7 Things You Need To Know BEFORE Starting Print On Demand

okay so here is the honest harsh truth you see as you may have seen in this video I took a brand new print on demand store from 0 to $4,000 in less than 6 months yet if you go to the video comments for it you'll see that there are lots of other people who have opened new stores like I did but unlike me their stores flopped and failed and so it begs the question why do some stores succeed and why do some stores fail it's a good question and honestly as harsh as it sounds I

don't think that it's random nope I think that it's because there are seven big mistakes that a lot of beginners make that will guarantee that your store will fail and so if you want your store to be successful then you need to know what these mistakes are so that you can avoid them so then let's get started with mistake number one not creating print on demand designs that fill a gap in the market yes so that phrase to fill a gap in the market it is very important it means to create a product that people

want that does not yet exist and as I said I think that it's very important because it is a crucial way to be able to get people to come in and buy products from your store even though you don't yet have any reviews or social proof yep and to show you why take a look at this mug here it is a mug from an itsy print on demand store muggy MCM muggins and well as you can see the Itsy store is pretty much empty it has no reviews and it has almost no store branding besides

a store logo they have no store welcome blur no store Banner nothing this store honestly looks incredibly untrustworthy and unprofessional which I think is a huge shame because if they had just put even a little bit of effort into it I bet they could have made a lot more money with this but well guess what despite all of those mistakes mgy MC Muggin has still managed to get 20 sales in their ugly looking store and it's all for this one single mug and you know why this mug has managed to sell 20 copies I believe

it's for two reasons the first reason is that it is you know admittedly a pretty funny gift but the second reason is that it fills a gap in the market I did a search on Etsy to see if there were any other mugs on there that were using this funny joke and I discovered that no no one else was selling a mug that featured this joke it was the only one and so it is no wonder then that despite the fact that they had an empty unfinished unprofessional store with no reviews that they still managed

to get 20 sales because they created a new original product that filled a gap in the market you can only buy it from them which leads me on to the next big mistake I see new print on demand stores make which is mistake number two creating copycat stores so you see here's the thing right you will absolutely see comments left by people on YouTube who will say things like oh I uploaded a bunch of designs and no one bought anything and well as harsh as this may sound the truth is is that when you take

a look at these stores rather than creating original products that fill a gap in the market they are instead what I call copycat stores yep they'll basically come to places like Etsy and go oh look at that dog dad mags are popular they're selling well I know I'll create my own dog dead mag and I'll sell it to and then guess what the boring an original design flops yep nobody buys it and do you know why nobody buys it it's because look at how many other dog dead mugs exist on Etsy there are lots of

similar designs on Etsy already to pick from many of which are being sold from stores that already have thousands of reviews which begs the question would you rather buy a dog dad mug from a store with thousands of reviews or a store with no reviews obviously most people would choose to buy from the store with thousands of reviews which is why being a copycat store is in my opinion a great way to waste a lot of time by spending hours upon hours creating unoriginal designs that nobody wants to buy whereas for muggy mcmug they gave

themselves a huge Advantage by creating an original design that no one else had made yet because you think about it right imagine you're an itsy customer looking for a joke gift to give your coworker and you stumble upon this mug and you go oh wow that's hilarious I want to buy it but then you click on muggy mcmug store and you're like I'm not sure about this there don't have any reviews so not wanting to take a risk on a new store you do a search on Etsy to try and find an established store that

is selling this design but well no one else is and so now you have a bit of a dilemma either you go and buy a different gift from an ablished store that you don't like as much or you take a chance on a new store so that you can buy the item that you loved the most now of course some people out there will absolutely pick option A but on the flip side some people will absolutely take the risk and I'll pick option b but you know I do think that it's very understandable that many

designers choose to instead copy designs because it's actually pretty hard to come up with your own original creative ideas especially if you make the next big common mistake that beginners make which is mistake number three selling popular products instead of products where you have an unfair Advantage yes so coming back over to Etsy for a moment one of the most popular print on demand niches on there is is absolutely dogs take for example this custom pitch blanket here the ET research app Laura estimates that this has made over $3,000 and that's just one product in

