design done is none other than Fiverr.

Here you can get the service as low as $5. The price can vary depending on additional services you required.

Another place you could find great designers is Upwork. However, the price here can be more expensive but of course you can expect to get higher quality artwork done. As the saying goes, “You Get What You Pay For”.

iv) Getting Interested Buyers To Your Print On Demand Store

Marketing is the heartbeat of your Print On Demand business.

It is an extremely important part and you can’t afford to neglect it.

Without marketing effort being done, there is no one going to visit your online store even if you have the best design in the world.

This is because your new online store is synonymous to a new island in the middle of big sea.

No one is ever going to know about your business unless you drive traffic to it via marketing.

One of the best platforms you can start getting truckload of traffics is Facebook.

It is having more than 2 billions monthly active users (that’s really huge with 9 trailing zeros behind).

The good thing is you can reach the interested buyers from any part of the world in the platform by using Facebook Ads.

It allows you to target your ads to the people based on the interest that might resonate with your products.

You’re no longer having the problem of finding potential customers for your Print On Demand business.

Another great place you can drive huge amount of traffic to your online store is Instagram.

Instagram is the next big social media that keeping up with the trend.

It is having various cool features such as Instagram Story and hashtags that could bring you additional visibility which is translated to free organic traffics.

Not to mention also it is having pretty good amount of engagement (likes, comments) when you post something.

You can even bump up the visibility of the post on your Print On Demand product with Instagram Ads.

If you think it’s a great business model, let me know your thoughts below and share with someone who might love this.

All the best, and see you next time!