Jeff here for POD insights, your source for print on demand seller tips, resources and industry news. Today we’ve got the August 2022 monthly print on demand update, including the Etsy purchase protection program, Digisoft from CustomCat, plus prep for Q4 sales and seasonal niches and I consider raising my Etsy shop prices so stick around!

Etsy News

In Etsy news this month, the big headlines is that the Purchase Protection Program started on August 1st. This new feature is just packed with maybe helpful but also confusing and seemingly thrown-together information and processes. Let’s break down what it is, how it works, and whether it might be relevant for print on demand sellers. 

The program applies to two scenarios that we’ve all faced – when a customer’s package is lost in transit and never arrives, and when the customer receives an item that was damaged or broken during shipping. Etsy has positioned this program as a win for both customers and sellers, to help take some of the heat off of us when a shipping carrier delivers a bad experience (pun intended). When a package valued at up to $250 is lost in transit and never delivered, Etsy will provide a refund to the customer without taking the funds from our seller account. They will also provide a refund to the customer the first time each calendar year that an order arrives damaged or broken. It all makes sense and sounds great – once we (or our print providers) hand a package over to the shipping carrier, anything bad that happens from that point forward is not our fault and out of our control so Etsy wants to step in and make it right for the customer while letting us keep the revenue from the order. But as with most Etsy programs or policies, it’s all about how it is implemented and you know there is going to be some fine print. There are requirements an order must meet in order to qualify for purchase protection. The requirements are: 

1. Use valid tracking, either by purchasing your shipping label through Etsy or by uploading a tracking number to your order. We’re good there because our print on demand platforms like Printify or Printful automatically upload the tracking number when an order ships. We’re only responsible for adding additional tracking numbers after the first one if there were separate shipments from more than one provider, because the order can only be marked complete once and the first item to ship will do that. 
2. Use Etsy’s payment platform, Etsy payments. If your shop uses PayPal instead of Etsy payments, buyers will be directed to handled cases through PayPal. 
3. Ship the order to the address provided in the Etsy order. This one is interesting, because Etsy does not provide a way for us or the customer to update the shipping address on the order record after the order is placed. I’ve gotten requests through my Etsy messages from customers to update the shipping address after an order was placed, and as long as we catch it before it is shipped out, we usually have the ability to update it with the print provider. But if you do that and then you suddenly have a shipping issue that would otherwise qualify for the purchase protection plan, the order will not qualify since it was shipped to different address than what is on the order record. Etsy suggests canceling and refunding the order so the customer can place the order again with the correct address. I think this is kind of ridiculous, because Etsy should allow us to change the shipping address if the customer requests it – I know they are concerned with privacy and security, since anyone could send you a message and tell you to change the shipping address on an order, but if they provided a way for the customer to do it through their Etsy account directly in the order, it should be no less secure than the order itself or their account. Anyway, we’ll come back to why I won’t be having my customers do this in a few minutes. 
4. Package the item carefully to avoid damage. This one is a little fuzzy, because they don’t define exactly what their interpretation of “carefully” is. For example, mugs from District Photo, my preferred provided on Printify for mugs, ships orders in a styrofoam container that is made to hold mugs. However, it does not include any special padding or bubble wrap inside. I don’t frequently have them break during shipping, but if one did, would Etsy not consider that safe packaging? I guess we’ll find out as sellers start to share their experiences with this program in the next few months. 
5. Include processing times on your listings and ship your order within stated processing times. You must also have an estimated delivery date for a listing, which includes transit times and origin zip code where applicable. There’s a lot packed into this one but it’s actually fairly simple. Etsy has required more detail in your shipping profiles for about a year now and if you’ve included the required fields of origin zip code, shipping method, and the processing time, then you should meet all these requirements. Etsy uses the information from your shipping profile to show the customer an estimated delivery date, combining the production time and shipping time for estimated delivery. Then as long as your order ships within the stated production time, you will meet this criteria. As long as you keep your shipping profiles updated you should be fine. 
6. Fill out your shop policies, especially your policies for returns, exchanges, and custom orders. Your shop also has to comply with Etsy’s policies and your local laws. I don’t recommend accepting returns for print on demand, and you’re not required to, as long as you’ve set your shop policies appropriately. 
7. Keep your shop in good standing, meaning you’re not violating any of Etsy’s policies (which they have many). In general for us this is going to mean not having intellectual property reports or claims against items in our shop for trademark or copyright infringement. Of course, violation of any of Etsy’s seller policies would fall under this criteria, but that one is likely the most common one we would come across as print on demand sellers. 

