I can’t believe it but it’s already mid-February, and a lot has already changed this year in the POD world. We’ve got print provider updates from CustomCat, Printful, and Printify, an Etsy update about responding to messages, and some more questions to answer so let’s dive into the February print on demand update.
Etsy News
Let’s get started with Etsy news and I have a few updates for this month. I will link to the Etsy seller articles for these topics in the blogpost for this episode as always so check this episode description for a link. First, Etsy made some enhancements to search features in January. They did not make changes to the way search works – meaning the order of search results or search ranking criteria. These are features they’ve added to search results for customers and you can see them for yourself by running a quick search. The first feature is an add to cart button that appears right on the listing in search results. However right now it only appears for products that don’t have multiple variations, so it’s not appearing for things like t-shirts that have different color and size options. If you sell anything where there’s only one variation, you should see the add to cart button in search results. Etsy says that this has helped conversion rates in some testing that they’ve done. The second feature is a sale countdown display in the search results. If your listing is on sale and there is under 48 hours left on the sale, it will display the time left in search results. Etsy showed that countdown on the listing page previously and now it’s showing on the search results which I think is a good thing. It’s intended to help trigger purchases when customers see that a sale is ending. The next feature is the estimated delivery date, which Etsy says will also now display on search results when the shipping profile includes all the necessary detail to provide an estimated delivery date. I think Etsy now requires all that information in our shipping profiles so there shouldn’t be many listings that don’t have this information at this point, but I did not see the estimated delivery date in search results when I checked recently. However it’s possible that Etsy is phasing-in these features as well so maybe it just wasn’t live when I looked. The last thing they added to search recently is a filter option for the star-seller badge which will allow customers to filter results to show only star-seller shops. This does not change search rankings, but it will filter out shops that don’t have a star seller badge currently. I find this one a little annoying because it’s a step towards Etsy promoting star seller shops over everyone else. I personally have missed the requirements a few times because of message response rate – not because I consistently respond late to messages, but because I don’t get that many messages from customers. When you don’t get a lot of messages from customers, you have less buffer to respond late to any of them because each one impacts your average more than if you had a large number. A couple times I missed the goal because I responded over 24hrs later to like two messages – and they were not messages from customers who had problems with their order, they were messages from someone who wanted to know if I could alter a design for them. Sometimes I see a message like that, which is not urgent, and I forget to reply the same day. And if you don’t have a lot of other messages during that scoring period, you can miss the goal for message response time like I did. And then you’re stuck for a month of not having the star seller badge. However, my second bit of Etsy news for this month is going to help me avoid this problem going forward, and maybe you too.
I don’t know how this one slipped under the radar – at least for me. I don’t recall seeing an email or shop dashboard message about it, but it’s possible I missed one. Last year Etsy rolled out automatic replies for your shop messages, with settings so that your auto replies are only sent outside of your normal hours. You can set your own customized business hours and then have a message sent automatically when outside of those hours. And the best part is that the auto-reply counts towards the star-seller requirement for response time. I personally consider my regular hours to be Monday to Friday from 8am to 7pm. Generally speaking I do respond to customer messages on the weekend, especially if it’s a customer who has a problem with their order. But at the same time, I don’t want my customers to think that Sunday is a “normal” day for me to respond right away. Especially because sometimes I might take a weekend trip or something like that, and I don’t want the standard to be that I’m available to respond quickly 24/7 just because it comes to my email. I don’t think that’s a reasonable standard for anyone, even if Etsy is what you do full-time. Everyone deserves some time each week to not be expected to respond at a moment’s notice, and I think most customers will understand that. To set up auto-replies, all you have to do is go to your messages page in your seller dashboard, and in the top right corner there’s a grey button that says auto-reply. Click on that and then select “manage weekly auto-replies”. In a pop-up window you will be able to set your normal business hours by selecting individual days of the week and the hours for each day, and then enter your auto-reply message which will only be sent outside of those hours. I would suggest being extra-polite in your message and don’t just write one sentence. This is the same as everything I talked about back in the episode about customer service – be more friendly and polite than you need to be so nobody can interpret your message as rude or dismissive. Also, as I mentioned I personally do still look at my messages on weekends especially if I see that it’s a customer who has a problem with their order. So in my auto-reply, I say “you’ve reached me outside my normal hours however I may still check messages periodically. If I can’t get back to you right away, I’ll reply as soon as possible during normal hours”. The one thing I don’t want to happen is for a customer who received a damaged product or bad print to immediately go open a case with Etsy support because my auto-reply says I won’t respond for a long time, so I want to make it sound like I might still get back to them quickly. I think this is a very helpful feature especially for weekends because now I don’t worry about responding to non-urgent messages if I’m away for the weekend. The auto-reply will count towards star-seller status and then I can reply when I’m back in town. If you didn’t know about this feature either, I hope you find it helpful. If you did know about it, good for you because I missed it!
