POD Insights

Jeff here for POD insights, your source for print on demand seller tips, resources and industry news. In this episode, about the different sales channels that exist in the print on demand space. This will be a great discussion for anyone who is considering getting started with print on demand, or even if you already sell in one of the sales channels and want to know more about others. We’re going to compare print on demand marketplaces like Redbubble, Teepublic, and Zazzle with independent seller platforms like Etsy and Amazon, as well as your own website with a print on demand store run by Shopify. If you want to know the key differences between all these then stick around and let’s dive in.

Defining the Sales Channels

The print on demand business model has a lot of potential and can be approached from several different angles. Print on demand opens up opportunities by removing the inventory of finished products from the business model, so when combined with an internet-based storefront to avoid brick and mortar overhead expenses, print on demand has very little barrier to entry remaining. There are business opportunities for selling designs on products as well as business opportunities for printing companies to offer their services to sellers like us, either directly or through platforms like Printify. There is no official definition for the different sales channels that utilize or can utilize print on demand, but I’ve grouped them into three categories.

Print on demand marketplaces – these include sites like Redbubble, Teepublic, Zazzle, and the Amazon Merch on Demand program. These sites have the lowest barrier to entry of all the sales channels because there is zero cost to create an account and sell products. There are no monthly fees and the only overhead would be paid resources for graphics and keyword research. They also take care of order fulfillment and customer service. However, they also control the types of products that are available to sell and their is minimal customization over the branding of your product listings and storefront. You don’t have to worry about shopping traffic, because the site already has thousands or millions of shoppers per month – you just have to worry about standing out from the competition. Selling on these platforms is kind of like selling some products inside an existing store at the shopping mall, and you can only sell the type of products that the store already sells. You are only involved in putting your own designs on the products, and the store pays you a royalty when your product sells but you are otherwise not involved. You can tell your friends, family, and social media follows to go to the store and buy your products, but most of your traffic is going to be customers that were going to that store anyway and they found your product.
Independent seller platforms – these include Etsy, Amazon seller central, eBay, and Walmart. These platforms take a step towards more control over your business. They basically give you a spot in the marketplace, but don’t tell you what you can sell. Of course it’s not quite that simple – all platforms have rules about what you can and cannot sell and how you represent your products, but compared to the print on demand marketplaces, you have much more control. Going back to the same analogy, these platforms are like you renting a storefront in the shopping mall where only your products are sold and the platform is the mall. You have control over the products that you sell, how you price them, discounts or sales, how you display your product, and a little bit of control over the branding of your products and storefront. You’re also responsible for customer service, including answering questions and responding to complaints or issues. However the platform provides existing customer traffic. People already shop there and you can certainly drive people people directly to your store through social media and advertising, but you also have a regular amount of traffic. One important difference here in terms of print on demand is the order fulfillment. With a platform like Etsy, they will process the customer’s payment and put the revenue from the order – minus their fees of course – into your seller account. You’re responsible for making sure the order is fulfilled, and that’s where print on demand platforms like Printify and Printful come in. More on this later – I just wanted to point out that difference from the first category because there is much more involvement in running the business on these independent seller platforms.
Your own website takes you away from the shopping mall analogy completely – the equivalent would be opening your own retail store in a separate location. When you start your own website and online store to sell print on demand products, there is no existing customer traffic – you have to generate it. That’s the biggest difference from the other two categories. There is no parent company driving traffic for you, you need to promote your business across multiple channels to build up a customer base. This is in addition to the things like handling customer service, choosing products and setting pricing, and handling order fulfillment and the accounting. The upside is that you have nearly 100% control over everything. I say nearly because there will always be a couple things that are limited – you need to have payment processing for your store so you will pay fees for that, and your site design and layout may be limited if you use a hosting service that offers pre-made templates. But in general, this category offers the greatest amount of control over all aspects of the business.

Now that we’ve laid the groundwork for the sales channel categories, let’s go into some more detail about each one and my personal recommendations for beginners as well as established sellers.

