In today's video I wanted to talk about Print on Demand. Specifically I wanted to address the question of whether it's better to have your own store, for example a Shopify, Bigcommerce or Wordpress store. Or Whether it's better to sell on a platform like Amazon Merch, Redbubble, Teespring, etc.
Both methods have pro's and con's. Having your own store allows a lot more customization, potentially better profits, allows you to run ads more effectively and allows you to scale and grow a brand better. It's also a lot more hands on and less passive. It requires you handle setting up the site, payment processing, customer service and returns.
Selling on platforms also has it's own pro's and con's. Pro's being you get organic traffic from the platform, it's more passive, you don't have to deal with setting up a site, customer service or processing payments, you just upload your design and get paid at the end of the month on what sells.
I started a newer brand/niche whatever you wanna call it back in June. Most of June was kind of wasted as I initially set everything up with Custom Cat and after not being happy with the backend UI and the quality of the print wound up having to start from scratch with Printful.
I love the store I setup, but ultimately it hasn't yielded great results in terms of sales, it's something I'm having to monitor, and it's costing me money. I share the numbers in this video but to date I've spent significantly more than I've made.
On the flip side with platform plays I've made money and spent nearly nothing.
There's so many factors at play here, and while I'm going to let this experiement play out for another couple months, my findings thus far is it's more beneficial, at least for me and my niche, to sell on platforms as opposed to having to manage my own store.
While managing my own Shopify store potentially could lead to slighltly higher profits per shirt sold, when you factor in the fact that I'm having to pay Shopify $29 a month for the store, plus either spend money on Facebook ads or spend my own time on marketing and driving traffic, those slightly better margins don't seem to make me more profitable than the passiveness of a platform with no expenses.
I'd love to hear from you guys. What platforms have you had success with to date? Have any of you tried to make the jump from selling on Amazon Merch or Redbubble to managing your own store? How did it go? Drop a comment below and tell us about it.
Thanks for watching!!!
Thanks for the heads up on all this. I really need to become more familiar with this type of Marketing and Business
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