Lastly, your listings need to accurately represent the product, meaning the description and photos need to match the product that the customer will receive. The purchase protection program indicates that it “protects sellers for orders that match the listing description and photos, where a buyer claims it does not”. At first, I assumed that only applied to the scenario where the item arrived damaged or broken, because the only other scenario listed as being covered by the program on the seller page is when the order never arrives so the customer would have no idea if it matches your listing or not. However…then I read the buyer policies page that include an overview of the plan from the customer’s perspective. 

If you navigate to the Buyer Policy on Etsy’s site, which is totally separate from seller policies and all the seller-directed content, there is a third scenario listed under the purchase protection program, indicating that if items do not match the listing description, either Etsy or the seller will be required to refund the order. They list a few examples of when an item does not match the description, such as being a different color, model, version, or size, being made of a different material, and if the condition is misrepresented. There are a couple others listed that sound more like they apply to vintage items. These examples are not listed on the seller pages dedicated to the protection program, which I find ridiculous. I understand that a help page directed towards the customer audience is going to be worded differently and probably different slightly in the content vs. the seller content, but what the program applies to or does not apply to should be written identically in both places. And one more thing that isn’t stated on the seller page – it states eligible buyers must have a registered account on Etsy in good standing. Again, this is new so I’m not 100% certain here, but I think that means those orders you get where it says “guest” next to the customer name might not be eligible for the program, because if they did a guest checkout without registering then they wouldn’t meet that criteria. Another detail not stated on the seller information page…that one we have no impact on but still. Ok, enough complaining, so I guess any order where the customer states the item doesn’t match the description will potentially fall under this program. 

So if we ignore the shipping address piece for a moment, we should not have any problem meeting all these criteria for our orders on a regular basis, meaning we should be able to take advantage of the seller protection program if it becomes relevant. Now let’s discuss how they have implemented this program. 

You don’t have to take any action to participate in the program. If the customer reports one of these issues to Etsy by opening a case, they will automatically handle it under the program if all criteria are met. I have not experienced the program myself yet, however, I have read sellers commenting in forums and I’ve even seen at least one video on YouTube about Etsy closing the cases immediately and refunding the buyer. The key is that the customer needs to open a case vs. just messaging you. You can tell the customer to open a case if you are certain that the purchase protection plan will apply, and from the early feedback it sounds like Etsy is closing the cases and providing refunds pretty quickly. There’s another page in Etsy help articles that indicates a specialist may need to reach out for more information – which I would guess probably would be the scenario where the customer states the item doesn’t match the listing mostly. Now ordinarily, Etsy closing a customer case in favor of the customer so quickly could be a bad thing, because when a customer opens a case against your shop it’s because they’re not happy about something. When Etsy sides with the customer, it can impact your shop’s standing on Etsy, because they keep a record of the cases against your shop. However in this case, this program is intended to take some financial burden off sellers when an order meets the program criteria, so having a case covered by the program is not quite the same. However, I couldn’t find in writing any guarantee that these cases have zero impact on your seller “good standing” status. Personally, I wish the whole case system stayed it’s own thing and this program was run outside of it, because including it in their case workflow just makes it seem like it’s being counted as a complaint against your shop when they are saying it’s intended to benefit both the customer and the seller. 

