POD Insights

Jeff here for POD insights, your source for print on demand seller tips, resources and industry news. In this episode we’ve got the November 2022 print on demand update. In this update we’ll be talking about several smaller bits of news from Printify, Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals for print on demand tools & resources and we’ll answer some questions from recent YouTube videos so stick around and let’s dive into the November update.

Print Provider News

We’ve got a lot of Printify updates this month so we’re going to skip Etsy news and go straight into print provider news. I’ve got several small updates from Printify this month. None of them are huge, but lots of little things from the last few weeks. To start with, Printify updated their print provider quality scores recently. The quality scores that show next to the name of each provider on the platform are now broken down into three components, and you can see them when you hover your mouse over the score. The score components are:

Quality – based on the percentage of items that have defects or complaints. I believe this specifically is looking at how many orders have required reprints or refunds due to a printing defect.
Production Speed – calculated based on the print provider shipping orders within agreed times. By “agreed times” they are referring to their estimated shipping times on each order. If you look at your orders, they will indicate “estimated ship date”, and they are tracking how often orders are shipping within that estimated time.
Stock Reliability – Printify indicates they measure both the frequency of items being out of stock as well as the accuracy of their stock status. If you’re curious how they know the accuracy, they are looking at scenarios where an order cannot be fulfilled because an item is out of stock, even though it was not showing as out of stock in the Printify catalog. If this has never happened to you, you’re lucky. It’s happened to me a couple times after an order sat in production for several days, so when I had to cancel the order and move it to another provider it was already almost past the Etsy shipping date, so it’s definitely not fun when the stock status is not accurate.

The single score that you see is a combination of all three of these elements, but it’s worth hovering over the score to see them individually if you are deciding whether you want to use a provider or not. Delays with production come and go, and it’s likely that most providers will take a hit on this part of the score during Q4 high volume times, because any staffing shortage can cause a pileup of orders at this time of year. Of course, if I’m looking to get a single order fulfilled right now then definitely consider production delays and look at the production status page on Printify where they list all providers and their current status. I’ll link to that page in the blogpost for this episode if you need a link to it. But in the long term as far as choosing a primary provider for a type of product, I don’t personally get too concerned with temporary production delays as long as it’s not a constant thing. I look a little more at the quality component because that will generate negative reviews and complaints that you can’t blame on high order volumes or staffing shortages. Even for fulfilling individual orders, I try to avoid providers with a low quality score. But don’t necessarily write a provider off forever just because one time you saw a low quality score unless you’ve gotten samples or had a past experience with them. They can improve their quality over time, but if a provider is consistently at the bottom of the list with low quality scores, that’s when I start to just avoid them altogether. The quality scores are updated every week, using the last four weeks of data, so it’s a rolling month of information being used. This means any significant issues that happen are going to impact the score for a minimum of one month if they don’t continue. For example, if a provider has a bad week and has a spike in printing errors that require reprints but the issue is contained to that one week and does not continue, that one bad week is going to impact their quality score for a month before it rolls off and their score should improve after that. If the score doesn’t improve, you can tell from the breakdown of the three score components whether it’s a continued quality issue or one of the other two, or minor issues across all three. I wouldn’t spend too much time stressing over the scores, especially if you have experience with a provider already, but it’s good to have a little more detail to look at.

One interesting thing related to this is that even an objectively “good” quality score doesn’t mean their print quality is exactly the same as the next provider. This is a topic I could easily go down a rabbit hole about and do a whole episode on but I’ll try not to ramble too much right now. There are two primary factors that determine the way a DTG print comes out: the equipment and inks being used, and the actual methods and process that is applied. Printing is a lot like cooking actually. There are different types of equipment – for cooking it’s different types and brands of cookware, utensils and appliances, for DTG it’s different companies that manufacture the printing equipment, such as Kornit and Brother. And then the process and methods – for cooking that would include the process itself like baking vs. grilling, but also the technique of the chef and the recipe they use. The same thing is true for printing. You might ask two chefs to make you the same dish, but they each have their own unique way of making it. It’s technically the same dish, and both can be called “high quality”, but they won’t be exactly the same. The same thing happens with DTG printing to some degree. You could have two different print providers who both use Kornit Atlas equipment and the same inks, but the settings they use on the equipment and the type of pretreatment they use, among other details, all determine how the final print comes out. It’s not like pressing a button and it comes out the same every time. These factors are why you can order three samples from three different print providers of the same design on the same garment and get three different results. Anyway, there’s no actual point to me going into this right now, I just find it interesting because even though several print providers can have high quality scores, there is still subjectivity involved and even if none of the providers have defects, you may prefer one over another and that’s why samples can be very helpful.

Ok back to Printify updates for this month. I also wanted to talk about two specific products that I received emails about in the last week. First, tote bags from Monster Digital are having stock issues again. Monster has the basic Port Authority canvas tote bag printed in the US and I sell a decent number of these in my shop due to their competitive pricing. The email I received indicated that the stock issue is not specific to Monster Digital and this particular product is affected by stock issues “across the market”. However, they will be continuing to fulfill orders with an alternative product made by OAD, the OAD113 tote. The email says they will honor the price of the Port Authority bag even though the OAD product has a higher cost, until the stock issue is resolved. It doesn’t appear there is anything needed as far as updated mockups, just general awareness that orders will still be fulfilled with a substitute product.

