Jeff here for POD insights, your source for print on demand seller tips, resources and industry news. Today we’ve got the September 2022 print on demand update, including a new segment where I answer questions that have been asked in the comments on the YouTube channel. Stick around for all the print on demand information you need for September 2022.
Etsy News
Nothing huge this month in Etsy news but there are a couple things to point out. First I wanted to give a quick update on the Purchase Protection Program that I covered in detail in the August 2022 monthly update episode. In that episode I mentioned that I had heard and read that Etsy seemed to be closing these cases pretty quickly and refunding the buyer. However after reading into some more examples shared on the Etsy seller community forum, there were a lot of examples where Etsy refunded the buyer and took the funds out of the seller’s account. So in effect, these cases were handled as “buyer protection” and not “seller protection”. But one thing I wanted to point out that is important – in almost every thread, there was a response from another seller indicating they looked at the original seller’s shop page and found they had no published shop policies. Now I normally would not be on Etsy’s side if we’re talking about a seller losing money in a situation like this, but Etsy’s Purchase Protection Program makes it pretty clear that you need to have your shop policies published in order to be covered by the program as a seller. Based on this, I can only assume that these cases would not have been refunded out of the seller’s account if they had published shop policies at the time that the customer filed a case.
I wanted to share this for two reasons – mainly because it’s a good reminder that you need to have your shop policies published. You do not have to accept returns, you just need to have a published policy. I’m going to do a video on the YouTube channel at some point dedicated to my whole strategy around returns but the bottom line for right now is, Etsy will take the refund out of your seller account if you don’t have completed shop policies and the customer files a case that qualifies for the protection program (meaning they’ll protect the customer but not the seller). The same might apply if you don’t meet any of the other eligibility criteria for seller protection that I covered in the August update episode, but this one seems to be coming up quite a bit.
In other Etsy news this month, I have a couple small updates. I have not yet had any customers leave me a review in video format, so although that’s been available for Etsy customers with the iOS app since last month, I don’t have an example of it in my shop yet. I also just wanted to mention that I have been using the Etsy seller app semi-regularly and don’t have any major complaints about it yet. It does seem to be working better than the previous seller app and in general I like the navigation a lot better. According to Etsy’s website, coming in fall we should have the ability to edit or add product variations in the app, however it looks to me like you can already do that. I was able to get into a couple listings and scroll down to the variations section, and there was an option to “Edit Variations”. It seemed to be working because it let me add a new color option to a listing. So maybe they’re ahead of schedule and just haven’t updated the article that shows future enhancements. But anyway, just wanted to give a brief update on that.
That’s all I have for Etsy news this month, now let’s talk about a few items for Print Provider News.
Print Provider News
In print provider news this month, I wanted to share a couple updates on things I’ve talked about in past episodes. First, a quick update on Gelato paid subscriptions, Gelato+ and Gelato+ Gold. Within the last couple of months they added the benefit for shipping discounts, which I explained in the episode where I explored several paid print on demand platform subscriptions (episode 12). However at the time, they kept the pricing the same with that added benefit – which was $95 per year for Gelato+ if you paid annually and $600 for Gelato+ Gold if paid annually. Well, so much for that. Gelato has since increased the prices significantly. The Gelato+ plan still has a 30-day free trial available, but now will cost you $139 per year if paid annually or $14.99 per month. However with the shipping discount, which is 30% off standard shipping methods for the first 49 orders per month and then 50% off shipping for all orders after that, it does have a monthly feature that helps to pay back the monthly cost. You also get access to the customer-driven and fully automated personalization feature that I did a video about on the YouTube channel a couple months ago if that is something you’re interested in. While $40 dollars per year is not an insignificant price increase, Gelato+ Gold had a slightly more significant price increase. Like $400 significant. The original price as I mentioned was $600 per year, and it now costs $999 per year and you can ONLY pay annually. There is no monthly payment option with the Gold subscription like there was before. I do not see any significant new financial benefits to the plan vs. what was included before, so this is a massive increase without much to substantiate it. It’s possible that Gelato is trying to position it more for established large-scale businesses that are guaranteed to bring a large order volume through their platform vs. a growing business. Granted, the plan always provided support for up to 25 stores and 20 users, so it’s not like it was a starter plan before but man, that’s expensive. It does still include 30 days of 100% free shipping worldwide after signup, but that’s still a one-time benefit that does not repeat each year. You also still get the discounted monthly shipping after the free period, with the same 30% off the first 49 orders and then 50% off after that.
