Jeff here for POD Insights, your source for print on demand resources, tips, and industry news. In this episode we’ve got the May 2023 print on demand update, including updates from Printify, Printful, and CustomCat, and we’re also talking about international selling so stick around and let’s dive into the May 2023 print on demand update.
Etsy News
Nothing much to share in Etsy news this month, unfortunately there still hasn’t been any further announcement about international pricing updates that was mentioned in an article back in March.
Etsy is hosting Etsy Up, the virtual event for Etsy sellers, on May 18th at 1:00pm EST. There will be panels and speakers covering topics on trends, marketing, and Etsy Search. I’m particularly interested in hearing the Etsy Search content and I also hope the talks will be available to watch after the event. I will link to them in the blogpost for this article if video recaps are available.
There’s also another interesting virtual Etsy Seller event on May 23rd about optimizing your shop for Google search. I will link to the Etsy community events in the blogpost if you want to check this one out too.
Print Provider & Industry News
Moving on to print provider news for May, we have a few updates to cover. Starting with Printify, I’ve gotten a flurry of emails announcing small changes in the last few weeks. There was a reminder about the Printify Premium subscription pricing that it will now include sales tax. They’re not changing the price of Printify Premium, it’s still $29.99 per month or $299.99 per year, but now it will include sales tax. By the way, I still have a coupon code for that, it’s all lower-case pod insights for a 30 day trial of Printify Premium.
Printify also has reintroduced a bonus program now called the Boost Program. You should have received an email about it if you are a Printify seller. They started having bonus programs last fall and had a much more detailed challenge-based program at the start of this year. The new Boost Program is much more simple and similar to the program at the end of 2022 – if you meet or exceed your target for the month (based on previous-year results), you will receive a cash bonus in your Printify account. I’m not sure yet if they’re going to continue this each month, but it seems for the last several months Printify has been testing out ways to implement a bonus program for sellers, which is nice.
My last mini-update for Printify this month is that they’ve added support for Australian currency in your account payment settings. However, there are some things to be aware of if you want to change your default currency – a note on the payments page indicates that if you change it from USD, Printify Coupons will be disabled, so if you’re currently using a coupon code for a free trial of Printify Premium, I’m not sure if that means you’ll immediately end the free trial period. It also indicates you cannot use Printify Balance, you have to save a credit card with other currencies – so if you add funds to your Printify balance rather than using a saved credit card, that will no longer be an option if you switch your default currency. But, if those things don’t matter or impact you then you can change your default currency, now including Australian dollars.
Moving on to a small update from Printful – the last couple of years in print on demand has been a nonstop trend of increasing costs. Of course, this is not specific to print on demand – almost literally everything in life has gotten more expensive in recent years, some things a lot more expensive. The issue with print on demand products, especially high-volume products like t-shirts, is that profit margins are generally not super high. When I started selling print on demand, Printful offered Gildan Softstyle t-shirts for $7.95 with $3.99 shipping, which allowed for a retail price of $19.99 for a 29% profit margin. Recently the price of the same t-shirt on Printful had gone up to $10.95 and they also recently increased shipping to $4.69, resulting in a total cost of $15.64 for a very basic t-shirt. That would cut your profit on Etsy down to just 10% if you didn’t raise your price fro $19.99, which just isn’t sustainable. But thankfully, Printful recently announced lower prices on some core products, including the Gildan Softstyle. Now it’s not going back to the 2020 price of $7.95, but they did lower it to $9.25. The total cost of $13.94 now allows for a price of $22.99 with a 28% profit margin. If you sell a high volume through Printful, you can still qualify for monthly quantity discounts as well. It’s nice to see some platforms looking to help sellers keep costs low for some of the higher-volume products.
In similar news over at CustomCat, they recently announced two nice updates to their CustomCat Pro plan. For the same price as Printify Premium ($299 per year), CustomCat sellers get access to lower product pricing. They recently announced Core Product pricing – in addition to generally lower pricing on all products, some specific products like the Bella+Canvas 3001 and Gildan 5000 t-shirts will have an even lower fixed cost for Pro sellers. The G5000 will be just $6.95 and the 3001 will be $8.99. Will shipping added those prices are very close to the best price you can currently get. Another improvement is that if you don’t currently have CustomCat Pro, you can now get a 30 day free trial by using my referral link. No coupon code needed, just use my link and you’ll get the 30 day free trial when you sign up. I’ll include the link in this episode description and the blogpost.
That’s it for print provider news this month, let’s move on and answer a couple of questions.
Your Questions
This month we’re going to talk about international shipping in response to a few common questions from the YouTube channel. This can definitely be a confusing topic because not all print on demand platforms make international selling on Etsy simple.
First up, let’s just talk about your strategy and choosing the right platform to fit that strategy. If you know from the start of your print on demand business that you want to sell to multiple countries and not 1-2, consider which print on demand platform is the best for your business. For example, if we wanted to sell posters internationally to 5 or more countries, the best print on demand platform to support that would have print providers in all those countries and automatically route orders based on the customer’s location. Of course, competitive pricing on posters would also be important. Currently, the print on demand platform that best fits that scenario is Gelato. They have a great selection of poster products, good pricing, and print providers in 30+ countries. Most importantly, they automatically route all orders to be fulfilled domestically without any manual work from you. There’s one small downside relating to the customer checkout process with Gelato, but otherwise, it’s the best fit for this situation. That small downside is that your Etsy shipping profiles can only have one “Country of Origin”, so your listings will all have one country of origin even though the order is going to be fulfilled domestically for nearly all customers. When Etsy believes a product will be shipped internationally, based on the shipping profile, the customer will pay VAT during checkout. For example, if the customer is in the UK and the shipping profile indicates the poster will ship from Norway, the customer will be charged VAT during checking. If the country of origin in the shipping profile was the UK, the customer would not pay VAT at checkout. Because you can only have one country of origin in your shipping profile, many of your customers will pay VAT when they really shouldn’t have to. But that’s really the only downside to selling across multiple countries using Gelato.
