January 2023 Print on Demand Update
Jeff here for POD insights, your source for print on demand seller tips, resources and industry news. In this first episode of 2023 we’ve got the January print on demand update. We’ll be covering Etsy news, print provider and POD industry news, we’ll answer some more questions and we’ll also talk about some niche ideas so stick around and let’s get into the first update of the new year.
Etsy News
Let’s get things started with Etsy news. A quick update about 1099-K tax forms for sellers who file a tax return in the US. I will link directly to this article in the blogpost for this episode – check the description of this episode for a link. Etsy shared in a post in the seller community that the government has postponed a new threshold for requiring 1099-K forms to be reported until later in 2023. We originally thought the reduced $600 threshold to apply to the 2022 tax year, meaning if you made over $600 in sales Etsy would be required to report your earnings on a 1099-K to the government, which makes sure that you also report that income on your tax return. But with the change being delayed, Etsy says that the prior threshold of $20,000 in sales and at least 200 transactions will still apply to the 2022 tax year. So for example, if you started your Etsy print on demand store in 2022 and made 100 sales and $2,000 in total revenue, Etsy will not report a 1099-K to the government. However when the reduced $600 threshold goes into effect, Etsy would generate a 1099-K in that example. For the full scoop on that, check out the article in the blogpost.
No other major Etsy news to share this month, but I do want to just mention one thing about adjusting your Etsy listings after Q4. If you haven’t re-adjusted the estimated processing times in your Etsy shipping profiles, it should be safe to do so now but of course, make sure you check with your specific print on demand provider to see if anything is still experiencing delays. Printify makes this easy with their print provider network status page where they list out all print providers and indicate whether they are experiencing production delays. If you primary print providers are still showing delayed production times, then leave your shipping profile estimates for a while longer. But if there are no delays, then it should be safe to adjust your shipping profiles back down to your normal processing times. For me personally, my t-shirt shipping profile was adjusted to 4-8 business days of processing in Q4 and I’ve adjusted it back down to 2-4 business days. Mugs I usually leave at 2-5 business days because occasionally my provider, District Photo on Printify, will go up to 4-5 days. But anyway, this is a good time to scan over your shipping profiles and make any needed adjustments so that you’re not showing extended production or delivery times when it’s not necessary.
It’s a pretty light month on the Etsy news front, but we’ve got a few print provider updates to cover so let’s move on to that segment.
Print Provider & POD Industry News
I’m making a very minor adjustment to the segment about print provider news – I’ll also include print on demand industry news in this segment as well if we ever have any to talk about. For example if there’s a new print technology, or a new research tool, etc. we’ll talk about it in this segment. Alright starting with print provider news for January, we’ve got a few updates to cover.
Let’s start with Gelato. Ever since Gelato rolled out the Gelato+ and Gelato+ Gold subscriptions, they’ve been making adjustments to it. I can’t say I blame them, however looking back at the original pricing and benefits when it first launched, it does seem like almost a “too good to be true” type value at the time. Basically I mean they probably could have started with higher pricing and avoided some of the changes they’ve had to make. I think the price has changed at least twice since it started, and they’ve introduced and then adjusted some benefits like the shipping discount. Well they’ve adjusted the shipping discount again starting in February 2023 – thankfully this time it’s a minor update that won’t significantly devalue the subscription if you already have it. Starting February 1st, 2023, the discounted shipping will only be available for orders fulfilled in a country with domestic production available – meaning they have a production partner located in the same country as the customer. If the order has to be shipped from outside the customer’s country, you won’t receive the discount on the shipping charge. On the website, which I will link to in the blogpost for this episode, they specifically state that the discounted shipping benefit is only available for USA, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Singapore and Japan. That may not sound like a lot of countries but they included Europe without naming specific countries so that does cover quite a few. If you have Gelato+, the discount is 30% off standard shipping on all orders in those countries and if you have Gelato+ Gold, the discount is 30% off standard shipping for the first 49 orders per month and then 50% off for any additional orders each month. So bottom line – the discounts on shipping no longer apply to international shipments. Since most of us are selling primarily in the countries where Gelato has print providers, I don’t think this change significantly reduces the value of the benefit. If you do a large amount of online sales to customers outside of those countries, for example, in India, then that would be a significant decrease in the value of that benefit since you won’t get the discount on shipping for any orders being shipped to India. If you fall into that scenario, you may want to do some analysis of whether Gelato+ still makes sense for you since it has a $139 annual cost.