Only time will tell on some of these details, but for now, I’m honestly not too concerned about it impacting my shop or print on demand business in general, and here’s why: we already have ways of resolving these orders for customers that don’t involve us losing money. Our print on demand platforms are usually pretty good about providing refunds or replacements when an order doesn’t arrive, or arrives damaged or broken. Regarding damaged or broken items, I’ve never had any print on demand platform refuse to send a replacement, so I’ve always been able to resolve the issue with just a couple messages to the customer and no out of pocket cost. When it comes to items that don’t arrive – that one can sometimes take a little more work because your print provider will likely ask you to contact the shipping carrier or local post office to have them try to locate it before they will provide a replacement or refund, but still, you can get those resolved without additional cost and just by exchanging messages with the customer. So in general, we have no need to go the route of the customer opening a case. And in my experience, more customers ask for a replacement or reprint vs. a refund. An educated guess for my shop in the last two years would be about a 60-40 split, with most customers asking for a replacement to be sent. If they open a case and Etsy provides a refund immediately, then there’s no opportunity to ask that question and get them a replacement.

I don’t feel like I know enough about some of the details to strongly recommend that everyone avoid the program, but for me, I’m going to avoid it until we see some more seller feedback and possibly some updates from Etsy, because our print providers already provide a solution in these scenarios that doesn’t involve out of pocket cost. If you want to know more about how I handle those scenarios with customers today, check out the YouTube channel for the Shipping Issues video or the episode of the podcast all about shipping, which was published on July 5th, it was episode 13. I’ll report back on any updates that I can find about how this program is going. 

Next up in Etsy news this month, I just noticed on my seller dashboard last week that customers can now leave video reviews for your products on iOS devices. So if they have an iPhone and the Etsy app, they’ll be able to leave a video review. There’s an article on the Etsy site that I’ll link to in the blogpost for this episode, and it states they’re still working on this capability for the Android app. They can only be 30 seconds in length and include audio. You can report an inappropriate video and Etsy will review it for policy violations. The page says that it may take up to 7-10 days to remove a video that violates their policies, but most are removed sooner. So definitely keep an eye out in your updates history for any new video reviews. Generally speaking, video reviews could be more impactful to future potential customers because people like to see videos showing a product, and because they can contain audio the customer might say something. So really good video reviews should help, but really bad video reviews could be an issue. I can’t lie I’m a little nervous about this one, because I’ve had a few customer leave bad reviews without messaging me first in the past, and their bad review stays up until I can get them to respond and resolve whatever their problem was. For example, I once had a customer leave a one-star review and say that their mug had a bad print quality and they did not message me first to ask about getting a replacement. I messaged them and said if they wouldn’t mind sending a photo I’d be happy to provide a replacement or a refund. They responded the next day and said they would take a replacement, and then eventually they updated their review to 4 stars…but that wasn’t until they received the replacement. In the end I think it was a little over a week that the one-star review was visible, but knowing Etsy likes to show recent reviews to shoppers it was stressful knowing that was there. Imagine if that was a video review of the person trashing my product…it would be even more impactful. I’m probably being overly concerned, but this is another “we’ll have to wait and see how it goes” things since we have no control over it. However this does lead me to a seller tip.

Within the last few months, Etsy turned on the ability for you to respond to all your reviews, not just the ones that are three-stars or less. So you can post a public response for 4 and 5 star reviews, just to say thank you for leaving a review or something like “I’m so glad you like it”. Why would you bother to do this? Because once a seller comments on a review, the buyer cannot edit or change it. That means they can’t drop your review to 4 stars if they suddenly decide a couple weeks later that they are less thrilled with it than they originally thought. Of course, they can still message you if they have a real issue that deserves a replacement, but their 4 or 5 star review is locked in. So go ahead and drop a comment on your reviews to keep them from changing.  

