Jeff here for POD Insights, your source for print on demand resources, tips, and industry news. In this episode we’ve got the June 2023 print on demand update, including some great updates from Printify and Gelato, as well as another vague update from Etsy and more questions from YouTube answered so stick around and let’s dive into the June 2023 print on demand update.
Etsy News
While there hasn’t been any additional information posted by Etsy about their mention of international pricing settings in an update posted back in March, they have posted another article about the updated listing creation workflow. I will link to the article in the blogpost for this episode so be sure to check the episode description for a link or just head over to podinsights.net. The update was posted on June 6th and it again states that the listing workflow has been updated – but this time at the bottom they list a few different things under the “coming soon” section. Instead of mentioning international pricing, they mention “custom shipping profiles”, and “the ability to preview shipping prices”.
I’m guessing that custom shipping profiles is just a reference to something you could already do in the old listing creation workflow and just hadn’t been implemented in the new workflow yet. In the old workflow, the shipping section allowed you to select an existing shipping profile or enter custom shipping settings just for that listing. In the new workflow, so far there has only been the option to add an existing shipping profile so I believe the forthcoming update is just to add that custom shipping information back. I’m not exactly sure what the ability to preview shipping prices means, as that sounds like a new feature we did not have before. It may just mean that the shipping prices from the profile you select will display in the workflow rather than requiring you to edit the profile in order to see the prices, but we’ll see when that update is live.
If you missed the Etsy Up event in May, check out the video of the sessions. There was some interesting conversation about Etsy SEO and details about best practices for both Etsy search and Google search ranking. I will link to that segment of the Etsy Up talks in the blogpost for this episode. While there was nothing revolutionary that I heard in the discussion, there were some great reminders and if you’re newer to selling on Etsy or haven’t taken the time to fully understand how Etsy search ranking works, I would suggest giving it a listen.
Print Provider & Industry News
Moving on to print provider news for May, we have a few updates to cover from Printify and Gelato.
Printify has released a small, but awesome update to their product mockups during the listing creation workflow. When you’re editing the design of a product and click on the “preview” to see the mockups, you can now add your own background to the flat mockups for apparel! It’s not available for all products yet, but I can see it for the Bella Canvas 3001 t-shirt. For the flat mockups that usually have a white background, you can upload your own image and it will be placed behind the flat mockup for each color option. So if you previously were downloading those and adding a background manually, you can now save a bunch of time and do that right on Printify before publishing the listing. It’s about time somebody added this ability to make the default mockups more usable. Of course, I still recommend adding at least a couple of high quality mockups of your own to your listings, especially one that can be used as the primary thumbnail. But I’m still excited for this because it can help you with the color option mockups and I also love that you upload your own image instead of a pre-made one, because it means you can add your shop logo in the corner as well.
A second update from Printify is that they are starting to offer custom package inserts for one print provider with plans to add additional ones, and they are going to be free until September. Starting now, you can add custom branded inserts on apparel orders from Print Provider Dimona Tee, and they will be free until September 1st. The next print providers to offer custom inserts will be Monster Digital and Swift POD, which I’m excited for as I use both of them. The inserts can be fully customized to offer a branded message, request for a review, a coupon code, or anything you’d like to include for your customers. You can add your custom insert design by going to your Store Settings page in your Printify account, and then Branding section – there you can design the insert and enable it. One thing I should point out is that I haven’t found any mention of what the cost will be after the free period ends, so if you do enable them be sure to set a reminder for yourself to check on September 1st. If the cost is too high to justify continuing with them, you can disable them from the same page in your Store Settings. I will link to the article Printify posted in the blogpost for more details.
Alright we also have a couple of updates from Gelato to cover this month. I’ve received several email updates from Gelato in the recent weeks, most of them just small updates but all of it has been positive things. First, Gelato introduced quantity discounts for all products except stationary and business cards. The best part about this is that it’s available to all account tiers, including the free account, so you don’t have to pay for a premium subscription to get quantity discounts on your orders. Also great is the fact that quantity discounts start very low, just 2 products of the safe type within a single order will get you a 5% discount, and 3 or more will get you a 10% discount. This means you can enjoy a higher profit margin on your orders when selling multiples of the same product. If you want to pass some of the savings along to your customers, you can offer a quantity-based coupon code in your store, or you can reduce your shipping price for the additional items if you don’t do free shipping. Of course you can simply retain the savings, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for doing that because profit margins are getting tight on lots of products with all the price and shipping increases over the last couple of years.
