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Video Transcript:
in this video I'm going to be reacting to Greg got Freed's print on demand strategy now this is heavily requested a lot of people have messaged me privately and in comments asking me to react to one of Greg's videos Greg is a print on demand cell he's been on YouTube for many many years he's been a print on demand seller for many many years and I've been watching his content for a long time and he's a very big player in the industry um he's got some amazing content he's a great YouTuber but let's actually have a look at his video and see what his strategy is and I want to walk through some of my issues I have with it because I have seen previous videos so I do have some sort of inclination of what his strategy is going to be but anyways let's just give him the benefit of the doubt let's start from scratch here and let's go through his video so the video is titled why I don't use printful printify or Etsy for print on demand so let's have a look at what he thinks hey everyone welcome back to another video in today's video I'm going to be explaining why I don't use printful printify or Etsy for my print on demand t-shirt business now for okay so that literally what the title said fine nice this is an interesting one for me because those are probably the most popular print on demand platforms out there especially Etsy people like using Etsy because it has the added benefit of good profit margins uh good quality products and a huge huge number of visitors so I'm curious to see what he has to say about that for those of you who don't know I've been a print on demand t-shirt seller for just about 10 years now and what a lot of people don't realize is that I don't use printful printify or Etsy to run my business in this video I'm going to be explaining and showing you on screen recording why I don't use these platforms and a lot of things that people don't share about these platforms that you really should know if you're just starting out in this business so if you are just getting into print on demand please watch this video first I think it's going to save you a lot of headaches down the road so when it comes to starting a print on demand t-shirt business the core of that business is having a print on demand fulfillment service now most tutorials out there that are going to teach you how to start the business are going to show you to use printful or they're going to show you to use printify I mean it's very obvious he knows what he's talking about he's done print on demand it's it's clear as day he has done print on demand before um this is what baffles me even more that he's done print on demand yet he's still recommending interesting companies to use now although both of these are great print on demand fulfillment Services what most people don't realize is there are two very different ways to do print on demand when it comes to print on demand there is active print on demand and passive print on demand this is something that very few people are sharing about the print on demand business but both printful and printify are both in the active print on demand business model now for those of you who this is the first time you're hearing about active print on Demand versus passive print on demand active print on I like the concept of passive and active print on demand it's interesting however I don't really agree with the concept of passive print on demand regardless of what platform you're using let's have a look at what he he says here I have a feeling that for Passive he's going to say Amazon and for active he's going to say you know Shopify something like that demand is where you create your own website you bring your own traffic and your own buyers this is typically with social media marketing or it's done with paid advertising and then every order that you receive you pay for that order up front and then you receive your full amount of money with the profit afterwards and lastly you handle all of the customer service this is so very smart there he um he lists the things that sound bad um they're not necessarily the cons but he words it in a way where it doesn't sound very desirable very appealing for someone to get into is more of building a full-fledged clothing company but using print on demand to fulfill those orders now when you look at the other way of doing print on on demand which is passive print on demand this is where you are creating your t-shirt designs and uploading them to big print on demand Marketplace websites they are bringing all of the traffic and buyers for you the customer who buys your product is paying for the whole order up front and you are just getting a split of the profit afterwards and the big print on demand websites they're handling all the customer service for you this way of doing print so this annoys me a little bit um it actually really frustrates me when someone paints a picture like this where okay you have active and you have passive and for active you're listing things that make it sound bad and for Passive you're only listing things that make it sound good you're showing the cons of one and the pros of the other but not the cons and pros and the cons and Pros so it's not really a fair a comparison really obviously you know if you word it like this one is going to sound much better than the other but what about sharing the the the cons of one let me just add a couple of extra points with passive you run the risk of getting banned suspended or shut down at any point in time with passive you don't