Print on Demand Marketplaces

I got my start in print on demand in marketplaces that specialize in the print on demand business model. Specifically, I got started in the Merch by Amazon program, which they now call Amazon Merch on Demand, Zazzle, and Redbubble. I’ve also sold my designs on Teepublic and Spreadshirt. These marketplaces have some things in common, and a few small differences. Actually, Redbubble, Teepublic, and Spreadshirt are all very similar in their structure, product selection, and upload process. Amazon Merch and Zazzle have some differences – but also some similarities with the others.

The big similarities are these factors:

They all are free to join and start selling. There is no cost to create your seller account and upload designs to products.
They all handle 100% of the fulfillment and customer service for you. You simply upload designs to products, do your keyword tagging and write descriptions, and set your royalty or commission rates. If customers buy your products, you receive the commission or royalty and that’s it – you receive a monthly payout and it’s that simple.
The upload/listing process is pretty simple. Some are easier or faster than others, but in general, they make it easy for you to upload your designs on products and create listings.
They all have rules about the types of design content that you can upload. They don’t allow you to sell trademarked or copyrighted content, and some also limit content based on the theme as well. Some are more strict than others – Amazon Merch is probably the most strict. They have several rules about the types of designs you can upload beyond prohibiting trademarked and copyrighted content, and they even have words that cannot be used in descriptions. They will also regularly take down content that slipped through the upload process with prohibited content, and breaking these rules can result in your account being suspended or terminated. Redbubble, by comparison, also does not allow trademarked or copyrighted content, however they are a little less strict on content themes and they also don’t seem to police listings as much, although it’s still possible to have listings removed.

Amazon Merch has a couple differences. The major difference is that you have to apply to the program and you may or may not be accepted. I originally applied back in 2020 and was accepted after waiting about 2 weeks. I’ve seen comments from others on YouTube and Reddit about getting denied a couple times before being accepted, so you can try more than once and nobody really knows why Amazon doesn’t accept everyone, but it’s very likely that they want to control the number of sellers in the program to some degree. They also will shut down dormant accounts that don’t have new uploads or sales for long periods of time, presumably for the same reason. The second major difference is that they limit how many active listings you can have, based on your sales performance. It’s called the Tier system and you start out in Tier 25. After 25 sales, you get to Tier 100, then 500, 1000, 2000, and so on. I believe there are Tiers 5000 and 10000 and I know some sellers are in Tier 100k or 200k, but I’m not sure what the actual limit is or how many high-level tiers there are. I personally got to Tier 2000 after about a year in the program, meaning I made at least 2000 sales. That’s actually nothing special, considering I’ve made over 6000 sales in my Etsy shop in the two years since I opened it. This tier system provides some inherent kind of competition against the system, like gamification. I guess it’s incentive to stay engaged and keep trying to improve your design and keyword strategy to make more sales and reach higher tiers. After all, the more listing you have, the greater your chances of making consistent sales. That means you can have ten designs uploaded – and thankfully you can have all the products in the catalog for each design, so you’re not limited to ten literal products, it’s ten designs and you can put each design on all the products that are available. But that’s still pretty limited. Once you make ten sales, at some point, usually within 30 days, you will be up-tiered to Tier 20. A third, smaller difference with Amazon is that they have a smaller catalog of products you can upload to compared to marketplaces like Redbubble and Zazzle. Actually, all the other print on demand marketplaces regularly add new products to their catalog, and Amazon seems to be a lot more slow paced and deliberate when it comes to adding new products to the Merch program. As I mentioned, Amazon is probably also the most strict in terms of their content rules and enforcing those rules.

