I’m going to start doing something new once per month on the podcast. Rather than focus on one topic for the whole episode, I’m going to discuss a few things that are more current events and updates relevant in the print on demand world. For example, I’ll talk about updates and new features on different print on demand platforms, news from the Etsy marketplace, what types of design niches are trending or are popular at the current time of year, and occasional updates on what is working or not working well for me in my Etsy shop. So stick around for the first monthly update episode.
Etsy News
We actually have a fair amount of Etsy news to talk about in this first monthly update episode. First up let’s talk about the German packaging regulation that took effect on July 1st. Etsy sent emails and put a banner message in your seller account dashboard so at this point it’s likely not news for you. I don’t fully understand the actual VerpackG regulation but what I do know is that in order to ship packages into or within Germany as a seller, you need to be registered in the LUCID package registry. The regulation applies to all packaging that typically results in waste after use, including shipping materials. If you are registered, you need to add your LUCID identification number to your Etsy shop to be compliant.
I will link to the Etsy article about this regulation in the blogpost for this episode on the website, podinsights.net. So what does this mean for you if you sell in Germany? Well means you have to either comply with the regulation, or stop selling in Germany. Your print on demand platform may have a LUCID registry ID that you can use. Printify emailed me indicating they have a LUCID ID number that sellers can use to comply with the requirement, however you can only use their ID number if they are your only print on demand platform. They also added a help article on their site that I will link to that further explains you cannot use the Printify LUCID ID number if you use other print on demand partners in addition to Printify to fulfill orders to German customers. Unfortunately for me, this means I can’t use it because I do use other print providers for my international customers – specifically I use Gelato to handle most of my international orders because they have very low international shipping prices and print providers in 34 countries.
Note: Since I recorded this episode, I found that Printful has the same information available on their site, and Gelato also has a LUCID ID number available for sellers. I may use the Gelato number since I usually have Gelato fulfill international orders.
So until I figure out if I am going to personally get a LUCID registry ID, I have to stop selling to customers located in Germany. If you need to do this as well, the only way you can do this on Etsy is to remove Germany from your shipping profiles. And unfortunately, Etsy doesn’t make this really easy. There is no individual setting you can change to disable your listings for one country or market. Any shipping profile with active listings assigned needs to have Germany removed from it, which means you have to edit them individually. In addition to removing Germany in any profile where it’s specifically listed, you also have to check for the “Everywhere Else” option. Any country that is not listed separately automatically falls under “Everywhere Else” if you have that option in the shipping profile, so you also have to remove that option to ensure listings don’t display in Germany. Lastly, you have to add back any individual countries you want to sell in that would be removed by the “Everywhere Else” option. Yup, it’s not an insignificant amount of work. Whenever Etsy does a seller survey I always mention that we need a better way of controlling which markets our listings display in but that may never happen.
In other Etsy news, there were some updates to the Etsy seller app that just came out. The new features include the ability to see when an order is from a repeat buyer, add photos to your listings, see order details from your messages, purchase and print shipping labels, and manage orders more efficiently. I deleted the Etsy seller app at some point last year because the notifications didn’t seem to work consistently – I’d get a ton of “like” notifications all at once and then not get anything for days. I downloaded it again to see these new features and it does seem to be easier to navigate than I remember. I like the order tab layout and the ability to jump to an order from messages, but time will tell if notifications work better than my last experience. I also found a page on Etsy’s site that lists out some planned future features of the seller app. Spoiler: we’ll have to wait until winter 2023 to access shop settings in the app.
The last Etsy news topic is the Etsy purchase protection program which goes into effect on August 1st. I’m going to go further in-depth on this one next month but wanted to mention it since it’s coming up soon and we’ve all gotten emails about it. The purchase protection program will apply to qualifying orders up to $250 USD, and will provide a refund to the customer for orders where the buyer never received the package or the item arrived damaged for the first instance per calendar year. The refund is provided to the customer without subtracting from your shop funds. It won’t apply to all orders automatically, there are five criteria that the order has to meet. This includes having tracking information uploaded to the order, have an estimated delivery date, be shipped within your stated processing time, be appropriately packaged, and the product has to be appropriately represented in your listing photos and description. A couple of those definitely have some ambiguity, but the first three are pretty straightforward. In next month’s update I will talk through how to make sure you’re meeting those criteria and when the protection plan might apply to us as print on demand sellers. In the scenarios covered by the protection plan, we can usually get a reprint or refund from our print on demand platform but that doesn’t mean there is no benefit for us with this new program, so be sure to check out the monthly update episode for August.
Print Provider News
In print provider news this month, first we have some updates from Printify inlcuding enhancements to the design editor interface. The biggest update for Printify users is that we can now use SVG files in the listing editor. A viewer of the YouTube channel tipped me off to this last month and I finally had time to try a few SVG files and I have to say, this is a bigger deal that I realized at first.