The next update from Gelato is more good news – starting May 30th, Gelato added automatic stock status updates for apparel to their integration with Etsy, Shopify, and Woocommerce. This means that Gelato will now automatically update the stock status of apparel product variants in your store, so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of stock updates or deal with orders for out of stock items. Now there is one thing to be aware of – you can also set the selling region that your stock status is based in. Since Gelato has dozens of print providers across the globe, you’ll want to set your stock status region to the one where you get the most sales because that will control the stock status for your listings that display in all countries, depending on your shipping profiles. For example, if you have a t-shirt listing with a shipping profile that has shipping destinations to 10 countries but you have selected the US as your stock status region, Gelato is going to update that listing based on stock availability to US print providers. That means a customer in another country could purchase a variant that is out of stock in their country but it was available in the listing because it’s in-stock in the US. There’s really no way around this because you can only select one stock status region for Gelato to use when updating your listings, so even if you create separate listings for different countries with dedicated shipping profiles, Gelato is still going to update the stock status of all the listings based on the availability in your designated region. So that could be a bit of a challenge for sellers who are active in multiple countries, but the good news is that because Gelato has so many print providers, the chance of of a product being completely out of stock with all their print providers is fairly low, except maybe during the high volume time in the fourth quarter.
That’s it for print provider news this month, let’s move on to a couple of questions from the YouTube channel.
Your Questions
This month we’ve got two questions to answer, one with a fairly simple answer and one with a not so simple answer. Let’s consider the tough one first.
1. In my recent video about international selling options with Printify, I mentioned that one of the options helps to prevent your customers from paying VAT on the order when it’s not necessary. The question was: If you want to keep your Etsy listings simplified and not duplicate listings, what can you do about VAT for international customers? Unfortunately there is not a clean and simple answer, as is usually the case with any question about taxes. When a customer in a country subject to VAT or value-added-tax purchases a product that is being shipped from outside the country, they have to pay value added tax. About 160 countries currently have a VAT system, many of which are in the EU. Similarly, when you, as the seller, pay for the products to be produced in another country where you are not a registered business with a resale exemption, you also are charged VAT. If you sell print on demand products in many countries, this often creates a “double tax” scenario where both you and the customer are paying VAT for the same order. We’re focusing on the customer side of things with this question, but on your end, the only way to avoid being charged VAT is to be a registered business with a resale exemption in the country in question, similar to how you need to file resale certificates for states in the US in order to avoid paying sales tax for order fulfillment.
But now back to the customer – if you focus in on the reason why the customer is being charged VAT, it will lead you to the potential options that you have. The customer is being charged VAT because they are buying something that is being shipped from outside their country. The mechanism that tells Etsy the product is being shipped from outside the customer’s country is the country of origin stated in your shipping profile. For example, if I use a print provider in the US for my mugs and my mug shipping profile lists the US as the country of origin, but I also offer my mugs for sale in the UK through the same shipping profile, when a customer from the UK places an order it looks to Etsy like the customer in the UK is buying a mug that will be shipped from the US. This is going to trigger a VAT charge on the order. This will happen even if you know that you’re going to use a different print provider for this customer’s order and it will ship from a domestic location for the customer. So in that example, the customer should not have been required to pay VAT, but Etsy can only go by what is in your shipping profile. And unfortunately, you can only indicate one country of origin in your shipping profiles. You cannot have a different country of origin based on where the customer is located.
So what do you do? Well unfortunately the only way to prevent the customer from paying VAT when their order is going to be fulfilled domestically is to make sure your shipping profile has the country of origin that matches the customer. And the only way to do that for multiple countries is to create separate listings with different shipping profiles for each country. That may not be super time consuming if you only sell in two countries, but if you sell in three or more countries, it would be very time consuming to duplicate all your listings. This also can create a bit of a confusing shop homepage, as customers will see all your listings on the shop homepage regardless of which country they are for. But in search results, customers from each country will only see the listings that can be shipped to their country, and they will not pay VAT on orders. I’ve used this method a few times in my shop. I don’t do it for all listings, but if I have a product that starts to sell in other countries, I’ve created a duplicate listing with a different print provider and separate shipping profile for that country. I have a few mug listings in the UK for this reason, and I’ve verified that orders are not including any VAT charge. It would be great if there was another way around this, but unfortunately there is not with Etsy. On other selling platforms, you may be able to set up multiple shipping origins that change depending on the customer’s location. But if you think about it, it kind of makes sense that Etsy doesn’t have this capability for sellers. Even though Etsy allows print on demand sellers and has made some changes that moved away from their origins as a marketplace for small businesses who make everything by hand, they still are not expecting that sellers would have multi-national distribution channels. Having a dynamic shipping origin makes sense for sellers on Amazon, but if the intent of Etsy is to buy from a small business that exists only in one location, I can understand why they wouldn’t allow us to set up shipping of the same product from multiple countries.