Redbubble, Teepublic, and Spreadshirt are all pretty similar. Each one has a pretty large selection of products you can upload designs to, a simple upload process, and are very simple in term of starting your account. Redbubble is perhaps the most well known of the three, started in 2006 and based in Australia. The marketplace had a total revenue of over 650 million AUD which is about $440 million in USD. Artist revenue totaled $104 million AUD or about $70 million USD in 2021, spread across 728,000 selling artists. They also reported 9.5 million total unique customers, so that’s about 791,000 unique customers per month – that’s not total site traffic and it does not factor in repeat customers, so that’s a healthy amount of traffic on the marketplace each month. These numbers are from Redbubble’s 2021 financial results report, by the way – Redbubble is publicly traded so they must provide these types of reports. Let’s take a second and focus on the total earnings for artists. They reported about $70 million USD in artist earnings and 728,000 artists. That means the average earnings per artist was $96 for the year, or $8 per month. I think that tells you an important part of the story with these print on demand marketplaces. With the barrier to entry being virtually zero, there is a very high amount of competition. Keep in mind though, out of 728k artist accounts, a percentage of those are making $0 per month because they’ve never uploaded more than a couple designs and that brings the average down. There are also accounts that are part of the brand partner program so they can sell licensed designs for popular brands and those accounts will make a lot more. I personally don’t put a lot of effort into my Redbubble account, I focus a lot more on my Etsy shop. I have 160 designs uploaded and in 2021 I made $113.55. So I guess I was slightly above average, but that’s only an average of $9 per month. I definitely could have improved that by putting more effort into it, so the potential is there.

As I mentioned, Redbubble had about 728k artists in 2021 and 9.5 million unique customers. That’s a ratio of about 13 customers to each artist. So if you’re a seller on Redbubble, thankfully there are more customers buying than there are sellers selling, but that’s a lot of competition. This category will have the highest amount of competition because the barrier to entry is the lowest. Getting started is as simple as creating an account and uploading designs, so lots of people do it. Now the number of active or “engaged” sellers on Redbubble is definitely not 728k because some people open an account and list a few designs and then never log in again, but still, compared to the traffic the site is getting, it’s still a healthy amount of competition. Anyone who’s been selling on Redbubble or Merch by Amazon for at least a few months can tell you that it’s extremely difficult to be early on a trend. These days, as soon as a picture of a famous person wearing a funny t-shirt shows up on Twitter, an hour later there will be at least one full page of search results of that design on t-shirts and you’re already too late, at least for a quickly passing trend.

Teepublic used to be a separate company but Redbubble acquired it in 2018. It still operates as a separate print on demand marketplace with different products and pricing, and a slightly different upload process. I actually find Teepublic the easiest and fastest to upload to. The traffic on Teepublic is not quite at the same level as Redbubble, but I also make one or two sales per month from my Teepublic account and again, I don’t put a lot of effort into it.

Zazzle ha a couple differences as well. The primary difference is the way Zazzle has positioned itself in the space of print on demand marketplaces. The structure is basically the same: a marketplace of independent artists who upload designs to a catalog of products and set royalty rates. However Zazzle has focused on personalized or customizable products as their core business. If you want a mug with a picture of your family on it, you go to Zazzle. They have built a customer interface where the customer can make their own customizations to products before purchasing, so there is no clunky back and forth with individual sellers. If you want a mug with a picture of your family on it, you select the mug, upload your picture, adjust the placement, and buy the mug, simple a that. As a designer, when you are creating your product listings you can add customizable text and image layers to your products or you can lock elements so they can’t be edited by the customer. You can sell designs that have no personalization to them on Zazzle a well, but the site places a big focus on products that can be personalized. They also do a lot more in the stationary space compared to other marketplaces – thing like business cards, wedding invitations, save the dates, thank you cards, etc. Zazzle is privately held so there is less readily available information about their sales revenue and site traffic, but their site claims to offer over 300 million designs contributed by over 900,000 designers, so the amount of competition is a bit higher than Redbubble, although they don’t focus on the same market niche. Zazzle is happy to sell you a non-personalized t-shirt, but they focus their advertising dollars on the personalized products like wedding invitations and photo-gifts.