One thing that takes up time in the listing creating process is having to save multiple copies of your design print file in different dimensions for different products. If you sell on the Merch by Amazon program, you’re already used to this and you probably have found some shortcuts to getting your design files resized to meet their requirements for different products. Print on demand platforms are not as strict about your print file dimensions. They have recommended file dimensions and templates but you can upload any size file you want to and then adjust the size in the design editor view. However, you still have to have a file that is close to the necessary size so that the print quality is not affected. You can get away with a few shortcuts – for example, I use the same print files for my t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, canvas tote bags, and sometimes I can even get away with using the same print file on mugs or stickers if it doesn’t need to be adjusted. However, for larger items like posters which require significantly larger print file dimensions, that always means having to save a separate file. In addition, if your design happens to be a little bit smaller in the print area of a t-shirt than you planned, you don’t want to stretch a PNG out to make it larger because that will mean reducing the DPI, affecting the print quality.
SVGs take care of all those issues, because they can be scaled up without any change to the pixel density or quality. If you have one SVG file, you can use it on everything from a tiny 2×2 inch sticker to a t-shirt, sweatshirt, mug, shower curtain, it doesn’t matter! But previously the upload system on Printify didn’t support SVGs, only JPEG and PNG files. Now with the ability to use SVGs to create listings, we can in theory only have to upload a design as a single file to create all our listings. Of course, there are some reasons why you would still have more than one file. For example, a design that is more of a landscape orientation usually needs to be adjusted to fit properly on one side of a mug, so if you plan to sell the same design on mugs, you probably will still need to make some adjustments and save a separate file.
This also means that Canva pro users can take advantage of an export option that eliminates all concerns about Canva’s PNG pixel density. Canva exports transparent PNG files at 93 PPI which some people worry is not good enough to use for printing. As a side note – I did a test of Canva PNG files and really didn’t see any quality issue with using them at a standard print file size at 93 PPI, however I saw a slightly better result by creating a print file that was larger than necessary and then scaling it down in the listing creator to increase the DPI. But anyway, Canva pro allows you to export your designs as SVG files, eliminating concerns about the PPI. So now you can export as an SVG and go straight to Printify without any of those concerns. I know photopea also supports exporting your files in SVG format, and of course any graphic design programs like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Design. However at first glance, I’m actually having trouble finding how to export a file as an SVG from Photoshop. I don’t see that option in my export menu, and a quick search revealed that Adobe moved the option to a legacy menu you have to enable in your preferences at some point, however I don’t even see the option in Photoshop on my Mac to enable the legacy export options. So I have some more research to do to figure out if Photoshop still supports exporting you files in SVG format. In the meantime I may be using Canva to make more of my designs to test out the SVG feature on Printify.
One other enhancement in the Printify design editor view is that they’ve added some alignment guides. This is especially helpful when you have more than one design layer added because the guides help you align them. For example I just added a mug to my shop this week where I had the design file as two layers so I could adjust them on each side and the guides helped me line them up without having to copy and paste the height adjustments. So that’s another nice feature in the updated Printify design editor.
I have one bit of Gelato news for this month as well. I got an email recently from Gelato about some not so great news – price increase on products and shipping effective August 1st. But included in the same email was some pretty interesting news about their paid subscriptions, Gelato+ and Gelato+ Gold. I recently did an episode of the podcast comparing the paid memberships of multiple print on demand platforms and discussed whether I thought they were worth the cost. Gelato’s plans include some nice benefits that I thought would justify the cost for some sellers, but not everyone. However the change to one of the benefits might make these plans more worth it for additional sellers now. The change is that the Gelato+ plan which costs $95 per year if paid annually will now include a reduced shipping cost benefit, which is 30% off shipping rates on your first 49 orders per month, and then 50% off shipping rates for the rest of your orders in the same month after that. So if you have 100 orders, you’ll get 30% off shipping for the first 49 and then 50% off shipping for the next 51. There was no previous shipping discount included in Gelato+ at all, so this is a nice addition. Let’s just use an example to calculate how much it might save you. Let’s say you sell 30 mugs per month. The new US shipping price for mugs starting August 1st is $6.24 so the 30 orders would have a total shipping cost of about $187 with the free account. With the Gelato+ subscription that cost would decrease to $$4.37 per order or $131 total for the month, a reduction of $56. So you will save over $100 in two months and easily recover the cost of the subscription. After that point it’s all free savings and higher profit margins compared to the free account since you’ve already recovered the subscription fee in two months, so this is actually a great deal if you use Gelato to fulfill orders every month. It’s not going to be worth it if you only use Gelato to fulfill a couple orders every month though.