The next product update is about metal ornaments from Pic the Gift. Unfortunately, they had some issues with the background colors not printing correctly according to an email I received, so they have removed the option for those ornaments to set your own background color. They will now be printed with a white background, even for your existing listings. This means if you have any metal ornaments from Pic the Gift in your shop, you’ll need to re-publish them to update the mockups, and if you have any designs with while graphics or text, you’ll want to change the print file as well since the background will now be white. This is definitely a bummer if you have a bunch of these in your shop, but it’s better that they make this change than let bad prints keep going out if they were having an issue with the print quality.

There is also a feature update for Printify invoices. Now, I don’t personally use Printify invoices for anything unless I’m looking back at a specific transaction and trying to figure out what I paid for a particular order, but if you use the invoice records for tax purposes or general documentation, this is a good update to know about. The invoice records are available in your Printify account from the Payments page. If you go to your Payments page, you should see several tabs including Payment Details, Transactions, and then two tabs for Invoices. Within the last couple. Of months, Printify changed their older summary invoices to individual order invoices – basically they got rid of monthly summaries and instead only provided an invoice for each individual order. While it can be helpful to have access to an invoice for an individual order, not having anything that provides a summary was a little bit strange. Printify recently sent an email indicating they received feedback requesting a return of the monthly summary invoices, and now that option is back. We now have both options, for individual order invoices and monthly summary invoices. If you want to see your monthly summary invoices, you will need to go into your account settings and change your invoice frequency setting to monthly. You can find that settings page in the account options menu – the same place that you find the link to your payment settings by clicking on the account icon from any page on Printify.

The last Printify update I have for this month is just an FYI about the Green November challenge if you haven’t seen it. Although at this point I’m sure you’ve seen something about it because they put it all over the homepage and they also sent us a couple emails about it. But just in case, the Green November challenge is a chance for you to earn a reward for your sales in November. Printify has a whole page set up that explains everything and I’ll link to it in the blogpost for this episode. All you need to do to sign up is go to that page and click on the sign up button. There is no additional action or input needed once you sign up for the challenge. If you are an existing seller on Printify, they will compare your November 2022 sales volume (in dollars, not the count of sales) to the best previous November that you’ve had – the best result is your target. If you meet or beat your target, there are different tiers that will provide a cash reward, paid into your Printify account balance. If you sign up for a new Printify account and don’t have any previous sales, they also are providing cash rewards based on your November sales. If your orders total between $1,000 and $4,999, the reward is $10. In my opinion it’s worth checking out the challenge because there is no effort required once you sign up. Of course, read the fine print in the terms & conditions if you’re concerned about that, but I did not see anything in there that I’m not already agreeing to by using the platform in the first place. However I’m not a lawyer so if you are concerned about the terms for contest or challenges like this then by all means review that before signing up.

Phew, that was a lot of Printify updates. I also have one thing I wanted to mention about Gelato, but for that, let’s go to my special segment for November, Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals for print on demand sellers.

BFCM Deals for Print on Demand

Replacing the “what’s new with me” segment for this month, because of the timing I thought it would be good to mention some BFCM deals on tools & resources that may be of interest in the print on demand space. If you’re listening to this episode after the deals have expired, sorry about that, you may want to skip this part. But if it’s still before November 30th, 2022 then here are some deals you may want to check out. Links to all these deals will also be on the website page for this episode and I also will have a video posted on the YouTube channel on the 23rd of this month with links as well. One quick disclaimer – I’m sharing these deals because if you’re already in the market for one of these resources, then why not get a better deal on it. I’m not sharing these to suggest that you need to run out and pay for another thing that adds overhead expense to your business, just because the price is discounted. With all business expenses, it’s important to ask yourself what real value the tool or resource is going to provide your business. Maybe it’s access to better quality graphics or better mockups or social media tools, and those are things that do provide real value, but I just want to point out that not everyone needs every tool or resource out there. I personally need a source for high quality graphics so that I’m not limited by my lack of graphic design skills. But if you are a designer and can make pretty much any design that you want to yourself, then you don’t need to pay for graphics. I do believe that everyone should use a keyword research tool, but everyone may not agree on which one is the best and that’s fine. As long as you’re doing some keyword research to guide your niche strategies, titles and tags, it’s less about the tool you use and more about how consistently you will use it to improve your listings. Ok, I didn’t mean that to sound like a lecture, I just want to make sure that it’s clear I’m not just trying to push everyone to go buy things unless they are necessary and return value to your business.