The last piece of Etsy news for this month is just a few things I wanted to share about the Holiday Trend Report that Etsy provides. It’s easy to ignore something like this, because Etsy puts so many things in your seller dashboard that don’t necessarily apply to print on demand sellers, like articles focused on trends for crafty or vintage items. However it’s worth perusing the holiday trend report because there are a few things that apply to us and I’ll link to the full article in the blogpost for this episode on podinsights.net. The report has several categories, and the first is style trends. One item that could apply for you is that pajamas continue to be popular and matching family sets become even more popular around the holidays. Some print providers offer all-over-print pajamas and if you upload to sites like Spreadshirt, they also include some pajama options. You can also offer items like leggings from Printify as an alternative to traditional pajama bottoms, paired with a t-shirt in a combo listing. There are also some trends in home decor, including nature themes, which at first might not sound like it applies to us but there are certainly print on demand products that fall into the decor category and could have nature-themed designs. The gifting trends section also includes some helpful tips, including a mention of a 45% YOY increase in searches for “board games” on Etsy. Printify recently got a couple of options for print on demand puzzles in the catalog, so that might be a good holiday gift item. Unsurprisingly, personalized items also make popular gifts. All of the items mentioned in the report I would consider starting points for you to explore search phrases and look for specific niches that might fit for a particular type of product, and if you feel stuck on what to research for your Q4 listing build-up, these can be helpful to get you going. Again, the link to that article will be on podinsights.net but you can also just search Etsy for the holiday trend guide and make sure it’s for 2022 because they publish one each year. 

Print Provider News

Alright it’s time to move on to print provider news, and I’ve only got one big thing for this month. CustomCat is a print on demand platform that I mentioned in the episode earlier this season where I compared all the major platforms, and I had one big complaint about CustomCat. Their user interface for creating designs and publishing them to your store is far less modern, intuitive, and easy to use compared to platforms like Printify, Printful, and Gelato. However, I recently took a survey from CustomCat and gave them this very feedback, and their executive Vice President of growth & strategy, Eric Abrams, sent me an email response. He said that they are currently testing some enhancements to the user interface from sellers that should help to improve the experience. I’m excited for that, but that’s not actually the news I have for CustomCat. I’m excited they are working on a better interface because they just launched a totally new and proprietary printing process for apparel, called Digisoft. They first launched Digisoft a few months ago on hoodies, sweatshirts, and polyester athletic apparel, and just launched it for t-shirts starting with the Gildan 5000 heavy cotton unisex t-shirt this month.

CustomCat says Digisoft is “equal parts DTG and DTF print process”, and that’s direct-to-garment and direct-to-film. They say Digisoft combines the best qualities of each without their limitations. The resulting print provides high detail and color accuracy, while being softer to the touch and not requiring pre-treatment that adds stiffness to a large portion of the garment, which is often an issue we see with DTG printing on dark colored garments. They also state the consistency from print to print is excellent, meaning your prints will come out the same over hundreds or thousands of prints on the same or different products, which is important if your customers buy from you more than once. It also is a lower overall waste process vs. DTG. 

I have a couple samples right now and some more on the way and am planning a video on the YouTube channel reviewing the quality of the print to see if it holds up to these claims, including a comparison to DTG samples. From the ones I have received I can say that it seems that Digisoft does deliver on those promises, and it’s a pretty cool thing. It’s not very often that we see totally new printing methods, especially ones that can bring our products closer to the “retail standard” of quality and comfort that customers get from major brands. It’s also worth emphasizing that Digisoft works on 100% polyester apparel where DTG often struggles, and this includes moisture-wicking or athletic garments. Most providers that offer this type of garment use DTF for those garments because DTG just doesn’t work that well on them. If Digisoft can deliver a high quality print on these garments, it could mean you have a great opportunity to sell niches that fit well with these garments, like fitness, athleisure, and outdoor activity niches or even just text-based designs with gym or workout-related sayings. Imagine being able to do a combination listing with all-over print leggings and a moisture-wicking shirt with a motivational exercise phrase on it and knowing the print is going to be high quality and soft, not like a stiff decal on the shirt or a print that comes out faded and comes off easily. I’m excited to see how my other samples come out and compare them to the same designs printed using the DTG method, so watch for that video on the YouTube channel within the next month. Pricing on CustomCat is fairly competitive, and I think if the quality of Digisoft prints comes out consistently better than DTG, it would even justify slightly higher prices. And if CustomCat can deliver an improved seller interface for creating listings, they could jump from being a platform I don’t personally recommend to being a top contender. 

That’s it for platform news this month. 