this Niche there are lots of others that have all made hundreds of thousands of dollars each so you know a lot of people see this and go wow you know what I've got a great idea I'm going to make a product in this Niche so that I can make a bunch of money too but there's just one problem with their idea usually these people don't actually have dogs themselves or they might own a dog but they aren't super fans of dogs and they themselves would not ever actually buy a dog themed blanket or a dog

themed mug or a poster for themselves which as I said is a bit of a problem because in my experience I've had the best luck at creating products in a new store when I can use myself as a yard stick yep in other words my best ideas come from when I myself am a customer in a niche and I can ask myself okay as a customer in my Niche what product would I like to buy but that I currently can't because it does not yet exist it's honestly the easiest way for me to come up

with new original product ideas and it's so much easier that in my opinion it gives you a hugely unfair advantage in those niches which is why I personally prefer to avoid niches that I'm not a Target customer in for example take Sports I am not against sports but I just personally don't play any or follow any so if I tried to start a store in the sports Niche I'd be at a disadvantage compared to sports fans because all they have to do is ask themselves okay what tennis themed t-shirt or what baseball themed mug would

I like to buy but does not yet already exist and then they get to go and make that and so even though sports themed products can make a lot of money and can be very profitable I personally stay away from this Niche because I'd be at a huge disadvantage when it comes comes to brainstorming original good ideas in it and using my unre advantages is a technique that I discuss inside of my free ebook the six zet six figure online stores follow to make over $10,000 a month with print on demand you can find a

link to download my free ebook in the video description below but anyway back to the video and we'll move on to the next huge mistake that I see beginners make all the time which is mistake number four hurting their sales by pricing their products too low yep I'll tell you now I see so many new stores make this mistake they think that to compete they need to price their product super low and as a result like this person did here they end up at best breaking even or sometimes even making a loss which is absolutely

ironic when you consider that if you price your products too low you risk hurting your sales not helping them which is why often times a lot of stores find that they can just increase their product sales simply by raising up their product prices and it's because of a psychological cognitive shortcut that most people use when buying products called price quality her istic the way it works is pretty simple you see let's imagine that you're in a store buying a new laptop well one laptop might cost $1,500 and another might cost $2,000 so how do you

figure out which laptop is likely higher quality simple you use the price quality herotic shortcut most people assume that whichever product costs more is likely better but this is not always true yet studies show time and time again that people will continuously use this shortcut yep for example two researchers did a psychological pricing study called the denomination effect what they did was they took a group of study participants and gave them each some chocolate to try and also told them how much the chocolate cost they then asked the participants to rate the quality of the

chocolate and to also note how much money they would be willing to pay for it and well as expected the more expensive the chocolate was the better the quality they rated it and the higher the price that they were willing to pay for it but guess what the researchers lied yep The Twist was that actually all the chocolate was the same it was all the exact same chocolate and it was therefore all price exactly the same at the supermarket and this is why therefore when people ask me Sarah how should I price my products I

usually recommend looking at your competitors and setting your price point somewhere in the middle of the is yep don't try to match or even worse go lower than your competitors who are pricing their products at the low end otherwise you're going to risk people worrying that there's something wrong with your products but on the flip side don't match or try to beete the people who are pricing their products at the high end of the market either otherwise people will worry that your product is too expensive and that if they buy it they're going to get

ripped off instead focus on Middle Ground pricing because thanks to the psychological phenomena of of the anchoring effect that is what most consumers prefer they find that it's the middle ground between not buying a bad product but also not getting roped off and actually this bias can apply to print on demand sellers too which leads me on to mistake number five assuming more expensive print on demand products are better yep so for example I recently bought two T-shirts from two different print on demand providers to try through the print fight app one print provider was

fulfill engine and the other print provider was Monster Digital I gave them each the same print image this image here and well you can see that fulfill engines t-shirt was much much worse the colors on the Monster Digital t-shirt print are much closer to the image I gave them the ramen bow for example and the fulfill engine t-shirt looks washed out whereas Monster Digital printed it pretty much perfectly so then it's a no-brainer right the Monster Digital t-shirt would cost more than the fulfill engine t-shirt but nope it wasn't it was cheaper for fill engines