Correction: Since recording this episode I noticed that Gelato+ only includes 30% off all standard shipping, it does not include the bump to 50% off after 49 orders. That is now only part of Gelato+ Gold.
Just for fun, let’s do some quick math on that. Let’s assume the free shipping period is over and you’re a larger seller with 500 orders per month regularly. That volume is not that outrageous – it certainly takes time and effort to scale your business to that level but I had 716 orders in November and 586 in December last year – I just don’t have that kind of volume outside the 4th quarter at this point but it’s definitely possible to get there. You will get a 30% discount on shipping for 49 orders and 50% off shipping for 451 orders. Let’s keep it simple and say that every one of those orders is for a t-shirt being shipped to the US. Gelato’s shipping price for a Gildan Softstyle t-shirt in the US is currently $3.64 (which is pretty cheap already). 30% off would be $2.55 and 50% of would be $1.82. Your shipping cost for the month with the split discount will be $124.95 for the first 49 orders and $820.82 for the remaining 451, for a total cost of $945.77. Without any discount, the shipping cost would have been $1,820 so the discounts saved you $874.23 in just one month. Now I think I know why Gelato raised the price…if some very large sellers with 500+ monthly orders jumped on board with Gelato+ Gold at a price of $600 per year, they were getting way more in return than what they paid for the subscription. Even with the price set to $999 per year, if you’re a seller with that kind of monthly sales you’re going to be into a positive return in two months. So I guess this is a good reminder for me to do the math before criticizing the pricing of these things.
Ok another quick update in Print Provider News – I wanted to mention that I noticed in one of CustomCat’s user update emails they called out that recently their Digisoft production times have increased. They started noticing some quality control concerns and have had to slow down a bit to make sure prints are coming out correctly, and I believe the production times are starting to improve this month. Hopefully that hey that sorted out for Q4 sales. I have all my samples of CustomCat’s Digisoft prints and I just finished filming my comparison video with the same designs printed with DTG and DTF printing. It was a very interesting side by side comparison to CustomCat’s new print method so be on the lookout on the YouTube channel for that video soon.
What’s New With Me
This month I don’t have anything huge going on in my Etsy shop. I’m mainly just working on adding some additional listings for Q4 in the hopes that I can bolster up my holiday sales, but that also includes checking my expired listings for any holiday designs from last year that I want to renew again.
I like to set my renewal option on Etsy listings to manual, because if a product does not sell for four months, it gives me a chance to review the listing and decide whether I want to renew it before paying another $0.20 to relist it. This is also helpful for holiday-specific designs because they only tend to sell around a particular holiday. Take Valentine’s Day for example – the odds of someone buying a Valentine’s Day t-shirt in July are not very good. With the renewal option set to manual, the listing will expire four months after it stops selling and then I can renew it 6-8 weeks prior to Valentine’s day next year and not pay the $0.20 listing fee repeatedly all year when it’s unlikely to sell. Getting back to Q4, mid-September is a great time to check your expired listings and renew any that you want to be active at this time of year so I’m going to spend some time reviewing that for my shop.