Next up we have a couple updates for Printify. Let’s start with a minor update if you use print provider District Photo for mugs. Printify sent a notification recently about the print area for 15oz mugs being adjusted for this provider. I use DP for my mugs and I sell a good amount of the 15oz size so I checked a few of my listings and I the print area does look slightly different. It looks like the print area might extend closer to the mug handle on either side than it did before, making it slightly easier to center you design on each side. They just made this change so I haven’t had a chance to receive any samples yet, but it’s a welcome adjustment because previously the alignment on 15oz mugs did seem to be different than on 11oz mugs which was frustrating.
Also this month, Printify announced a new “challenge” for Q1 2023, continuing their recent gamification efforts. In November of last year, they introduced the “Green November Challenge”. Green had nothing to do with being environmentally conscious or sustainable – it was green as in money. The challenge was simple and there was not a lot of “game” to it really. If you opted into the challenge, you received a sales target for November (they repeated it in December as well), based on your best historical November sales. So essentially it was a “beat your personal best” challenge. If you met or exceeded your PB, you received cash awards. To start 2023, Printify has announced the “POD Quest” challenge. This takes the game aspect to a whole new level. I’m actually surprised at how much detail they put into this – there’s a whole backstory, plot, and weekly challenges that could be more engaging than simply aiming to beat your PB in sales for a full month. You really need to check it out for yourself because there’s a lot of detail to the story, but the general idea is that your POD store has been attacked by the Evil Specters of New Year. You have to defeat the specters to restore your profits because they’ve taken control of your products and customers. There will be weekly challenges aimed at helping you build your POD business. Oh, and there are prizes too. The total prize pool is $40,000 and the initial email says they will be giving $5,000 in rewards per week. Upon further inspection of the page on their site about the challenge, it looks like you are entered into the contest by completing the weekly challenge, and then you share the $5,000 available each week with all the weekly winners. There is a lot of information on the site and I will link to it in the blogpost for this episode – just check the description of this episode for a link. You do have to sign up for the challenge or your account will not be included, so be sure to do that if you are interested. There will be eight challenges, so eight weeks, and the first one opened on January 9th. The first challenge is just to publish five new products to your store so that should be an easy one to knock out!
Next up is an update from CustomCat. I just completed and published my second in-depth review and comparison of Digisoft printing available from CustomCat, where I compared some prints to DTG and DTF printing. One thing that’s become clear from the two sets of samples I’ve received: Digisoft printing is consistent across different colored garments and types of products where DTG delivers different results. I showed examples of this in my recent video so be sure to check that out if you are curious about Digisoft – I’ll embed it into the blogpost for this episode or you can go straight to the YouTube channel too. I’ll be talking more about my findings in a future podcast but for now, I’ll just say that I continue to be impressed with Digisoft.
But that’s not the news for this month – the update from CustomCat is that they now are offering a Pro seller account that gets you access to lower pricing. It’s pretty similar to how Printify Premium works – the cost is $30 per month or $300 per year if paid annually. They also are offering a 60-day free trial. If you have not used CustomCat before, check out the link in the description of this episode to sign up for a free account and you can select the Pro account for the free 60-day trial. If you already have a CustomCat account, you can find the plan information in your account settings by going to the Subscription tab. The main benefit of the Pro account is a 20-40% discount on product pricing, which goes straight to your bottom line. Since the cost is the same as Printify Premium, the calculation of whether it is worth it for your business is going to be similar. All you have to do is compare the pricing for a couple of the products that you offer in your shop at relatively low sales volume, for example, 20 orders per month. If the difference in total cost is greater than the subscription cost, then it’s worth it. I will take a closer look at this and I might opt into the 60-day free trial myself and report back next month.