t-shirts cost around $14 each whereas monster idual t-shirts cost around just $11 each so never assume that price equals quality instead when you're choosing your print providers make sure to check reviews yep as you can see currently right now fulfill engine has a rating of 8 out of two on Printery as of me filming whereas mod digital has a higher rating of 9.2 out of 10 which matches exactly with what I have seen in this experiment and speaking of spending money unnecessarily this leads me on to mistake number six using pay traffic and advertising before

using free traffic and advertising yes and now I got to say before I begin I do want to point out that I am not against using paid traffic or paid ads nope for example remember my video experiment where I grew a new store to almost $4,000 a week in just 6 months well in that video I also shared how in that new Etsy print on demand store I turned $25 of etsy paid ads and to $142 so yes I do like paid ads and I do use them however even I as someone that likes them

and uses them can admit that they can be a fast way for beginners to lose a lot of money yep so out of curiosity I went through all of the sales for the products that I had for sale in that store and after some calculations I discovered that all of my store sales came from just 38% of my products yes so in other words for 62% of the products that I released they completely flopped and failed plus I also discovered something else that's very interesting 65% of my store sales came from just 25 of my

top designs yep and honestly this is exactly what I expected when I first launched that store because you see here's the thing right if you take big companies like McDonald's or Starbucks or Lego before these big Brands release any new burger or any new drink or any new toy set they will do market research focus groups they'll get a group of customers in a room and test these new product ideas on them and see which ones they like and which ones they don't like then they will release the very tiny fraction that pass this testing

process because of that large corporations do have fairly good success rates but well understandably us smaller businesses can't exactly spend millions of dollars running our own focus groups can we so the equivalent of this in a print on demand store is honestly to just put out as many good quality designs as you can and see which ones the market likes and which ones they buy and which ones they don't this means in that unlike McDonald's or Lego we probably do have a higher rate of product flops but at least we save millions of dollars in

not running market research focused groups and so this is exactly why I personally worry when I see beginners just jump straight into running paid ads it can be hard even for us experienced sellers to be able to guess exactly which of our products are going to be our big hits and our big Sellers and so since statistically most products you release are probably going to go on to be flops it means that you can spend a lot of money running paid ads for products that were doomed to flop from the start now of course if

you have a large budget and you don't mind running a bunch of failed ads to test products to find Winners well I'm not going to deny that there have been plenty of talented beginners who have made a lot of money by finding their winning products through this which is great for them but honestly most beginners I meet don't have the extra cash lying around that they can comfortably lose on Advertising product flops and so if that is you then a free way to do market research is to use free marketing and traffic techniques to identify

your winners yep start out first with a free traffic method for example one of my favorite Instagram accounts is the big four accountant which posts funny Instagram and office memes and well if you click on the link in your bio you'll be redirected to the print on store here they sell their accounting and office theme products and you know here's the thing right this is a very effective strategy because it is completely free to create your own Niche memes like this and post them on social media platforms like Instagram and there are lots of free

tutorials on YouTube already that you can watch they focus on teaching how to create and grow Niche Instagram accounts like this one and so you can use a free traffic method like this and through that you can see which of your products are actually selling and and which ones aren't and then you can take the cash that you earned and then reinvest it into paid ads for your winning products which have already been proven to sell well and I'll admit is this the slower way to start a business absolutely it is but is it a

more financially sustainable way for many people to start a business personally I think so and this all leads me to my next mistake which is mistake number seven expecting overnight success yep because you see here's the thing right I get so many comments from people that expect results in a new business after months or even just weeks honestly after starting it yet as I showed in my new print on demand store Experiment video it took 6 months for that store to get serious traction and that's to be expected for many reasons for example remember how

earlier I pointed out that 65% of that store sales came from just 25 products well I haven't just added 25 product designs into that store nope as I said I've added hundreds and like most new business owners I worked on it in my spear time and so it took months to get my ideas and turn them into product designs and then post them to the store to find out which of my ideas were losers and which ideas were winners building a successful print on demand store is a lot like building a snowball it starts out

small but over time as a successful store creates winning products that customers love it grows until eventually the snowball is so big that it is now a Snowman and so then if you'd like to watch my video where I showed how I took that new print on demand store from zero to nearly $4,000 a week from scratch be sure to watch my next video here on screen and I'll see you in the next video