But then of course I’ll be spending more time creating new listings for Q4 as well. I like to put things into categories at least mentally, and then prioritize them by either timing or importance. Here are the areas I’m focusing on this year for Q4:
- Apparel (T-Shirt/Sweatshirt/Hoodie)
- New low-competition niches (based on research)
- Holiday niches (still based on research but holiday-themed)
- Holiday Products & Winter Accessories
- Ornaments
- Puzzles
- Beanie Hats
I like to think of it this way because it helps me prioritize. I never want to ignore low competition niches that might sell year-round, and I do still look for new ones at this time of year, but the holiday-themed niches and products are a little higher priority right now because their selling season is now through December. So I’m going to put some more effort into researching Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas design niches for apparel items right now. When it gets to the point where it feels like it’s “too late” for those designs – meaning it’s like early December, we’re past Halloween and Thanksgiving and new Christmas designs likely don’t have enough time to start selling – then I shift back to researching more general low competition niches for new designs. The second category gets the second priority to holiday apparel niches and that is holiday-focused products. For me this year I’m going to work on ornaments and puzzles. I only had a couple of those listed in my shop last year and I made a few sales of both. That tells me it might be worth building up more listings for those products this year. I may also try to do some personalized ornaments if I can find any keyword phrases that don’t have a huge amount of competition. I also try to get some winter products added before the Q4 rush like embroidered beanies because they might sell in Q4 and then they’re already there for the rest of the cold months in the US when winter hats tend to sell best. I have a couple samples of embroidered beanies coming from Printify soon and will be posting a review video.
That’s what I’m working on in between making videos and the podcast this month, I’m hoping to get at least 50 new listings created by the end of the month so I’ve got 400+ active listings in my Etsy shop for Q4. We’re going to talk more about Q4 niches in a few minutes, but first…
Ask Jeff Q&A
I’m adding a new segment to the monthly update episode this month, to answer some viewer questions from the YouTube channel. I’m working on creating a video format of this where each month I make a compilation video answering questions as well, and thought it was a good fit as a segment on the podcast. I’m going to try this out by answering three questions in this episode.
Question #1 came from Lisa on the video about selling personalized items and having them fulfilled with Printify. In that video I reviewed how I create a copy of the product in my Printify account, apply the personalization to the design, and manually swap that product on the order before sending it to production. This way it doesn’t impact the Etsy listing or cause you to have to republish. Lisa’s question was: do I have to wait until the customer’s order has shipped before I change the product listing I created for them to a different name? So there is an order in production that has the personalized print file on it, and now there’s another order for the same product with a different personalization. So I’m assuming the concern is that if you change the personalization in the print file for that listing in Printify to fulfill the new order, it might impact the print file for that other order that has not shipped yet. What a great question! I’m actually not sure exactly when the print file is “locked in” with the print provider. It could be sent to the print provider’s system immediately when you submit the order to production and locked in at that point, meaning if you change the print file on the listing after submitting the order it will not have any impact, or Printify’s platform could continue to send print file updates to the print provider’s system until your order actually is physically being produced, which would mean changes to the print file could impact the order depending on where it is in the process. I’m not sure which one of those is true and I could not find confirmation on Printify’s site, so my answer on this one would be to play it safe and create a new copy with the new personalization just to be extra-sure that it won’t impact the other order that has not been fulfilled yet. Once an order has been fulfilled/shipped, at that point it’s definitely safe to change the personalization in the listing. If I can find out any additional detail on this, I’ll update my answer.
Question #2 was from E M and they asked about how to control which countries your Etsy listings appear in. This question comes up quite frequently when we’re discussing shipping profiles on Etsy, and the answer is that Etsy does not make this easy for sellers. There is no simple setting that controls your “ship to” countries for all listings in your shop, but you can control where you ship orders to within your shipping profiles by including or excluding specific countries. However you also have to watch out for the option called “everywhere else” because if you have that in your shipping profile, it’s telling Etsy that you’ll ship worldwide. So if you want to exclude specific countries that you don’t want to ship to, you have to make sure that “everywhere else” is not included in your shipping profile and then manually add only the countries you want to ship to. This is not the same thing as disabling the ability to sell to a customer located in other countries, but it means customers cannot buy your listing and have it shipped to excluded countries. If that sounds confusing…it’s because it is. When you are shopping on Etsy, you have filters available for your search results and one of them is “Ship to” with a drop-down to select the country. It defaults to the country of your user account or the country detected from your internet connection if you’re not signed in. So for me, Etsy defaults to show me listings that can be shipped to the United States. If there are sellers out there that only ship to the United Kingdom, their listings won’t appear in my search results. However, if I change that “Ship to” filter to the UK, their listings will now appear. Generally I wouldn’t be doing this as a customer, but it does allow me to filter search results if I’m buying a gift for friends or family in other countries and I want the order shipped directly to them. What that means is that if the filters are left at the default settings, customers located in countries you exclude from your shipping profiles will not see your listings. But if they change the filters to ship to a country that is included in your shipping profiles, they will see your listings. So there’s no way to truly “turn off” the ability for customers in certain countries to see your listings completely, but they will only be able to ship your items to the countries stated in your shipping profile, and that’s what matters most. I do have a video about setting up your shipping profiles if you want to check that out.