I also have one bit of news regarding the Alura Etsy research tool. Over the last year, Alura has been adding new features with their subscription to better help Etsy sellers have multiple needs fulfilled with one tool. I personally use Sale Samurai as my top choice for keyword research because of how easily I can see search volume and competition information for keywords and tags, and if you’ve watched any of my YouTube videos then you’ve probably either heard me reference Sale Samurai or seen me using it. The only reason I haven’t adopted using Alura for my primary keyword research is that their approach to niche and product research is different – instead of showing search volume and competition data, they focus more on trying to identify best-selling product listings so you can study them and look for opportunities and best practices. They do provide some metrics like the number of views and likes the listings within your search phrase have, etc. but they do not provide estimated search volume. I personally don’t like to use sales volume to identify demand for a niche – that may sound dumb and I get that. But just because someone else made a t-shirt that is selling doesn’t mean I will make sales if I create a similar design. What I think is more important is finding out how much demand there is for the design or even the specific search phrase. I want to know if there is enough demand to support additional sellers and products, not just enough for that one person making sales who already has a lock on page one of the search results. Then I want to compare the demand to competition volume, and I want to do all of that with one or two clicks in a matter of seconds so that I don’t waste time digging into a niche that won’t yield results. Sale Samurai lets me do that efficiently, and in my experience Alura has not. That’s just me though – if your process is different or if you have found success taking the approach of searching for best-selling listings and then digging into the niche, Alura might be a perfect research tool for you. None of this is the actual news I wanted to share about Alura so I don’t know how I got off on this tangent. What I actually want to talk about is the newest features that Alura has added which I do find helpful and I’m planning to make a couple videos about. The first new tool rolled out a few months ago – automated email campaigns for your Etsy shop. As far as I know, aWeber is the only other marketing email tool that has a direct Etsy integration where you set it up to send an email subscription signup to all customers who place an order. If they subscribe to your email list, then you can send them automated and manually-created emails easily using templates. Alura now includes this as a tool in their paid subscriptions as well, and it’s very easy to use from what I have tested so far. You can send scheduled emails to your subscriber list using templates, and you can also set up automated emails for every order such as a branded email request for a review. The most recent feature they’ve added is an AI description writer, which is pretty cool. You input the title of your listing and some keywords, and the tool will generate a description for you. I’ve tested it a little bit and it’s pretty useful if you really don’t enjoy writing descriptions for your products. I’ve only had to make a couple tweaks to the descriptions that it has generated for me so far. As far as I know, only one other Etsy research tool out there currently offers AI-based content assistance, and that is InsightFactory. That’s a whole other conversation because InsightFactory’s tools for finding Etsy trends work differently, so it’s probably time for a comparison video and episode of the podcast about all the tools I’ve tried. But for now, I just wanted to share those new features that Alura offers and that I think they seem to have some value.
Your Questions
Alright moving on to answer some more questions that have come in through the YouTube channel, we’ve got two to cover for this month.
First up, I want to address a comment on the video about personalized order fulfillment processing. This is not really a question but it relates back to earlier questions on this topic and I want to mention this to raise awareness. In the past I’ve gotten questions about how to handle order fulfillment for personalized products with Printify – meaning those that require you to edit the print file before sending to production – because Printify does not offer a way to hold your personalized orders separately from all other orders to prevent them from going into production if you have enabled automatic order submission. I do sell some products that have personalization, and my prior solution for this was simply to leave my order submission on Printify set to manual, meaning every order has to be manually submitted. However in a video a couple months back I explored a user suggestion to alter or remove the Printify SKU numbers from any product that needs to be personalized so that it goes to your “Other Orders” tab on Printify. Because it does not sync with an existing Printify product variant, the order won’t be submitted to production automatically so you can turn on automatic order submission and only manually work the personalized orders from the “Other Orders” tab. If you want to see that process in full, I will link to the video from the blogpost. But another user commented on that video pointing out that I failed to mention one important point about how Printify imports order information, and they were absolutely right that I should have pointed this out in the video as a downside to this method. Printify will import partial orders, meaning if one item matches with a product in your Printify account but another item in the same order does not, Printify will import the order for the matching product only. That’s a good thing most of the time. However, when this happens, Printify does not import any information about the other items in the order at all – not even to your “Other Orders” tab. There simply is no record on Printify of the other products in the order that did not match with a product variant in your account. So if a customer purchases a personalized product along with a non-personalized product, the non-personalized product will sync to your account and go to your regular orders page. The personalized item that does not match to your Printify account will not go anywhere – it will not show up on your “Other Orders” tab at all. If you don’t realize this before the non-personalized product is submitted to production, you will have to manually create a separate order for it. And worst-case, you may not realize this at all and the order is fulfilled – which means you will only catch this when the customer receives one product and messages you asking where the personalized item is. Unfortunately the only way to totally prevent this is for you to watch your orders closely. I personally get an email notification for every Etsy order in my shop. I check that email 3-4 times per day and glance at the order information, then I check Printify to make sure all the orders showed up before I delete the emails. If you use this method for personalized products, it becomes extra-important to do this daily so you don’t miss an order that contains both personalized and non-personalized products. The alternative is to go back to manual order submission for everything and let the personalized products sync to your Printify account – then at least the order information will sync for all products and you just have to edit anything personalized before submitting them. But it also goes back to manually submitting all your orders. So there are benefits and drawbacks to both solutions, but until Printify offers a way to hold orders with personalized products, those are the options we have. I just wanted to call attention to that drawback about orders for both types of products because I should have called that out in the video.