In terms of overhead costs, the print on demand marketplace category ha the lowest of the three. Technically, you don’t have to pay a dime for anything to sell designs on these site – none of them have paid memberships or fees. However, you might still run into three things that have an expense to them: design software, sources for graphics and niche research. If you are an artist or designer and you create all your own original designs, then you won’t run into expenses for graphics and you likely already have design software that you use. But if you’re like me, meaning, not an artist at all, then at some point you will likely want to improve the quality and variety of your designs by paying for a source of graphics, and you will need software to create and edit your designs. There are free tools out there like Photopea, which is a web-based emulation of Photoshop that offers a good amount of features. There’s also Canva which has a free account but limited functionality compared to software like Photoshop. Kittl is a newer web-based design tool that includes graphics and editing in one platform for a monthly or annual subscription. There are lots of options out there if you don’t already have design software. Niche research is necessary for all of the sales channel categories. Creating a design and hoping people will buy it is not a business strategy – so you need to do some research on what types of design people want to buy. This involves keyword research, and there are free and paid tool to help with that. Amazon Merch has several dedicated tools like Merch Informer and Merch Titans that provide data on keyword search trends from Amazon to help you identify niches with lower competition. There are also tools for Redbubble including BubbleTrends, which I believe still has a free account. Outside of these three things, there is little need to incur any additional overhead expense with the print on demand marketplace category.

So who is this category for? Well I recommend it for a few scenarios:

If you’re interested in selling print on demand products but you’re brand new to everything and you want to get your feet wet in the process of creating designs, researching niches, etc. with minimal investment. It’s very easy to “graduate” from this to one of the other sales channels, and that’s exactly what I did.
If you create print on demand designs for one of the other sales channels and you want to expand where you list your designs for sale (and you have the time). This is why I maintain my Redbubble, Teepublic, Spreadshirt, and Zazzle accounts. I don’t upload to them very often, but it’s another place where I can upload designs for sale and occasionally generate some extra income.
If you’re interested in applying for one of the partner-programs. These platforms offer brand-partnerships where you can apply to be a licensed fan-artist and create designs that feature content that would otherwise be considered copyrighted and not allowed, such as characters from TV shows.

Who do I not recommend it for? It’s hard to say I don’t recommend this category to anyone because you won’t necessarily lose anything but your time by trying them out. But if you have experience in e-commerce and have a business idea for a specific print on demand business or niche and you’re wanting more control over branding and creating a following for your business, then I would recommend going into one of the other two sales channel categories. That’s a good segue to move on and talk about independent seller platforms.

Independent Seller Platforms

Independent seller platforms are a step towards more control over your business compared to the print on demand marketplaces. In this category we have Etsy, Amazon Seller Central, eBay, and Walmart. These are existing online marketplaces just like the first category, but these platforms work differently. Thinking back to the shopping mall analogy, these platforms are like the structure of the mall and you are renting a storefront. Some platforms charge a monthly fee while others, like Etsy, charge per listing. All of them charge a transaction and payment processing fee when you make a sale as well, but it varies by marketplace – more on that in a moment. You will have control over deciding which products to sell, which print providers you want to work with to fulfill orders, pricing, sales and promotions, and you’ll also be responsible for communicating directly with customers. This means the fun and not so fun interactions, like when a customer is not happy with the product and wants to return it even though you don’t accept returns. This is one of the things that comes with having more control over the business, but it’s part of every retail business so there’s no escaping it if you want the benefits of greater control. One thing that is nice about this middle-ground is that some things are still the responsibility of the seller platform. For example, on Etsy they have their own payment processing built-in. Sellers are not part of the actual checkout process or payment transactions. So if the customer has an issue with a charge or not receiving a refund, assuming your order records from that customer are accurate, they need to resolve that through Etsy support, not your shop. So there are still a few things that the platform is responsible for, which won’t be the case if you are running your own website.