Question #3 is also shipping-related and it is about shipping on those combination listings where you have more than one type of product in the same listing. I’ve made two videos about how to do that with Printify and this question has been posted on both of them. The question is how you are charged for shipping when the customer orders different products and how you make sure you are getting enough profit to account for it. This is a great question and the short answer and easiest way to do it is to only combine products that you offer free shipping on. But let me also just explain how you’re charged for shipping. When a customer orders multiple items from your combo listing, the fulfillment costs work the same as if the customer had purchased the items from separate listings. Printify will charge you the base shipping cost for the first item of each separate type – meaning if you have one t-shirt and one hoodie you will pay the first-item cost for each one. You will get the “additional item” discounted shipping charge if the customer buys more than one of the same type of item like multiple t-shirts. So you need to make sure your pricing is setup to account for that within the same shipping profile if the products are grouped together in the same listing. This is why free shipping is the easiest option. For example, if you offer free shipping on your t-shirts, sweatshirts, and hoodies, including youth sized options, you can safely combine any of them in the same listing because your prices already have the shipping cost built-in and having one shipping profile for all the products does not matter. However, if you charge for shipping and you charge different amounts for t-shirts vs. hoodies, then combining them into he same listings gets tricky. You can just charge the higher amount, but then you have to adjust your “additional item” rate because you’re going to pay the full shipping price on each separate item even though Etsy is applying a single shipping profile to multiple items. In other words, if you charge $6 for shipping plus $2 for each additional item, that will not cover the actual shipping cost of your fulfillment for two different products since you’re not getting the “additional item” rate. If your order was for one t-shirt and one hoodie, the actual shipping cost might be something like $12 but you’ve only collected $8. So your shipping profile really should be more like $6 for the first item and $4 for each additional to cover a little more of the cost. If you offer the free shipping guarantee in your shop, this complicates matters further. Ultimately, I recommend doing combination listings for apparel items that you can do free shipping on to make it easier on yourself. Combination listings for other products, like different styles of mugs, is a little less complicated since you’re more likely to use the same shipping profile on all your mugs anyway. If you do that just make sure your “additional item” charge is appropriate and it should work out with fewer complications.
I hope you found the answers to those questions helpful and interesting because I enjoyed bringing them into this episode and I think it’s a good fit for the monthly update. If you have a question that you’d like me to answer and consider including in the next monthly update, go to podinsights.net and use the contact form at the bottom of the homepage to email me. You can also post a question on any video on the YouTube channel.
Niche Updates & Ideas
Alright let’s dive a little deeper into Q4 niche updates and ideas. I mentioned how I’m prioritizing my niche research and new listings this month but let’s take that a little bit further.