If you use Printify as I do for most of your print on demand fulfillment, things are a little more complicated. I recently posted a video breaking down your four options for selling print on demand internationally with Printify and Etsy. The different options required different amounts of work either up-front or on the back-end for you, and they don’t all work well for every selling strategy. I’ll just cover a summary of the options now and will include the video in the blogpost for this episode.
- Option one is the least amount of work for you. You publish your Printify listings to Etsy with the print provider that you believe will fulfill most of your orders – in other words, from the country you believe will have the most sales. You include all countries you want to sell in in your shipping profile, and just allow the orders to be shipped internationally. Shipping times will be longer and shipping prices for customers outside that main country will be higher, so you may experience limited sales outside the primary country with this option.
- Option two is to use Printify’s automated order routing feature. This option is still not a lot of work for you, but provides the opportunity for some orders to be routed to the customer’s country if Printify has a print provider located in the same country as the customer. As I explained int he video, automated order routing is really two features in one, because it also enables order routing for out of stock products. But the main feature we’re concerned with right now is international orders. All you have to do up-front is decide on which countries you want to include in your shipping profiles. For example, if you know that Printify has a poster print provider in the UK and USA, you may want to limit the countries you sell in to those two. If you do that, you’ll only get orders from countries where there is a print provider and orders will be routed to either one automatically. If you include more countries in your shipping profile, some orders will still have to be shipped internationally.
- Option three is where we get into more work for you. This option is all about doing more work on the back-end when you receive orders. For this one you still create your product listings using the print provider in your primary country. However you set your or fulfillment on Printify to manual, and you set your shipping prices in your other countries based on a print provider you plant to use. For example, my primary country is the US, but I also sell in the UK. I know there is a print provider I will use in the UK for orders that come from the UK, so in my shipping profile, I use those shipping prices and estimated delivery time instead of the prices and times from my primary US-based provider. When an order comes in from the UK, I manually edit the order and swap the print provider before submitting it to production. I do this by saving an unpublished draft of the product in my Printify account with the print provider in the UK. The customer will pay a more reasonable shipping price and receive it in less time, however it will still look like it’s coming from the US because the country of origin in the shipping profile is still the US. Because of the manual fulfillment, this option is not the best for sellers who have a high volume of orders across multiple countries.
- Option four gives you the best chance of making international sales, and it moves all the work to the front-end of the listing process, while the order fulfillment process is automated. For this option, you select the countries you want to sell in, and let’s just keep using the US and UK for example. You first publish the listing in your primary selling country, which for me is the US. Then on Printify you make a copy of the listing, and use the “Replace” feature to select a print provider in the next country, the UK in this example. Then you publish that second listing to your Etsy shop. You will have separate shipping profiles for each country, and each one will have only that one country as a destination. This will mean only the listing that is fulfilled domestically will show up in search results for each country, so customers will not see the products as being shipped from outside their country. This gives your listings the best chance of selling in each country, and when an order comes in, it automatically goes to the appropriate print provider for each country. However as I mentioned this one requires the work on the front end to duplicate your listings in each country that you want to sell in.
So what do I do? For my shop, I use a combination of options 3 and 4 with Printify. For most of my listings, I use option 3 and just publish with a US-based print provider. I’m fine with manually submitting orders for two reasons: one is that I sell personalized products in the same shop so I need to manually edit some orders anyway. The other is that most of my orders come from the US – about 95% – so I don’t have to manually edit that many orders each month. However I do use Option 4 occasionally, if an item starts to sell in another country or if I believe it will be popular in another country. For example, if there’s a t-shirt with a popular pop-culture phrase or saying on it, and it’s something that I know is popular in the UK, then I will create a duplicate listing for the UK so that it has a better chance of selling there and if it does start selling, I won’t have to manually edit all the orders, I can just click submit.
Niche Ideas & Seasonal Trends
Alright moving on to niche ideas & seasonal trends for May, of course now is the time to make sure your father’s day designs are published on multiple products. For me, father’s day t-shirts are always a pretty good seller, but I also sell some mugs and pint glasses with father’s day designs. There’s still some time to get listings out there, so check out my father’s day design video on the YouTube channel if you’re looking for new ideas.
Also, warm-weather design shopping is getting into full-swing now, and that’s not just for t-shirts. Think about any warm-weather related products that you could put your t-shirt designs on. For example, tank tops, crop tops, and tote bags are great additional items to put your t-shirt designs on if they fit well. Not all t-shirt designs work on additional products but most text-based designs will. Beach towels and flip flops can also be great print on demand items – see my beach product video on the YouTube channel for some ideas there. One thing I noticed doesn’t seem to have the typical high levels of competition are the flip flops – they are reasonably priced from SPOKE Custom Products on Printify and several niches, especially personalized ones, had under 2k competition when I checked in April.
Fourth of July designs are a good general niche to move on to once your father’s day listings are completed, and before you know it we’ll be talking back to school! Hard to believe because the school year’s not even over yet, but in July we’ll be talking about those designs so put that on your calendar now.
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.