2. The next question fortunately has a much simpler answer but it is a good question nonetheless. Which color space should you use when saving your design print files? Should you use RGB or CMYK? It’s generally known that printers use the CMYK color space, while by default, our computer monitors display colors in the RGB color space – that is, unless you’ve customized your monitor’s settings. Graphic design and editing software like photoshop will also default to work with and export your design files in RGB unless you change the color space to CMYK. But if our designs are being sent to a printer, shouldn’t we be using CMYK? Fortunately, the major print on demand platforms make it simple for us. Printify advises to save your print files in the RGB color space, because their platform will actually convert your file to RGB if it is not. They do this for consistency, so that all print providers know what to expect and their printing systems will convert the print file to CMYK on their end. Printful recommends using the sRGB color profile specifically because that is what their system is calibrated for – this is easy to select in programs like Photoshop or Affinity. When using the “Export As” action in Photoshop there is a checkbox to convert the color space to sRGB. Gelato also recommends using the sRGB color profile for your print files. Gooten recommends creating your design in the CMYK color space, then converting to RGB when you export the print file. This is the best advice I could give actually, and it’s what I do myself when I’m using Photoshop. Designing with your project file set to CMYK will give you an idea of what the colors will look like when printed, then converting to sRGB when you export the file will make sure they’re in the right format since all major print on demand platforms recommend RGB. If you use Kittl, their files are exported in the sRGB color profile. Unfortunately there’s currently not a feature built into Kittl to view your project in CMYK, but I’ve seen that feature requested so hopefully that is something they can provide in the future. The bottom line is to make sure your print files are in the RGB color space, preferably the sRGB color profile.
That’s it for questions this month, don’t hesitate to ask a question on the YouTube channel if you have one!
Niche Ideas & Seasonal Trends
Let’s touch on seasonal niches and trends before we wrap things up for June. Aside from mother’s day and father’s day, this can be a slower time of year for sales unless you have a large catalog of evergreen listings that sell consistently. But before you know it, we’ll be heading into that time of year when sales really pick up. Take the time over the next couple of months to plan out when you need to have designs ready. Let’s take this time to consider planning your design process out as well as the right time to publish.
One of my favorite way to prepare is to use Google Trends. You can use Google Trends to look at the search trend for specific phrases over a long period of time, like the last five years. If you enter a phrase like “back to school shirt” or “halloween shirt”, you’ll find a history of the annual trend for that search volume over the years. What you’re looking for is the time period each year when search volume tends to increase towards the peak. Your strategy should be to have listings for each event published around the time that volume increases, not at the peak. Listings need a little time to be found and make some sales, unless you are pushing them a lot yourself with paid advertising. So if you publish your back to school listings at the peak of back to school shopping, you’ll likely miss out on sales because there will already be lots of back to school listings dominating the first page of search results at that time and it will be hard to break through, even in less competitive sub-niches. Using Google Trends to find when the general searching for the event starts to pick up lets you back up from that time to plan when you should be working on those designs. For example, in the US, the trend from the last 5 years indicates that search volume for “back to school shirt” starts to increase in volume between July 5th to the 10th, and then peaks between July 31st and August 10th. So ideally you would want your back to school designs published before July 15th in order to have some time to get noticed before the peak of shopping, and also give yourself a little time to promote them organically on social media.
The point of me sharing that if you haven’t guessed is that even though it’s only mid-June, it’s time to be thinking about back to school designs! If you spend the next couple of weeks working on those listings, you should be in good shape to have them out there right around the time when search volume picks up. Of course, you can always work on designs any time of year you’d like to if the inspiration strikes, but it may not always be a good idea to publish them immediately. Why not just publish them at any time? Because Etsy gives new listings a slight bump in search rankings, but it’s very brief. They give you that little bump to see if shoppers will prefer your new listing to the ones already selling. If you don’t get clicks, likes, and sales, you’ll quickly fall down in the search rankings. This is not a big deal for evergreen designs that may sell at any time of year, but with designs based on a highly seasonal niche or event that only happens once per year, you don’t want to waste that one-time boost in the search rankings by publishing them at the wrong time. If you spent time creating a bunch of back to school listings in March, you’d be better of keeping them as drafts and publishing them in early July so they have a better chance of selling. If you published them back in March when back to school designs generally are not selling, your listings will likely be way back in the search rankings by the time back to school shopping ramps up.
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.