First, in terms of holiday-themed niches for your apparel items like t-shirts, sweatshirts, and hoodies. There’s one obvious niche that we can leverage and that is ugly Christmas sweaters. Google Trends shows that in the last five years, search volume for the phrase “ugly Christmas Sweater” starts to rise immediately after Halloween and peaks in the first ten days of December. There are a lot of reasons that the general ugly Christmas sweater theme works well with print on demand. The big reason is that there are a ton of sub-niche possibilities with this design theme. Sure, there’s your classic design which doesn’t really feature a specific focus but rather is just the knitted-style images of Christmas trees, reindeer, presents, etc. in green, red, and white. But there are lots of different designs now that feature a focused theme and the possibilities are only limited to your imagination. There are ugly Christmas sweater-style designs featuring Bigfoot, unicorns, aliens, cats, dogs (and specific dog breeds), gaming graphics, and the list goes on. It’s fairly easy to find templates for ugly Christmas sweater style designs on sites like Creative Fabrica and Vexels, and you can then edit the graphics within the template to create many different sub-niche designs. Creative Fabrica even has a photoshop action you can download that applies the knitted-style texture and pattern to any layer, so you can insert a graphic and then make the appearance fit in with the rest of the design. If you use a research tool like Sale Samurai, you should be able to find sub-niche ideas fairly easily. You just have to keep in mind that the search volume for these designs is not going to start really jumping until after Halloween, so searching for niche opportunities right now in September might not show you super high estimated monthly search volume. My suggestion would be to check on sub-niches that are generally popular but the competition is not really high. I’ll make up an example – you know that Bigfoot is a popular theme for t-shirt designs in general, so you search for Bigfoot ugly Christmas sweater. There are only 1k search results, so if and when the search volume does spike, you’ll already be present in a lower competition niche. On the flip side, if that search phrase has 20k search results, even if the search volume spikes it will be harder for your listings to be seen with that much competition unless you advertise. So when the search volume isn’t quite there yet on something like this, just check out the competition for some sub-niches that you think are good ideas and use that information to prioritize the lower competition ones.
One other reason why the ugly Christmas sweater theme is great for print on demand, is because customers are open to these designs not being on actual sweaters. Getting this type of a design printed on a t-shirt has become almost it’s own niche where it’s like a sort of satire for someone to get the t-shirt version rather than an actual sweater with this design theme…like the meme version of it. Think of it like this – if your office had an ugly Christmas sweater day where everyone comes to work wearing one and you show up wearing the t-shirt version of it, it’s like a joke in itself. People also may like to participate in the ugly Christmas sweater theme without the expense of an actual knitted sweater which could easily be $50 or more. We can also offer the same design printed on a sweatshirt for something even closer to a real knitted sweater. And if you want to really go for it, you can do all-over-print sweatshirts with an ugly Christmas pattern on them. I personally don’t do AOP for these only because the patterns tend to be pretty detailed and making sure that everything lines up properly in all the print areas like the sleeves and neck area can get to be pretty tedious, and if it comes out not aligned properly the customer may not like it. That’s not a bash on AOP sweatshirts in general, just for this type of design since it’s got so much detail. If you’re up for it, they definitely offer the closest thing to an actual knitted ugly Christmas sweater that we can offer.
Another idea for holiday designs for apparel would be your family-themed designs. This is a great one for creating a combination listing. This is another great opportunity because again, there are so many sub-niche opportunities. The general structure is that you’re looking for niches that are a collection of designs for parents and kids that go together, and you create a combo listing with unisex, youth, and baby sizes options together so the customer can see all the options without leaving one listing. This is a popular sales tactic for a reason – if the customer doesn’t have to navigate to a bunch of separate listings, there’s a better chance they’ll just add your items to their cart and go to checkout because you’re making it easier for them. If they have to bounce around to different listings to see the adult, youth, and baby sizes products that go together, that’s just more time for them to change their mind or see something else they like better. I don’t do the combo-listing approach automatically for all my products because it is time consuming (at least for now it is until somebody gives us a way to automate more of the process), but for some niches like matching family designs it’s definitely worth it. I would suggest starting with a general search phrase like “family Christmas shirts” and then use your research tool to see related phrases that high high search volume and lower competition. The Sale Samurai Chrome extension is a great tool for doing this because it shows you hundreds of related search phrases with the search volume and competition side by side and you can filter down based on competition to remove the saturated phrases. The same thing I mentioned about the ugly Christmas sweater theme applies here – I’m sure that there are thousands of search results if you just look for family shirts that say “Merry Christmas” on them, but there are lots of sub-niche opportunities here. Think about families that love video games – lots of potential designs that feature gaming-style graphics. That’s just one example but you can see where I’m going – get specific and you’ll find lower competition ideas.