Print Provider & Industry News
Ok moving on to print provider & industry news. Let’s start with an update from Printful and their embroidery products. Printful has had very nice quality embroidery for quite a while. When I started my print on demand business in 2020, I read and listened to several sources of information about which platforms to use and comments almost always mentioned the embroidery quality from Printful. While I can’t say that I think Printful’s core products are very competitively priced ($30 for a Gildan hoodie with shipping!) I can say that in my experience their embroider quality is very good. I still sell some products including baseball caps and winter hats with embroidery from Printful. Thankfully, embroidered products can support higher prices than printed products generally, so Printful’s mostly higher pricing compared to other platforms like Printify is not as much of a disadvantage if you’re making embroidery designs. The update from Printify this month is that they now support full-color embroidery. This means not having to select from limited thread colors for your embroidery design. Instead, the actual colors of your design will be translated into the thread colors, allowing for more accurate reproduction of designs and fewer limitations. Of course, there are still some limitations. At first, Printful is only offering full-color embroidery on two products – classic dad hats which are a baseball cap, and the Bella canvas 3001 unisex t-shirt. They do plan to offer it on more products in the future though. There is an additional $3.50 charge to use full color embroidery, and that’s not a one-time charge, it applies to every order. So you’ll want to make sure that it’s really worth it to use for a product because you’ll have to price the item higher. Printful also says they cannot reproduce neon or metallic colors, but flat colors and even gradients can be reproduced with a huge range of variation. This is an intersection option if you offer embroidery products in your print on demand shop from Printful
Moving on, a quick update from CustomCat. Normally I don’t mention every new product that I come across because platforms like Printify add new products frequently, but in this case I wanted to mention that CustomCat now offers canvas tote bags. The pricing is pretty competitive if you have the new CustomCat Pro subscription. Lightweight canvas tote bags can be good sellers because they have a good sized print area and can be competitively priced compared to heavier-duty bags like AOP totes. The new ones from CustomCat look very comparable to the ones on Printify available from Monster Digital. The pricing is $9.08 on the free plan but that goes down to $6.36 if you have CustomCat Pro which costs the same as Printify Premium: $29 per month or $300 per year if paid annually. So if you use CustomCat or signed up for the free trial of CustomCat Pro, you may want to check out the tote bags. They’re not quite as low in price as the option from Monster Digital on Printify if you have Printify Premium, which cost $5.69, but they’re pretty close.
Speaking of Printify, I have a few updates there as well. First, something we all just love receiving, there was a notification recently of a price increase for several print providers effective February 23, 2023. The price changes include products and shipping and they included two spreadsheets in the email listing everything out. There are a lot of print providers and products on the list so I won’t cover everything here, but I will link to the resources in the blogpost for the episode, just check the episode description for a link.
Products that have the highest price increases look to be from provider Print Pigeons and include framed posters, and laminate squares. The AOP t-shirt from MWW on Demand also has a significant price increase. But for all the details be sure to check the listing and adjust your prices if needed.
Another update from Printify that I wanted to point out this month is that they’ve made several changes to the design editor features and tools over the last few months. Of course a major improvement was the addition of a pattern creation option and I covered that in a video last year when it was added. But there have been some other smaller updates and Printify actually has a page on their site that lists out all the improvements they’ve made. They now have some more helpful guides that appear when you are positioning and sizing your print files, which can be especially helpful when you have multiple graphics that you want to align in the print area. They also now support more layers for each product design. All products support up to ten layers now instead of five, and sticker sheets support up to 20 layers. You can also now select multiple layers or graphics by holding shift and then dragging your curser, which will allow you to move and resize multiple layers at the same time if needed. They’ve also added some more fonts to their built-in text layer feature, specifically 32 more fonts have been added. It’s still not a massive selection, but more is always welcome.