Ok, next topic is a question that recently I received from more than one person on my videos about creating combination listings. I have two videos about creating combination listings with more than one product that still sync to your Printify account – one focused on apparel products and one that uses mugs as an example. I will link to both on the website if you want to check them out. Technically this question doesn’t have to be about a combination listing – it could be on a regular listing for a single product if it’s an apparel item like a t-shirt. The question that’s been coming up is how to offer an additional variation in the same listing when you’ve already got two variations, because Etsy only allows you to add two variations into one listing. For apparel, that would be size and color – once you have those two variations, you cannot add a third. A few people recently have wanted to know if there is a solution for adding a third variation, like if you want to offer different design choices. The answer is yes, you can do this and it involves a similar process as with the combination listings – you will need to manually edit the variations and then copy & paste SKU numbers from Printify in order for orders to sync. Let’s keep an example pretty simple and say that you are selling a t-shirt and you want the customer to choose from three different design styles, and you are offering the shirt in three color choices. You will need to create Printify drafts for each design first – create a separate draft with the same t-shirt color and size options but your different designs. It’s pretty quick after you create the first one because you can just duplicate it and then change the print file. After creating all three of them, you can publish one to Etsy to use for the listing. You’ll need to get the mockup photos separately for each one of course and you’ll need to use some of your listing images to make it clear to the customer they have three design choices. Once that first one is published, on Etsy you will edit the variations section – it will already have variations for color and size. What you will need to do is edit the variation for color – you may have to remove it altogether and then add a “custom” variation because you need to edit the description for each one. You’re going to add three options for each color and include the name of each design with them. For example, Black – Design 1, Black – Design 2, and Black – Design 3”, each as separate options within the Color variation. Do that for all three colors you are offering and then you’re done. That will likely wipe out all the SKU fields so you’ll need to paste in the SKU numbers for everything, but now you will have one option for each color, design, and size variation with a separate SKU number that you can paste in from the Printify drafts that you created. When you publish the listing, customers will see the color and design choice in one drop-down, and the size as a separate drop-down. You just need to make sure it’s very clear to the customer which design they are choosing by naming them something clear and then matching the name of the design to the images in the listing. Doing this allows you to get a third variation into the same listing and just like the combination listings, it’s a bit of work up-front when you are creating the listing. But on the back end, all orders will sync to Printify and won’t need manual handling because you entered the SKUs of all the variants.
The last question for this month is very closely related to the last question so we’ll continue using the same example scenario. This question was asked in a reply to another question on this topic of copying Printify SKUs to get products to sync. The question was: do we have to spend the time copying all the SKU numbers or is there any other way to import orders to Printify for these combination listings and custom variations? The answer is yes, but it will be impacted by the drawback I mentioned earlier regarding the personalized oder submission method. If you want to create a combination listing or one of the custom-variation type listings that we’ve been talking about, copying the SKU numbers from Printify will make sure your orders sync to Printify which saves you time after orders come in. However it requires a good amount of effort at the time that you’re creating the listing to copy all those SKU numbers, especially if you have a combination listing with a lot of product choices. The alternative is to wait for orders to come in and then do manual work to submit the orders to production, but you can sync them to Printify as you go so the products that are selling will start to automatically sync on future orders. Let’s walk through that before I talk about the drawback.
So to do this – you would create your combination listing on Etsy in a similar way as what I’ve showed in my videos, except you would skip the step of copying all the SKU numbers over. You still need to build all the correct variations for product, size and color, but you can use a template listing to save time on that part. You also still would want to create the product drafts on Printify so that you can either get the mockup images or at least reference them for the design placement when you make your mockups – you just don’t need to publish them or use the SKU numbers. Then you publish the listing on Etsy and wait to see what sells. When a product from the listing sells, it will go to your “Other Orders” tab on Printify. From there, you can import the order by selecting the appropriate product variant from your Printify drafts. You can use the option to “automatically import orders with this product variant” during this process. This is something we intentionally avoided for the personalized products because we wanted those to keep going to the “Other Orders” tab, but in this scenario, we have an opportunity for any future orders of this same product variant to import automatically, so it makes sense to check that box. Now there’s one less product variant that you have to manually import. As time goes on, the idea is that you’ve only spent time manually importing orders for the products that sell and you’ve set up the automation for future orders, and anything that does not sell, you didn’t spend the time on. Sounds like a great solution….but now let’s go back to the drawback. As I mentioned when we talked about the personalized products, Printify imports partial orders and if there is another product in the same order that doesn’t match up with a variant in your Printify account, the order info for that item is not imported at all. So if you have a listing where some products have been ordered and you’ve synced them to Printify but other variants in the same listing have not been synced yet, that creates the same scenario. A customer could buy one variant that you have synced with Printify and another that you have not in the same order. Printify will import the synced product and completely ignore the one that is not synced, so you will have to catch that and update the order before it gets submitted, or submit a separate manual order for the product that didn’t sync. So this method saves you time up front and in theory saves you from spending as much time on products that may not sell, however on the back end you could run into some issues until all product variants have synced with Printify. Because of that, I personally prefer to do more work up front and worry less about my orders – but the choice is yours.