These marketplaces have integrations with sites like Etsy so that your customer’s orders will automatically flow through to your account and be sent to a print provider to be printed and drop shipped to your customer. You have to pay for the order fulfillment cost, usually before you actually receive the payout from your sales channel – Etsy in this example. Platforms like Printify and Printful have free accounts that do not require monthly fees and they do not charge any fees on individual orders, but you of course have to pay the fulfillment cost. So this means you are the one handling the accounting for your business – you need to reconcile the incoming revenue with your fulfillment expenses. This is simple to do by setting up a separate business checking account and using either a debit card or credit card to pay for order fulfillment, and most sales channels like Etsy will pay out your order revenue at your desired cadency – weekly, for example, so you will have funds regularly coming into your account to cover the fulfillment expenses. Because you are receiving gross revenue before expenses are taken out, you’re going to have to keep track of expenses for tax purposes. Software like Quickbooks can help simplify the tracking of expenses for you, which adds to your overhead expense but does make it a lot easier at tax time. Basically you want to make sure that you are only paying income tax on your profits, not the gross revenue from your sales, because your profit is going to be a lot less. In general, print on demand profit margins average anywhere from 25 to 35 percent. It varies by product and marketplace, even by niche. Some niches are more specialized and warrant higher prices, such as personalized items. And some niches, such as basic, text-only designs printed on an economy t-shirt, are going to be lower profit margins because there is more competition and no special features to warrant higher prices. If you assume your profit margin averages out to about 30%, you still have to subtract overhead expenses from that, which is actually a good thing for tax purposes. You may end up with a final profit of around 26-27% of sales, depending on how much overhead you have. Overhead will be things like subscriptions to research tools, paid graphics or mockups, shipping supplies if you handle any of that, fees for maintaining your business filings in your state, etc. All of that reduces the amount of income that you have to pay taxes on. This is not necessary when you only sell through the artist/contributor marketplaces, because what you receive as a payment from those marketplaces is all profit since you don’t pay for fulfillment or any significant overhead. There will likely be more overhead expenses to deduct if you sell on your own website, which we’ll get to in a moment.

One of the major appeals of selling on a marketplace like Etsy or through Amazon Seller Central is the customer traffic that they provide. While you certainly should still promote your business through social media and other marketing efforts, the marketplace is providing a steady amount of shopper traffic every month, and not just a small amount. In April through June of 2022, Etsy’s monthly traffic was about 377 million visitors per month, and 58% of that was in the United States. Every month, you have an opportunity to have your products viewed by millions of shoppers, just by listing products and doing some keyword research to give yourself a good chance to match up with what customers are looking for. The same is true for Amazon of course. So with this much traffic already happening, all you need to do is stand out from the competition.

Of course I’m over-simplifying but it was a good segue to talk about competition on these marketplaces. While there is a tad less competition than on the artist/contributor marketplaces, it’s still a lot of competition. The barrier to entry is a little bit higher, because you need to complete a few more steps to get started. I keep using Etsy as the example because that’s where I’m the most experienced so sorry if you’re tired of that but I’m going to keep using it. Starting a shop on Etsy is not what I would call super-difficult in the big scheme of things. But compared to opening a Redbubble account and listing your first product, you would have to say that opening an Etsy shop and listing your first product from Printify or Printful is relatively difficult. I do think that anyone can do it, don’t get me wrong, but you have to open the Etsy shop, which is a multi-step process, create your print on demand account with Printify, Printful, or another company, connect it to your Etsy account, walk through the listing creation process on your print on demand site and finish it in your Etsy shop, set up at least one shipping profile, create mockup photos, and then you’re done with your first listing. There’s a reason why I had to break up my Etsy shop setup video into two parts – because it’s not as simple as opening a Redbubble account. This means not as many people do it, which means slightly less competition. In 2022 Etsy has had approximately 40 million unique customers to about 2 million sellers. That’s a lot more sellers than Redbubble – more than double. However it’s also over 4X as many customers, so the ratio of customers to sellers is better, about 19 to 1. And one thing to remember about Etsy – it’s a platform for handmade and vintage products. That number of sellers and customers includes everything, so the actual ratio of customers to sellers if we were to single-out non-vintage apparel is likely different. But ultimately the point is that these independent seller platforms are not significantly better than artist/contributor marketplaces in terms of competition, although they may be slightly better.

