setting up our side project: beeb.ee teeshirt store using a combination of gumroad and printful.

It’s almost ready to launch, we have a great supplier of shirts in printful, they handle all the drop shipping and now have a base in europe as well to send orders so they should be pretty fast if ordering for europe now because originally they are based in the US.

beeb.ee is nearly ready. . .

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The ideal for us would be maybe to have a squarespace or shopify shop because they work better when it comes to picking the sizing and colour but we are ghetto and want to do things on the cheap and gumroad allows us to do that, the integration part between printful and gum road is lovely and makes adding new products a breeze.

our big delay really in talking about the store was that we needed to have a ‘float’ of funds in an account that printful could draw from when we got orders because gumroad currently only pays out every week so the float is to pay for the order to be activated at printful automatically — helpful when on the road — you > gumroad > printful > auto payed printful and they then sent to you, they handle everything. super nice.

https://www.printful.com/landing/gumroad-print-products-fulfillment -- if you want to do the same you can get started here on their gumroad intergration pages.

We also love the quality of printful and they are always adding new products all the time which over time we will test out first before listing it — you can be confident that we have ordered and tried the service first before ordering if you like any of the designs.

It was mainly a side project for us to get going before we got out on the road so that we had a string of different projects that were either bringing in residuals or that we could order things from, the nice thing about printful is they offer the ability to send products in to drop ship with your existing product base so that might be interesting later on for contests and such.

iOS dashboard application

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I’m not sure if this was a recent addition but they have a nice little IOS dashboard application for the iPhone, it’s super basic and really it’s just a push notification style app — when we get an order on gum road we will know about the payment and so give us a heads-up as it goes to printful so we can make sure everything is working and that it’s heading out in a timely manner, we hope to really get that as automated as possible.

weekly payouts on gumroad

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right now gum road only sends out payments that it has received every week so that means that we really need to have another bank account that printful pulls funds to print shirts from topped up — ideally I wanted this to be the same instant same time (guess crypto has spoilt us) so that the funds go from gum road out to an account that printful is tied too — for now, that’s not the case and over time we will move away from gum road to make this happen exactly in that way.

balancing the payment processing parts (+ issues)

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Overall it’s not that big of a problem to get payments for the t-shirts sorted, gum road takes the money, sends the order to printful and right now they are saved as drafts in a work que — then I have to go in and say take money from this account and it makes them.

For the short term (shirt term? lol) we are putting together a little account with a ‘float’ that way we know that there is enough funds to cover that week of not having the funds, it’s a bit chicken and egg but it will solve the problem of paying printful to get started on the print out and send process.

I’m very keen to get going again now they have a distribution centre in Latvia, Riga because that will hopefully spend up sends for europe from europe, I always hated the idea of t-shirt material getting flown from america to here, that’s kinda stupid so anything fairly local is the play.

syncing all from gumroad to printful

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This is the bit I love the best about the gumroad/printful api integration - putting up products on gum road is so easy once you know what you are doing, like literally I’d say like five minutes per product — once you have saved it you can go to printful and sync it across.

On printful it tells you how many ‘products’ you need to sync across which basically means marrying what you are selling in terms of colour and size with the offerings on printful, they have a super neat builder that once you have done one it fills in the same details from the first one to the next one you make so often times you only need to change the size. neat.

It’s a bit confusing to the user on the front end of gum road and it’s something I’d like to see better but I think normally people would be just selling on t-shirt style and maybe putting some kind of instagram hipster video showing people with fresh white teeth smiling over latte and buns while they wear them, maybe we can do our own alternative versions! :)

maybe I should make a mini course on it?

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I picked up how to do everything with printful from their videos therefore I don’t think I need to make a course on that because it’s so straight forward but maybe it would make a nice hour video from start to finish walking through both sites and maybe work together with @dayleeo so she can put together a little screencast about the illustrator side because dayle has been doing all the print work setup and design side.

dayle keeps rattling out the designs

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@dayleeo set an objective of having four more designs up for this month and because she had that objective that made me ‘relook’ at the website and project and go back in as to why we did not make that live yet — now I know that gumroad pay out weekly we can work with that.

We will be ordering new test t-shirts of the new designs in the coming weeks now that we can get them from europe. I might also research integrating the printful t-shirts with amazon depending on cost but I know a lot of people use amazon for ordering — be great to test to see if they will deliver to amazon lockers too, that would be a game changer!

pinterest epic wins pinboard → brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won vloggie for node666 (san fran 2006) → television for time team history hunters 1999 (burton on trent) → sold me.dm to evan williams in april 2011 → went to phil campbell, alabama to help raise money after tornado ripped up the town (was on sky news, bbc news)→ CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin south by southwest event → video chat with robert scoble from rackspace → music video can you spot me? → won the digital derry contest for 5k euros → crowdfunded digital signage concept called pi street → now living life through digital blockchains.