This benefit was also added to Gelato+ Gold, which already came with 3 free months of worldwide shipping in the first year that you sign up. So you will get 3 months of zero shipping cost, and then you’ll start receiving the 30% discount each month on your first 49 orders and 50% discount on shipping after that. The free 3 months doesn’t repeat each year, but the percentage discounts do. So this really helps to offset the much higher annual cost of the Gold plan which is $600 per year. If you use the example we just did with 30 mugs per month, the annual savings in shipping cost would be $672. So even if you only used Gelato to fulfill 30 mugs per month, you’d still be coming out ahead with the Gold plan, it would just take you almost the whole year to get there. However if you are using Gelato as your primary print on demand platform and have more orders than that per month – say 100 orders per month or more, then the savings could be significantly more and make the Gold subscription well worth it. However, all if this is assuming that Gelato’s total price for products factoring in the product and discounted shipping is competitive against other platforms. It’s great that you can get more in savings than you paid for the subscription, but if your total fulfillment cost would still be less with another platform, then of course it’s not worth it as long as the quality is the same.
What’s New With Me
I really don’t have much to offer in terms of what’s new with my shop this month, because I’ve been so busy with my 9-5 job and working on the YouTube channel lately that I still haven’t had a ton of time to dedicate to new listings. I had a better June than April or May, largely because of fathers day. I have a couple dad themed designs that did well and they were carry-overs that were popular last year as well. The same designs also sell well as gifts around the holidays and periodically throughout the year – I assume because of birthdays. It’s great to have some evergreen designs that can sell at any time but also have times of the year when they contribute to higher sales like that, and if you build up a catalog of enough of those across different niches, then you’ll be doing pretty well.
One thing I’ll point out – I guess this could be under Niche updates and ideas but I’ll include it under my updates because I have nothing else for this month – is that I have noticed a trend on some of my evergreen designs that sell better than others or ones that sort of broke into a niche that was already fairly high-competition. I’ll use my best selling dad-themed design as an example. Last year as I was working on designs to prepare for father’s day in late April and I came across a retro 80s/90s themed niche which had some a few different sub-niche opportunities. I had seen a couple other text-based designs that I did not see in this retro themed niche, and it dawned on me, one of the text designs was actually a saying that was popular in the early 90s. So I saw an opportunity to combine the two niches without making a design that was too similar to any other seller’s, and I created a retro-style design using some graphic elements from Vexels (totally could have been from Canva though) and added the phrase to it. It’s been the best selling dad-themed design for me ever since, especially on t-shirts. This was not a particularly low-competition niche, but I was able to notice a gap that hadn’t been filled and create a design that wasn’t very similar to the others in the first couple pages of the search results for relevant search terms. In my experience pretty much all my best selling items fall into a similar scenario – the point being that’s kind of a formula for knowing there are great sales opportunities. I have other designs that I’ve made in lower competition niches but I couldn’t come up with a design that was significantly different from the competition or find an opportunity to make something that nobody else was making. I still created some listings because the relatively low amount of competition made it seem worthwhile, and yet because I didn’t stand out from the competition enough I still haven’t made many sales. So keep an eye out for popular niches where you can do something different than most of the competition and you should have a decent shot at some sales.
Niche Updates & Ideas
It may seem hard to believe but it’s actually time to be adding back to school designs to your shop. In the US, kids go back to school as early as mid-August, but generally it’s late August or early September. A quick check of Google trends shows that in the last five years, search volume for “back to school shirt” peaks between July 28 and August 10th each year, so only couple weeks to go at this point before we’re in that timeframe. This means there’s still some time to get your back to school designs published to make some sales.
There are also a couple back to school promotions to go along with the sales opportunities – I just noticed a back to school coupon Printful is offering where you only need to add one of the qualifying products to your store and you’ll get a $5 coupon for your next manual order and that runs through August 31. Printify is offering a discount on select products from specific print providers starting on August 1st and running through September 15th and several of them have a back to school theme like lunch boxes and backpacks. I have a video review of some of the products that will be included in the promotion coming soon on the YouTube channel so be on the lookout for that. I’ll also link to the pages for both the Printful and Printify promotions in the blogpost for this episode.
Back to school is a good print on demand opportunity because you have niches for multiple ages of kids as well as teachers and there are lots of sub-niche opportunities if you do some research and get creative. For example, a design that simply says “first day of school” is a good place to start your research because it should lead you to find lots of sub-niche opportunities. You could have a single design and make a simple text adjustment for different grade levels, like “first day of kindergarten”, “first day of first grade”, second grade, and so on. You could create these as separate listings or as variants within a single listing for the design. This is also a great way to get several uploads created if you’re in the Merch by Amazon program. There are also many different phrases that offer sub-niche opportunities, for example instead of saying “first day of kindergarten”, there is another niche with the phrase “ready to crush kindergarten” which usually has a theme of dinosaurs or monster trucks. There’s also “leveled up to kindergarten” with a video game theme. Don’t forget about the teachers as well – there are lots of niches and design themes that work well for teachers and these can actually be evergreen designs that sell well throughout the year, but will have a mini-spike around back to school time.
Before you know it it’ll be time to talk about Halloween designs so get those back to school ones out there!
Conclusion
I hope you found some helpful information in the first monthly update because I enjoyed covering a few different topics in one episode. 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 for video guides, selling tips and product reviews.
Thanks for listening.