have any control over your store and whether or not you get sales it's kind of like it's kind of like playing a print on demand a lottery where when you upload a design you hope that you get entered into the algorithm Lottery and you show up high enough and you get sales but then on top of that the profit margins of these passive income uh these passive print on demand uh platforms no more than $4 per sale so these are import point to consider when you are sharing a message about go for this or go for that you've got to look at the whole picture there there's a lot going on the same when it comes to active print on demand yes you're building your own brand you're building your own store the profit margins are significantly higher you're building a business you can sell that business one day you have full control over it there's no fear constant fear of getting suspended um these are important points to also consider now I'm not suggesting that active is more work than passive in in his words yes the active route is a lot more work um it's harder and that's why the payoff is so much bigger the passive route I'm not going to consider it passive but the other route is definitely a lot easier but the amount of money you can make is significantly lower and the constant fear of being shut down is significantly higher print on demand the passive print on demand way is the way that I think a lot of new print on demand sellers are actually looking for so with that being clarified the reason that I don't use printify I don't use printful is because both of these are for active print on demand now with that being well technically yes but also you can connect Printery and printful to Etsy which is like a hybrid because you have to deal with customer service and you have to use one of these printing Pro providers but you're also tapping into etsy's hundreds and hundreds of million of visitors every single month um so it's kind of like a weird hybrid there said I don't want to just leave you hanging in this video I actually want to give you a solution here so if you don't want to go down this active print on demand route and you actually want to try the passive print on demand route I'll quickly show you a couple websites that you can use that are passive print on demand I'll even upload a design with you to show you how easy this really is and then I will put a link in the description to another video here on YouTube that is a full passive print on demand tutorial taking you from idea that you want to start all the way to getting your first sales so with that being said let's switch back over to the computer and let me show you some of this so let's start out on Amazon what a lot of people don't realize is that Amazon is actually the largest print on demand platform out there if you search for a type of t-shirt this is G I'm really happy he showed Amazon here Amazon is a humongous platform they get billions of visitors it's it's absolutely massive it's one of the Behemoth in print on demand the only thing is he's I hope he mentions this but there's no way of building up a a business you don't get the customer data you can get suspend did at any time um every design that you make goes through through a review process you have to be accepted which is almost impossible these days it's so flipping hard to get accepted um and I know he has a video cuz I've seen that one on how to get accepted follow my steps but I I I don't think any any videos any tips on how to get accepted I think it's massively up to chance with getting accepted for Merch on demand unfortunately most newbies who are watching his video I mean it's got 39,000 views as of making this one won't a won't know you have to be accepted won't know how hard it is to get accepted and then as soon as they don't get accepted that's it what do they do there's nothing left now right so um it's definitely something that he should be mentioning I think gardening t-shirt this is just a great Niche right now for print on demand and you scroll down here all of these are going to be print on demand designs so when you click on any of these you will see that it looks like just any other product on Amazon but it has this little label right here that says Amazon merch on demand now whenever a listing has this little label right here it means that the person selling this only uploaded this design and Amazon is doing everything else for them so when someone finds this t-shirt they pick what kind of item they want it printed on they pick what color then they select what size they can add this to their cart I mean Amazon is really amazing if you can get accepted to Amazon's merch on demand it's flipping cool it's such a good platform um it know really really is good and I I fully agree with him in in in that sense and they can purchase it just like any other product on Amazon what's going to happen behind the scenes when this order is placed is Amazon is going to receive the order they're going to go pick out whatever color and size shirt you ordered and they're going to print this exact design on it ship it out to the customer and handle all the customer service the creator of this listing is then just going to get their split of the profit which on a t-shirt like this is going to be roughly $5 now some I'm sorry what $5 this person is selling the t-shirt for $16. 98 anyone who does Amazon will know that the profit is not going to be $5 not even near $5 let me actually have a quick look if we go onto Amazon into our own dashboard we can see selling at $16. 98 you'd get $2.