What’s New With Me

So what’s new with me this month? Well I do have a few things to talk about and two of them are annoying. So let’s start with the third thing that’s pretty cool and not annoying. 

First up, I’m testing out a new graphics service for creating designs called Kittl. I’m also working on a series of videos about the service and will be releasing the intro video very soon on the YouTube channel so check that out. I’ll also include a link to Kittl on the website in the blogpost for this episode. In a nutshell, Kittl is a web-based design tool that might seem a bit like Canva at first, but there are a few key differentiators. First, the quality of the design templates they offer is super high-quality and professional. The design templates for logos, t-shirts, and more are next-level compared to most other graphics services for creating print on demand designs. Second and most importantly, the tool allows a lot more customization of their designs and especially text, the kind of customization you normally would have to go into a tool like Photoshop to do. Canva simply doesn’t allow you to customize text the way that Kittl does. You can also customize every element of the templates and transform them with freeform adjustments that again, you normally would have to use a more advanced software like Photoshop for. They have a free account that allows you to try the features and functionality out, but you can only download low-res files with the free account. The paid subscriptions get you access to download any DPI setting that you need in PNG, JPG, PDF, and SVG file types. So far, it seems like a promising tool and I’m excited to keep working with it for a while and report on how it’s working for me. I’ll be using it to create some Halloween and other Q4 designs I the next few weeks. 

Next up are the two things that are annoying me right now – price increases and increasing competition on Etsy when it comes to shipping vs. free shipping. We’ve had a few prices increases in our platforms over the last 3 to 4 months, so I’m finally increasing some of my prices. Right now I’m adjusting my pricing on sweatshirts and hoodies because I was down to about a 18-20% profit margin, so offsite ad sales were cutting that pretty thin and if I wanted to run a real sale I’d have almost zero profit. Just one example of how you need to spot-check your orders each month to make sure your profits haven’t changed significantly. I prefer closer to a 30% profit margin, but the prices of hoodies and sweatshirts are getting higher to the point where I’m not sure customer will pay those prices for a basic Gildan hoodie. These are not premium-quality hoodies, so I can’t personally see myself paying $40 for one, and that’s exactly what the trusty Alura Etsy fee calculator says I would need to charge based on the Monster Digital Printify Premium price of $23.63 with shipping included. Looking at some competitor listings in search results reinforced that $40 isn’t going to be competitive, and it also alerted me to the second thing that’s annoying me right now, and that’s price competition and shipping vs. free shipping strategy. So we’ll come back to the price of hoodies in a minute. 

When I started selling print on demand on Etsy in 2020, free shipping was very common on other sellers’ listings, with some mixed in that charged for shipping and offered a lower list price to entice buyers, only to surprise them with the shipping charge in their shopping cart if they didn’t scroll down on the listing to see what the charge would be. I opted for the free shipping strategy for all my apparel items, but I do charge for shipping on mugs and a couple other items that have a higher shipping cost. I was still able to offer a competitive price on t-shirts even with the shipping cost built-in at that time, and it has worked well for me over the last two years even as prices have increased a few times. However it seems to be at the point now where my prices don’t look as competitive with the shipping cost built-in. I’m having to charge a minimum of $18.99 with free shipping to make a 27% profit margin on the Gildan Softstyle tee from Monster Digital, and that’s with the Printify Premium price of $11.70 shipping included. Besides my total cost, the other thing that seems to have changed is what the competition is doing. Rather than mostly free shipping mixed with some not-free shipping in search results, I’m seeing more and more sellers go with the strategy of showing a very low price on one product variant and charging for shipping. So what happens is they list a single variant, like a white XS t-shirt, at something like $12.99 or $14.99 and then every other t-shirt variant is $17 to $20, and they charge for shipping, anywhere from $3 to $6. So unless you buy that one low-priced variant, the customer is going to pay a total of anywhere from $20 to $25, which is a great profit margin if their cost is similar to mine. Because more and more sellers seem to be doing this, my listings are looking less competitive in search results, even with free shipping. However, my price is still lower than theirs, which is why this is annoying to me. I should in theory be winning the business more frequently because if my design and a competitor’s design are of equal quality and there is no real design preference between the too, mine is a lower price at $19 out the door while theirs is going to be $20 to $25 total. But the problem is that when dozens of listings around mine look like a lower price, the customer may never come back to check to see if mine is a lower price after clicking on a competitors, even after they see the shipping charge in their cart. So it seems to me like the tide has shifted towards more sellers adopting this strategy, and I believe it’s having an impact on my sales. 