When it comes to the holiday-products that are really specific to the holiday, like Christmas tree ornaments, you have niche opportunities there as well. Customers like to put ornaments on the tree that reflect their personal or family interests. So while you certainly can offer personalized ornament designs (which I might do myself) and more generic ornaments like “our first home” with the year, you can also find more specific niches with lower competition for this product as well. Bigfoot or unicorn tree ornaments are definitely a thing people will buy, even as gifts. And ornament listings are pretty quick & easy to create since there are fewer variants, so you can get a bunch listed in a pretty short amount of time if you find good design ideas.
One last thing I’m going to mention for this month on the topic of Q4 is your strategy around sales or coupons. I’m not going to go in-depth on that this month, we’ll save that for the October update, but as you are building up your listings for Q4, you should be thinking about when and how you’ll be offering promotions. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the obvious ones, but you can also run your own promotions including coupon codes for email subscribers and social media followers or just a flash sale for a specific day or weekend. You don’t have to run lots of sale events in Q4 – you could choose to only do a real “sale” or coupon event for Black Friday & Cyber Monday if you want to. Honestly in my experience, if you’re offering product that people like to give as a gift, they’ll buy it whether it’s on sale or not. In fact, last year I found that I did not make significantly more sales during weeks when I wasn’t running a promotion in Q4 compared to weeks when I was, if you ignore the Black Friday/Cyber Monday week. But that doesn’t mean running a promotion won’t encourage some extra sales either when done effectively. While you should plan those in advance, the good news is that it doesn’t impact the niches you’re researching now and the listings you’re creating, so you can be thinking about it while you build up your listings and then put your promotion plans into action a bit later. If you’re doing a coupon-code-only promotion like one for email subscribers, it does pay to announce it in advance so people are looking for it. For example, you could post on social media the week before Black Friday and say something like: “If you want access to our biggest sale of the year on Black Friday, sign up for our email list now!” with a link to your subscribe landing page. You can also send an email to your current subscribers with a preview like “look out for an email with subscriber-only Black Friday coupon codes coming soon – discounts up to XXX”. This way you might get some more email subscribers and your existing ones will be on the lookout. You’re likely to get more engagement in the sale vs. only sending the coupon codes out on the day of the event when you let people know in advance.
Also – a side note about email marketing for your Etsy shop. There are lots of email marketing services out there that can manage a subscriber list and help you build automated email campaigns, but not that many that integrate directly with your Etsy shop. Aweber has been around for a while with a direct Etsy integration, and I have it set up for my Etsy shop although I admittedly don’t send emails to my subscriber list as often as I should. But now there is a new option if you are a user of the Alura Etsy research service. Alura actually has several resources for Etsy sellers, some of which are free like their Etsy fee calculator and privacy policy generator. But they recently launched a new feature for email marketing intended to simplify the process by offering templates and automated campaigns as well as a landing page to subscribe. If you already have a paid membership, you have access to the new email feature. I have not gone through how everything works with it yet, I just wanted to share a heads up that if you don’t already have email marketing set up for your Etsy shop and you also use Alura, they now offer that as well. Also just a minor disclaimer: although I am an Alura affiliate, I don’t talk about it a ton on the YouTube channel. This is because Alura’s research features are not my #1 pick for doing keyword research. I don’t have any major problems with Alura, and I don’t think their data is incorrect or anything like that. It’s just the way they present the top-selling listings information and keyword trends that I don’t find quite as helpful compared to my preferred tool, which is Sale Samurai. The most important information for me is search volume and competition, and Sale Samurai makes it super easy to get to that info quickly with their Chrome extension, for a very competitive price. I do really like some of Alura’s resources, I just wanted to explain why I don’t mention them all the time on the YouTube channel. I’m going to check out the email marketing feature and see how that works and will share an update on that in a future episode. Ok, I said I was going to save this topic for next month and then I started talking all about it so we’ll really save more conversation for October.
I hope you all have an awesome Q4 as we go through the Halloween sales season in the next few weeks and then hit the big rush in November & December. Next month we’ll go into more detail on running promotions and we’ll also talk about Q4 shipping concerns and how to both prepare for and handle them.
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. Also a quick reminder if you want to submit a question to be included on an upcoming episode, use the contact me form on the bottom of the homepage on podinsights.net or post your question in a comment on YouTube.
Thanks for reading.