When it comes to the fees they charge, there is a range and some charge monthly fees while others only charge transaction fees. For example, Amazon Seller central has an individual or a Pro seller account. If you make more than 40 sales per month, the Pro account is more appropriate and costs $39.99 per month. The individual account is recommended for under 40 sales per month and costs $0.99 per sale. In addition to the seller fee, Amazon also charges a per-transaction fee which includes payment processing fees. This varies by the product category and can get pretty confusing, but on a $20 sale in the clothing category with free shipping, the fees would be $3.80. Your profit on that sale will be determined by your fulfillment cost of the item of course, but you’ll be losing $3.80 of the sale in addition to the seller fee of $0.99 or $39.99 per month. On Etsy, there is no monthly fee (they do have an Etsy Plus account which has a few benefits and costs $10 per month but it’s not required), they instead charge $0.20 for each product that you list and will charge you $0.20 to relist the product each time it sells. They also charge transaction and payment processing fees, and the total fees you will currently pay on a $20 sale with free shipping would be $2.35 including the $0.20 listing fee. Let’s pretend your cost for fulfillment is $12. The sale through Amazon Seller Central would result in a profit of $4.20 or 21% and that’s not including the seller fee. The sale through Etsy would result in a profit of $5.65 or 28% and there is no additional fee. So if you can make the same number of sales on both Amazon and Etsy, then Etsy would be more profitable in this example. However it’s not quite that simple – Amazon may have more shopping traffic in the niche that you sell in, you may be able to charge higher prices in one marketplace, the products you sell may have different fee rates than my example, etc. so researching the details is important if you are trying to choose one or the other. Of course, you can also sell in both!

Who do I recommend independent seller platforms for?

I’m a little bit biased towards these marketplaces because I have spent a little over two years selling on Etsy. I think they are a great stepping stone if you want to start a “real business” and take a step up from selling on artist/contributor marketplaces to gain more control. I think they provide a great learning opportunity because you don’t have to stress over getting enough traffic to your store while you’re learning about all the other aspects of the business. And I personally like Etsy because you’re only investing $0.20 per listing to build up your store – other than that, you’re not paying expenses until you make sales. Amazon Seller Central is a little more complicated to set up and not as many print on demand platforms have direct integrations. Printful does have an integration and it can be a good supplement if you want to sell in multiple marketplaces.

If you want to run your own business and have greater control but you don’t have experience creating your own website and generating traffic, these marketplaces can allow you to build up your print on demand business knowledge while making sales, and give you time to learn about building your own site if you still want to do that. There are plenty of Etsy sellers and Amazon sellers who start their own site eventually. If you’ve already built up a following on social media for your shop, you can simply direct them to your new website once it’s ready and you will have some traffic right away.

On the flip side, if you are experienced in building websites and marketing for them, then you might want to jump right into building your own print on demand store.

Your own Website

Let me start by saying I’m not an expert in creating your own website to sell print on demand products. I have not sold through my own site, at least not yet. I have some experience starting my own website in general, just not one with a print on demand store. I use WordPress for the podinsights.net site and BlueHost for the hosting. Creating a basic website like mine which is basically just a place to share information is pretty easy. And thankfully, there are also platforms that make it easy for people to create a website that is also an online store.

Shopify is one such platform. They’ve combined all the things you need into one package for a monthly price. Of course you also pay payment processing fees on each sale but it will be less than you pay per transaction on most seller marketplaces like Amazon Seller Central and Etsy. We’ll talk about cost a bit more in a moment. To start your own print on demand store you need four basic things, and I’m generalizing here to keep it simple:

A domain name.
A way to build out the pages of your site.
Hosting for your site content.
Store functionality including payment processing.

As I mentioned, Shopify provides all of these things in one simplified package. First up is the domain name, which generally speaking is going to be the name of your store or brand and the domain, which is .com, .net, etc. Usually .com domain names will cost more than .net or .store or lesser known domains. You need to register your domain and pay annually to keep it registered. You can do this through third party sites or purchase one through Shopify. A Shopify Basic account, which costs $29 per month, includes the other three things you need. It includes an easy to use site builder with templates, hosting and security features for your site, and all the functionality you need to create listings, accept payments, and email customers their order and shipping information. One of the biggest strengths for Shopify is their selection of apps. Shopify apps are integrations made by third parties so you can utilize a service or feature on your site easily. Printify has a Shopify app that allows you to publish listings to your store and receive orders automatically, just like the Etsy integration. There are some differences in features and Printify has several help pages available to cover the features that apply to Shopify. But the point is, you still get to have a seamless experience when creating listings and handling orders even on your own site.

