The UGLY Truth About Print On Demand That No Guru Will Tell You

in this video I'll answer all the most commonly asked questions about print on demand dropshipping including the questions that most people won't give you a straight answer on print on demand has a reputation for being a get-rich quick scheme because it sounds too easy you don't need to store inventory you don't need to ship or fulfill orders and you don't need that much money to get started and all you got to do is create designs and the print on demand company does the rest now while these statements are all technically true a common misconception is that running a successful print on demand business is easy but in reality success with print on demand has many pros and cons and isn't as straightforward as you are led to believe so in this video I answer all the in-depth questions related to print on demand to provide you with a complete view on what it takes to run a profitable online store now when it comes to print on demand all the gurus out there tend to focus on the positive aspects of print on demand such as how easy it is and how cheap it is to start but what they don't tell you is that the margins are pretty horrific sure you have full control over pricing but there's only so much money that you can charge for a t-shirt or a hoodie before no one will buy from you for example this t-shirt here from printful costs $116. 25 which includes printing on one side of the Garment shipping for this garment is $469 which makes your cost a total of $22. 94 now to make a profit of just $5 you need to sell your t-shirt for $26 if you want to make a poultry $10 per shirt you have to price your shirt at $31 now realistically most people won't be willing to pay $26 or $31 for a t-shirt unless you're a celebrity heck the most I've ever paid for a t-shirt was $40 at a concert but that was a special occasion I would never pay that amount for the exact same t-shirt at a store sure you can choose to sell a cheaper t-shirt from printful but if you want to sell a high quality product then 15 to 16 bucks is what you'll have to pay it is because of the extremely low margins of print on demand that I decided to buy my own printer and print my own handkerchiefs and linens in house now for all of you who don't normally follow my channel I recently launched a line of custom printed Linens over at my store during the holiday season last year I was fed up with the margins of print on demand so I said screw it I'm just going to buy a printer and keep most of the profit I ended up buying the suar DTF star 4 printer last year with the plan of launching a line of custom printed Linens and I'll give you a completely transparent rundown of the numbers compared to print on demand anyway using my previous example a printed t-shirt from printful costs about $116.

25 but when you print the exact same t-shirt yourself with a printer it is way cheaper first off you can buy an Apples to Apples identical blank t-shirt for $4 or less in the United States and if you Source your shirts in bulk from China you can get them for $1. 50 or less per shirt I've owned my printer for about 5 months now and the cost of ink and materials for an average shirt is about a dollar for a pretty complicated design with lots of solid colors but for most simpler designs it's easily less than a dollar so basically your cost of goods to printed shirt is only about $5 as opposed to $116. 25 and all of a sudden you can list your t-shirt for only $15 and still make a 3X profit and at $15 far more people are likely to buy from you now the beauty of printing yourself is that lower prices leads to more sales and the lower cost of goods leads to more profit higher margins also allows you to pay for advertising and still come out ahead it is exponential so overall it's very hard to make a living selling print on demand t-shirts and in order to make a decent wage you have to sell a ton of shirts for example if you want to make $100,000 per year and you profit $5 per shirt you have to sell 20,000 shirts per year or 55 shirts per day now it can be done but selling shirts at $26 each is going to be a tough sell by the way if you're enjoying this video so far make sure you sign up for my free 6-day e-commerce mini course below now in my last print on demand video some of you asked about my printer so I'll give you a little preview here I purchased a suar star 4 DTF printer back in 2023 now if you want to know how much it costs use the link in the description below but expect the printer to cost you between $6 to $10,000 depending on what you get occasionally suar will have a killer sale so make sure you sign up for their newsletter anyway if you use my link below you'll get $500 in free printing supplies the way the technology works is that you first print your design on a special film then you apply special powder and bake the film in an oven for 60 seconds then finally you take your garment and place a film on top and then press the design onto the fabric now for all of you who are wondering this is the exact same technology that many print on demand providers use and the quality is excellent the design is dark and crisp and Will Survive many Washings now I'm looking at the numbers right now and we pretty much made up the cost of the printer in profit within about 3 months and because the printer is paid off everything I print from here on out is gravy in terms of profit now that being said maintaining the printer is a bit more involved than your average desktop inkjet printer for example the machine is much messier than a normal printer and you'll find yourself cleaning it at least once per week also you have to run the cleaning cycle periodically or else the print head can clog up over time so basically this isn't the type of printer that you occasionally use you have to continue to use it regularly or else the head will block up the other drawback is you have to be familiar with Adobe Photoshop or other image editing software for example we get many orders per day for our printed merchandise and to be efficient you have to create a single file with all of your designs packed tightly so you don't waste film now since I'm a former engineer I wrote an Adobe Photoshop script that pulls all the orders off of the website aligns them efficiently and then sends it to designed to the printer automatically and as with anything in life there's a learning curve but the profits are worth it the other aspect of print on demand that no guru will tell you about is the limited range of products and design options that print on demand companies offer so for example let's say you want to print on a very specific item and sell it in your store well no print on demand company will be willing to print on merchandise that is not their own one time we had a customer who wanted to print on a very specific brand of a towel that no print on demand company carries but we were able to fulfill her order at a significant upch charge because with the suar printer we can pretty much print on anything and in some cases a print on demand company may even limit where you can print a design on the Garment itself for example custom cat will not let you print a design on the sleeve of your garment again with your own printer you can print on anything anywhere even on a pair of canvas shoes the other downside to print on demand is that the quality of the products and the print can vary depending on the print on demand company for example if you decide to use printify as your provider printify is actually made up of many different print on demand contractors with different equipment and different practices if you place an identical order across two different providers on printify you'll probably get slightly different results one time we used a print on demand company to print 50 t-shirts for my daughter's school team and the print quality was poor on about 20% of the merchandise now even though the print on demand company refunded us for the faulty shirts we didn't have enough time to place another order because the processing time was so long which leads me to the next downside of print on demand shipping can be more expensive and take longer to process than when you do it yourself according to PR's website 97% of the orders are shipped within five business days and about half are ship within 3 days if a customer needs their order rush which happens very often especially during the holidays well then you're out of luck now these next few aspects of print on demand are a little nitpicky but they're annoying nonetheless L my case launched their own print on demand t-shirt store when they were 9 and 11 years old over at kiden charge.