Your Questions
Time to answer some more questions that I’ve received and we have two to talk about this month.
- The first question is about digital and physical products when you want to offer both. Now I haven’t made a lot of content about Digital products for Etsy. Ok, that’s a lie, I’ve made zero content about selling digital products on Etsy. But I have done it before and it can be a great opportunity if you make digital files that people want to buy – like printable document templates or even graphics for use in someone’s business. You may have seen sellers on Etsy offering size charts and mockups for your print on demand shop – those are digital products too. However if you don’t create 100% of the file that you are going to sell yourself, you need to be careful about commercial use rights with digital products. Many sources of commercial graphics don’t allow you to resell their assets in digital format and the rights are specific for use on physical products. Others may limit the specific type of digital end-product that you can use them for. For example, Kittl, a graphic design tool and source of commercial graphics that I enjoy using, indicates in their licensing agreement that you can use their graphics to make and sell a rasterized (meaning no separate layers like a Photoshop PSD) digital file that is an end-product. End product means that it’s not intended for creative use – it’s being sold in its final state. For example, I could create a design that is a template for pages of a journal or personal planner using Kittl. I could then sell those templates in a digital format on Etsy like a PNG or JPG file to customers who print out the template on their own paper and then use it as a journal or planner. That would be an end-product because the customer is using it in the form that I’m selling it. But now if I just took some graphics from Kittl’s catalog and made a basic personal planner layout, then I sold it as a digital file targeted towards other sellers as a template they could use to make their own designs, that would not be acceptable use because I’m selling it with the intent of someone else further altering it and then reselling it – that’s not an end product. Of course if you use graphic design software and make designs completely from scratch, then you won’t have these concerns. But if you use any sources of pre-made commercial graphics, you need to be careful about how you use and sell them. None of this was about the question – I don’t know why I went on about licensing rights like that but anyway, the question was actually about whether you can list a digital and physical product in the same Etsy listing. Technically, I think you could do it, but it would create some challenges for you and I’m pretty sure Etsy doesn’t want us doing this. In each Etsy listing, there is one setting where you can select either digital or physical product type. You will only have the auto-download feature where you upload the file and the customer automatically receives it after checkout if you select the digital product type. This makes the customer service part of selling digital products super streamlined and very simple. When you make a sale, you don’t have to do a thing because Etsy will automatically provide the download link to the customer after they pay, and you never have to do a thing unless you need to change the file uploaded to the listing. It’s truly passive income because you don’t do anything to fulfill the orders once you’ve created the listing. You can only select one product type per listing, so it’s either digital or physical. Now if you selected either one and wanted to do some custom variations to sell the other type of product in the same listing…could you do it? I think you technically can. But it will definitely create some headaches for you on the order fulfillment side of things. For example, if your product type is set to physical, there will be no auto-download of the digital product, although you absolutely could add a custom variation to the listing to indicate “digital file only”. This means you have to manually fulfill orders for the digital product, by sending a download link to the customer. You also have to store the files somewhere since they’re not uploaded to Etsy, but you could use a service like Dropbox for that I suppose. Another issue would be that with orders for what Etsy believes are physical products, you’ll be expected to add a tracking number when you mark the order complete. If you don’t upload a tracking number, that’s a red flag for Etsy and might subject your shop to a reserve on your seller account funds. So the bottom line is that it might technically be possible to offer both products in one listing, but I personally think it will create more problems than it solves. I would recommend creating separate listings for the physical and Digital products if you want to sell both and then link to them in the listing descriptions and include a message in one of your mockup images to make sure customers are aware you offer the design as both a digital download and on printed products.