There are several other platforms that provide similar resources for building your site, such as Squarespace. I am using Shopify as the example because it’s become one of the most popular options and has apps or integrations for just about anything that you might need. As I mentioned, the Shopify Basic plan is $29 per month and provides everything that you should need to get started. The Shopify standard plan costs $79 per month and provides a few additional features for a growing business. In addition to the monthly plan cost, you also have payment processing fees as I mentioned earlier. One benefit to running your own site you will pay less in fees per order, which helps to keep your profits higher. However you also have to factor in the monthly cost which marketplaces like Etsy don’t have. For example, on a sale of $20, you will pay only $0.87 using Shopify, assuming you use Shopify Payments and not PayPal. There is an extra fee if you use PayPal payments. On Etsy, a $20 sale is going to incur $2.85 in total fees – that’s a much bigger chunk of your profits. But you also have to factor in the $29 per month fee for Shopify into your total cost each month, and how much it impacts each order will vary with the number of orders you have. If you have 100 orders per month, then the $29 monthly plan cost breaks down to $0.29 per order. So a $20 sale in a month where you had 100 orders will have a total cost of $1.16 when you combine the payment processing fee and that order’s share of the monthly cost, which is still less than the seller fee for the same order on Etsy. The break-even point as far as cost per order if we use our $20 example sale is around 15 orders per month. The 15 orders through Shopify would incur $13.05 in payment processing fees plus the $29 monthly plan fee or $42.05 total cost. 15 sales of $20 on Etsy would have a total fee of $42.75. Once you go less than 15 sales, that’s where Etsy starts to cost less in terms of total cost per order. That’s a pretty low sales volume, so the age-old argument that you can make more profit selling on your own site is looking pretty accurate, at least in terms of the Shopify Basic plan. However, I’m ignoring the cost of registering your domain name in this consideration.

If the startup process does’t scare you away from starting your own site, the only remaining scary thing is the idea of generating all your own traffic. I don’t mean that to sound like it should be scary, it’s just a reality that when you start your own online store, nobody knows about it except for you. You are responsible for getting customer traffic flowing to your site, through things like your social media accounts, search engine listings – both organic and paid ads, Facebook ads, and other marketing efforts. The success of your business depends on your ability to get customers to go to your site and make purchases, and then hopefully repeat purchases. Collecting customer reviews is also very important to keep your momentum going. As we talked about with the other two sales channel categories – those marketplaces already have built-in traffic from shoppers every month. Even if you do zero of your own marketing for your Etsy shop, you have the potential to get your products in front of over 300 million shoppers every month just by doing a good job with your niche research, titles and tags. Again, I’m not trying to say Etsy is better than making your own site – it’s just important to understand the difference. Generating your own traffic is absolutely possible and plenty of people have started successful online stores, but you need to know what you’re getting into when you start out.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve come across many sellers who started their business on Etsy and then moved to their own website. In my opinion, this can be a good way to go because you’re not putting up as much up-front investment in overhead expenses by opening an Etsy shop, but you’re still getting good experience and learning what sells and what doesn’t. You also can build up your customer base and brand awareness through social media during this time, and when you’re ready to launch your own site, you’ve already got followers who you can direct there in addition to ramping up your marketing efforts. Since you’re already comfortable with the print on demand part of the business at that point, the only thing that is new is building and running the site. This can be a little bit less stressful than if it was all brand new to you all at once and you’re trying to build up traffic from scratch.

So who do I recommend this sales channel for? The answer to that question is getting increasingly complex. As I mentioned earlier, if you have experience building websites and are comfortable with starting to generate your own traffic without any brand awareness, then this sales channel can be a good fit. I’m really making it sound worse than it is. I’m not trying to make anything about this sales channel sound negative – there’s nothing negative, there’s only different amounts of work and knowledge required for each sales channel. In my opinion, starting your own site and building it into a successful print on demand store requires the most amount of effort and knowledge of how to do things of all three. But that’s not a bad thing and you might have strengths and knowledge already that will make it easier for you to start your own site. If you have the right mindset going into it, the sky is the limit.

Conclusion

I hope you found this episode helpful if you’re looking to decide which sales channels to participate in. 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. This episode will close out 2022 and we’ll pick up with the next monthly update in January. Thank you to all listeners and subscribers, I really appreciate your support.

Thanks for reading.