66 $266 now okay that's not the end of the world but $266 is not $5 it it's a massive difference and and people were making a choice based off of this and actually $5 sale $5 profit per item is quite a good amount of money but when it's $2. 66 that is not a good amount of money not for the amount of effort it takes into creating the designs working your way up the tiers that's another thing um he hasn't yet mentioned is when you do sell with merch on demand you start on tier 10 you allow 10 designs you work your way up so it could take you quite a long time to get to the point where you have lots of listings just to make $266 not $5 it's a big difference it really is a big difference something that's really cool about Amazon is on some of these listings it's going to tell you how many of that exact listing has sold in the last month for this specific design that is 50 plus bought in the past month if you're saying an average of $5 profit that's about $250 in profit I mean why don't we just say an average of $300 profit per item and it'll make it sound even better for your video what is this really yes you can say whatever you want but thankfully we sell on Amazon we know exactly what the profit margin is on a $16 98 Cent t-shirt it really concerns me because if you do sell on merch on demand you know you won't get $5 here and I really wish Greg would respond to comments respond to emails I'd love to have him on the channel and talk to him about print on demand he his experience with merch on Demand with print on demand as a whole I would love to hear his strategy behind Amazon and behind all these passive uh platforms unfortunately he doesn't respond to anything um it's really annoying I wish he did um but I mean just to quickly fix this part of the video 50 items being sold it says or 50 plus he said $250 actually at $266 it's near $133 a profit for the month which is still a decent amount if you can do that that's great you know I'm I'm all for it but but don't mislead people and tell them it's going to be $250 and that it's $5 profit per item cuz it's not I mean you may as well just say it's $10 profit item and all right you've now made $500 a month I mean this is something that you could easily find the information out like exactly down to the last scent per month from just a single design now that's just on this listing but on some other niches when you're scrolling through here for print on demand shirts you'll see 1,000 plus in the past month so a single design can make you thousands of dollars in profit every single month now the reason that all of this works is because Amazon falls into the passive print on demand category meaning that Amazon is bringing their own customers just Amazon alone gets about 750 million people to their Marketplace every month now all that that must be without paid ads cuz if you look on um seash it will show you that Amazon get over two billion visitors but either way 700 million two two 2. 2 billion that's that's both pretty good really you know I'm not complaining then we're not looking to buy T-shirts but I can tell you a substantial amount of them actually do so just to give you an idea on this if you are interested in selling on Amazon as a print on demand seller just look up Amazon merch on demand once you find this page right here this is actually their application page to become a seller just hit the sign up button right here again this is totally free to do so Amazon is just oh okay so annoyingly he doesn't say that it's very hard to get accepted um a lot of new people don't get accepted and it's completely random and you could literally you know be anything like like I I I got accepted but like my wife if she suppes living in the same house under the same conditions same country um has the same kind of designs will she get accepted who knows I know so many people in this situation where they didn't get accepted and that's really it and uh I think that's a big point that you have to consider as a new seller and print on demand first example of one of these passive print on demand websites there's actually several more I've been selling on a lot of them over the years and there's a couple that really stand out over the rest just to show you what those are the second one that I would really recommend is called red bubble and red bubble is a little bit different than Amazon why why why why is he recommending red bubble I just want to clarify something here I am absolutely not hating on Greg I think Greg has a great Channel he makes great videos he's very good at teaching I'm not hating on him in the slightest not that's not at all what this video is what I am hating on is the idea that you should sell on red bubble and the idea that this is passive because that's simply not the case people don't make good money on a platform like Redbubble so I'm not hating on Greg gotri I'm hating on his strategy of selling on red bubble and I mean I assume the next one is going to be tuu why but I just don't understand like he does print on demand you know he he he's probably a successful on demand seller is that from red bubble because if it is then he should really like he should share more because that would be a very rare case that he is making significant amounts of money on red bubble cuz most people aren't so that would be quite cool if he actually shared what he is making a bit like what junor does junor from dor shirt if you want Amazon content red bubble content anything like that Juna makes really fantastic videos amazing videos and not only does he make those videos he also shares what he's making from red bubble what he's making from T publ what he's making from Amazon so it allows you to see is it something that you find worth your time going into you know Juna doesn't make tens of thousands a month from red bubble or tea public and he will show you that and it will allow you to see if it's something you want to do and that red bubble is specific to print on demand so they're not going to sell just every item that Amazon sells rather they're just going to sell print on demand items so if you were to type in gardening t-shirt these are just all going to be results specifically done with print on demand so when you click on one of these you're going to see what that looks like and again you can pick all of these settings here you can add it to your cart and you can purchase it the same style here with passive print on demand none of these are actually printed yet so when red bubble receives the order the customer is paying for the full order red bubble's going to print it ship it out handle the customer service and we just get a split of the profit but I do want to show you just one more of these passive print onand websites just to show you hang on pause pause there's so much you've left out with red bubble there's so much what about the the tears the suspensions the profit margins the quality you're recommending a company that new people are going to use who don't have a vast knowledge in print on demand who will just take your word for it but do they know that for a $25 sale they'll only make $22.