- Our second question was submitted on my recent video about financial accounts for print on demand sellers. In the video I explained the benefits of setting up business banking accounts, specifically business checking and business credit cards, and I recommended a few different accounts that I think are a good fit for print on demand sellers. The question is when is the right time to establish these accounts and switch over from using personal accounts. Oh boy, this is a tough question. Well let me get the one easy answer out of the way: if you’re approaching your print on demand business with a “long haul” approach right from the start, meaning you’re of the mindset that you’re doing it no matter what and you’re doing whatever you need to do to find success, regardless of the sales channel, then go ahead and get your business accounts and register your business right away. Of course not everyone falls into that scenario, and it’s much harder for me to answer if you are testing the waters or not sure if you’re going to really commit to your print on demand business for the long-haul. At the same time, I totally get it. When I started my Etsy shop in 2020, a month into it I had no idea that I’d still be doing this over two and a half years later. The best I can do is tell you when I decided to do it and hopefully that helps someone. About two months into opening my Etsy shop I found a couple niches that worked for me and I made about a hundred sales over 4 weeks. That small taste of success was all I needed to decide I wanted to see how far I could go, so I registered as a sole proprietor with my state and also registered a trade name for my business with the state. The next thing I did was get a business checking account and a business credit card to start separating the business expenses and revenue from my personal accounts. So for me, it was about two and a half months into starting my Etsy print on demand shop that I switched from personal accounts to business accounts. But I may have waited longer if I didn’t come across some niches that I was able to make sales within that timeframe. Worst-case scenario would be that you open your business accounts and then need to close them if you decide not to continue your business. But that wouldn’t be too much trouble with the accounts that I recommended – both the BlueVine and AMEX checking accounts don’t have fees or minimums and it’s very easy to transfer your money out. I haven’t cancelled a business credit card but I would assume it’s about the same as cancelling a personal one, which means you likely have to call them. Assuming you’ve decided that you’re going to be sticking with your print on demand business for at least the mid-term of a couple years or more, in my opinion it’s a good idea and move forward with business accounts so you can start to keep everything separated.
Niche Ideas & Seasonal Trends
Alright our last topic for the monthly update is some niche ideas and seasonal trends. Of course we have to talk about St. Patrick’s day because we’re starting to peak in search volume now. St Patrick’s day is on March 17th this year and typically the search volume for phrases like “St Patrick’s Day Shirt” peak in the first week of March according to Google trends. This means now is the time to make sure your St Patricks Day designs are published so they have a chance to be seen during the last week of February and first week of March when the highest search volume is happening. Just a couple small pieces of advice for St Patrick’s Day designs – don’t forget to niche down and expand the product types that you put your designs on. For example, your classic designs that simply say “Happy St Patrick’s Day” or something general like that are of course going to be very saturated with competition. So do some research on St Patrick’s Day designs that also incorporate other niches – say for example St Patrick’s Day designs for teachers or nurses or something like that. That’s not really sub-niching, that’s more cross-niching but still, you get the idea. The other thing is to consider additional product types that are a good fit for the holiday. For example consider putting a design that is selling on a pint glass or beer stein to sell alongside your apparel items.
Of course before you know it it’s going to be time to get your Mother’s Day designs published as well, because in the US Mother’s Day is in May and the shopping volume really picks up in April. And Mother’s Day has some great sales opportunities for a range of products like mugs, tote bags, accessories, and of course apparel, and there are dozens of sub-niches to research. One thing that’s always popular is to update your year-based designs. These tend to be pretty saturated inches but they’re super easy to make so I usually throw a t-shirt and mug out there anyway. Specifically I’m talking about the designs that say something like “Mom, est. 2023”. They’re a perfect give for new and expecting moms to commemorate the year of their first born. You can also niche down and go specific as well. There are still lower-competition mom-related niches out there to be found. For example, pet mom shirts are also popular around Mother’s Day, with specific breeds still having some lower competition niches available. So instead of making a “Dog Mom” design, make several that name specific dog breeds. For example, “Rottie Mama Shirt” has an estimated search volume on Etsy around 200 per month, and only about 1,300 competition. That volume is likely to increase closer to Mother’s Day as well, and you could easily alter your design by changing the name of the breed to create multiple. That’s also a great design to offer on a mug as well as a t-shirt and sweatshirt. I might do that one myself because I think there’s some good potential and a lot of options to create.
There are a few other design themes based on specific dates or evens in late winter and early spring, but you also want to think about product types as well. If you took a break from publishing designs on warm-weather products, now is the time to get back to publishing those as well. For example if you do any AOP products like swimwear, or maybe crop t-shirts, or beach towels, anything like that which you might not publish a lot of in colder months, you can start turning your attention back to those if you don’t have higher priorities at the moment. Or at the very least, keep these warmer-weather products in mind as you’re doing your general niche research.
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.
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