If you would like to ask a question to be considered for an upcoming podcast, feel free to post it on any video on the YouTube channel or send me a direct message through the website podinsights.net, there is a link in the description of this episode and at the bottom of the homepage there is a form to email me.
Niche Ideas & Seasonal Trends
Time to talk about some niche ideas and seasonal trends for January. After the rush of Q4, it can feel like a slow time in your print on demand shop. The Lunar New Year starts on January 22nd so it’s a bit late for new designs with that theme, but there are some more holidays that will sneak up on you over the next three months if you don’t keep an eye on the calendar. Since we normally want to put out new designs at least a month in advance of a holiday, now is the time to get your Valentine’s Day designs published. If you’re an Etsy seller and your listing renewal is set to manual, now is also the time to check your expired listings for any Valentine’s Day themed designs that expired since last year and decide if you want to renew them for this year. Before you know it, we’ll be talking about St. Patricks day too, which is on March 17th. There are also some USA “national something day” type holidays in February and March that can be good print on demand opportunities as well, such as national pizza day on February 9th, national drink wine day on February 17th, and international women’s day on March 8th. If you need a resource to help keep track of all these days, many print on demand platforms provide a calendar or file you can download to help with your planning. I will link to one that CustomCat provides in the blogpost for this episode if you need one.
As I’m planning the holidays or events that I want to create designs for, one thing I like to do is check google trends for the approximate timing that we can expect an increase in search volume. All you need to do is add a product name to the phrase to get appropriate trend results. For example, if you go to google trends and enter “international women’s day shirt” and then expand the timeframe to the last five years, you will see the search volume trends going back five years. You should see a spike in search volume around the holiday each year, and you can trace the line to see the timing of when the volume starts to increase. That is the timing for when you want to have designs published, so back up from there to schedule out your design work.
I also wanted to mention sort of a category of designs that you can still be working on as well, that is not holiday related. This type of design theme is also great for any Amazon Merch sellers out there because it can help you fill up a lot of your open product listings. The category of designs I’m talking about is repeatable designs that have one base graphic and you simply change the text to create different designs. There are a lot of possibilities with this type of design – many niches have opportunities to create them. Gaming is a good example that has a lot of opportunities. Think about a gaming-themed design. Maybe one that features retro 80s style graphics, like the 8-bit pixelated look and retro colors. It could have a game controller in the graphic or something like that – there are many designs like this available through resources like Vexels or Creative Fabrica, or you can create one from scratch. So you have the base design, now you add some text in locations that are easy to edit, like above and below or curved around the graphic if it’s circular. You can be as creative as you want with text placement and style, but you’re going to change the text to create several variations of this design so it should be easy to edit and move around. An example of a phrase that you would use would be “Leveled up to Dad – 2023”. You export that design, then you change dad to “mom”, and “brother”, “sister”, “uncle”, etc. until you’re out of ideas. All of those designs have slight variations in the keywords you will use and all will have slightly different levels of demand, but you just created several new designs very quickly. These are great designs for family members when someone is having a baby, because each person in the family “leveled up” and has a new title, and adding the year makes it specific. Sellers will start making these designs for the new year in November and December, but January is not too late because they can sell throughout most of the year.
Anything that you can associate with the year could be an opportunity as well, they may not all be repeatable designs. For example, retirement is another good one associated with the year – you can create different design variations having to do with retiring in 2023. The further into the year we get, the less opportunity will be remaining for designs that are year-based, but there is still going to be the back to school time in the summer where you can create your “first year of school 2023” type designs so always keep the year in mind if you are looking for design ideas. If I’m having a hard time finding new niches in my research, I will go back to the repeatable designs or the year-based designs to get some new things published while I’m still looking for new specific niches with good opportunities. As I mentioned, these can also be great designs to fill up a bunch of open spots if you’re an Amazon Merch seller in a higher tier and you can also get a lot uploaded to Redbubble or any other POD marketplace relatively quickly.
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 listening.