Now let’s bring back the hoodie example. With the recent price increases, to get my profit margin back to 30% I’d have to get a total price of $40. With my current free shipping strategy, that means a retail price of $39.99 with free shipping. However if you search for any niche that I sell hoodies in, you’ll find an abundance of listings showing a price as low as $18…at least until you click on it and see what the real price + shipping is. There are some holdouts like me charging $38 to $42 with free shipping, unless you’ve got an absolutely amazing design that nobody else is offering, it’s going to get pretty hard to get clicks on your listing when dozens of other listings are showing prices up to 50% less. So I have choices to make, as we all do. As I’m adjusting my prices, should I accept a lower profit margin? Personally I think I need to go with a profit margin between 25 and 28% for hoodies and sweatshirts because the more someone pays for a product, the more they’ll want it to be exactly what they had in mind. Think about it – if you paid $25 for a sweatshirt and it wasn’t perfect, would you leave a bad review or try to return it? Probably not. But if you paid $40 for it, now you’re thinking about either leaving a negative review or returning it, because $40 seems like a lot to pay for something you don’t love. That threshold is likely different for different people, but the point is, keeping prices low can help you avoid getting pushback from customers so you need to balance your desired profit margin with a price that won’t have customer feeling like they got less than they paid for. But even getting my profit margin back to 25% means a retail price of $36.99 so again it’s go me wondering whether I should change my strategy to charing for shipping which would allow me to drop my list price to $32.99 and charge $4.00 for shipping. But then I’d have to consider opting out of the Etsy Free Shipping Guarantee, because I’d lose the shipping charge for all orders over $35 which I don’t currently worry about with the shipping cost built into the price. 

So I have a lot more thinking to do, but that’s what is going on with me this month. Are you running into these same challenges and decisions? Drop me a comment on the blogpost for this episode, in the YouTube channel community or on Twitter, my handle is @POD_insights. 

Niche Updates & Ideas

Where did this year go? It’s time to talk about Q4 niches! You’ve got Halloween sales coming up first in Q4 and then the big holiday gift buying rush of November & December, and this is the time to be creating new designs and listings to prepare. 

Of course, right now you’ll want to prioritize Halloween designs since sales for those will peak first. In fact, Google Trends indicates that search volume for “Halloween shirt” starts really jumping around September 12-15 according to the last 5 years of search volume, and in 2022 it’s already started increasing a bit as of August 20th. You can expect to make Halloween niche sales from that mid-September time all the way up until the shipping cutoff time before the holiday – meaning your orders will start to drop as customers realize they won’t receive orders in time for the holiday. So now is the perfect time to get listings out there – they won’t sit without views and sales for very long if you target some good niches and do your keyword research. 

One thing that has done very well the last few years in Halloween niches are couples matching designs. These can be simple t-shirts that have matching or complementary designs and you’ll find lots of ideas by doing a simple search on Etsy. If you use a tool like Sale Samurai with a chrome extension, you can get lots of related search phrase ideas quickly and narrow it down to niches that have lower competition. The same goes for family designs that include a youth shirt or baby onesie. Designs as simple as spooky-style text that say “Mummy”, “Deady” and “Baby Ghoul” on each product are a good starting point to check on possible keywords and search volume. 

I already mentioned a couple starting points for other holiday niches earlier, so we won’t go further into other Q4 niches yet, we’ll do that more in next month’s episode. Good luck with getting your Halloween designs published! 

Conclusion

I hope you found some helpful information in this monthly update. Don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite platform and head over to podinsights.net to check out links to resources. And visit me on YouTube on the POD Insights channel and on Twitter for video guides, selling tips and product reviews.

Thanks for reading.