First up is a deal on Vexels graphics. I always call it Vexels graphics but at this point they have several more features than just graphics you can download and use in your designs. They do of course still have a massive catalog of individual graphic elements and complete designs that you can download in PNG and vector formats, but Vexels has also built up several additional resources that are included in the subscription, including a mockup generator, a t-shirt design creator, amazon KDP covers and interiors, and PSD design templates that you can customize with any graphics and text. They also still offer monthly custom design requests, where you can submit a request for a custom-made design that you have exclusive use of for 30 days before it goes into the catalog for other members to use. Vexels offers monthly, annual, and lifetime memberships and their Black Friday deal is 55% off the annual and lifetime subscriptions. They have different account tiers but for their regular Merch annual account, which gives you 100 downloads and 2 design requests per month, the discount brings the price down to $157 per year vs. the regular annual price of $261. The lifetime merch subscription starts at $690 and that includes 200 downloads and 1 custom design request per month, and the discount brings that down to around $415. I’m recording this before the deal goes live so I’m ball parking those prices, but I do know the discount is 55% off based on what they’ve sent me. If you know that you’ll be sticking with your print on demand business for at least a couple of years minimum, the lifetime license makes a lot of sense. The discounted price on the annual subscription will cost you $471 for three years, and the lifetime subscription with the discount will be less than that, so three years is the point where it would have made more sense to get the lifetime subscription rather than the annual one. If you’re not certain about whether you are in the print on demand business for the long haul, you could always go for the discount annual subscription and then upgrade to the lifetime deal next year – they’ve done the same Black Friday discount for the last three years at least so I assume they will continue in the future. The deal runs from November 23 until November 30th.

Next up is a deal on Placeit mockups. Again, this is a resource that has expanded beyond their primary product into some additional tools. As far as print on demand selling, mockups are still the primary reason why a Placeit subscription is useful, but they also offer social media templates, YouTube video templates for things like intros and outros, a logo maker, and they’ve expanded their selection of video mockups quite a bit as well. Placeit does have a free account as well, which I highly recommend if you sell print on demand because they have a monthly rotating selection of apparel and other mockups that can help make your listings look more professional compared to the standard mockups provided by your print on demand platform. The paid subscription unlocks access to the full catalog of mockups and mockup videos as well as all the other resources. The regular price is $89 per year when you pay annually or $14.95 per month if you pay monthly. The Black Friday deal is 10% off the monthly price or 33% off the annual price. I believe that means the annual subscription price will be $59, but again, the sale isn’t live yet so check it out if you’re interested on November 23rd. The “regular” annual price of $89 is already a significant discount off the monthly price if you pay that for 12 months, and normally any special deals would be taken off the higher price, not an already-discounted one. But in this case, 33% off the full 12 month price if paid monthly is higher than the regular annual price. Sorry if that was confusing – basically I’m justing saying I believe the 33% off is going to be taken off the normal annual price of $89 which should bring it down to $59 and that’s a pretty good deal in my opinion. The sale runs November 23 to November 30th.

My personal choice for Etsy keyword research, Sale Samurai, is also running a promotion for BFCM, and it’s actually live already, running through November 28th. They are offering a 6 month subscription at the same rate as the annual subscription, and you can still use my podinsights coupon code. The code is all lowercase: podinsights and that will get you a price of $39.99 for six months, which breaks down to $6.67 per month, the same monthly rate as the normal 12 month subscription that costs $79.99 with the same coupon code. So technically this isn’t so much a discount as just an opportunity to get the best available price for less than 12 months, which means if you decide that Sale Samurai isn’t the best tool for you, then you didn’t pay for a full year. But if you decide to keep using it, it will renew at the discounted price.

The last deal I want to mention is not limited to BFCM, it’s running through the end of this year. Gelato is offering some additional shipping benefits if you sign up for Gelato+ or Gelato+ Gold. For Gelato+, which costs $14.95 per month or $139 per year, the deal is free shipping on all apparel orders in Europe and USA for orders over $25. For Gelato+ Gold, which costs $299 per month or $1499 per year, the deal is free shipping on all orders in Europe and free shipping on all apparel orders in USA through December 31. Both subscriptions still offer discounted shipping after the promotion as well. This one I’m just sharing for awareness in case you were considering Gelato+ already because it’s not a bad time to sign up with the free shipping offer. But for either of these subscriptions, it would only make sense if you are using Gelato as your primary print on demand platform and have regular order volume each month, or in the case of Gelato+ Gold, a pretty high order volume each month.

That’s it for all the deals I’m aware of at the time of recording this, but if I find out about any additional promotions I will update the blogpost for this episode on podinsights.net as well as the description of my YouTube video covering these deals that will be posted on November 23rd.

Deal Summary:

Vexels: 55% off lifetime & annual subscriptions (Nov 23 – Nov 30)
Placeit: 33% off annual subscriptions (Nov 23 – Nov 30)
Sale Samurai: 6 month subscription for $39.99 (coupon code: podinsights, Nov 18 – Nov 28)
Gelato: Gelato+ free shipping on apparel orders over $25 until 12/31/22
Creative Fabrica: All-access annual subscription for $59 (graphics & fonts)

Your Questions

Alright it’s time to answer a few more questions from the YouTube channel, and this month we’ve got two good ones as usual. The first question is actually not just from one person, but it’s a popular question that has been asked a few times over the last month or so. This one has to do with shipping profile settings when you sell your products in multiple countries.

It’s hard to state this one as a direct question because it’s been asked a few different ways, but I can summarize this way: what are your options for shipping profile settings if you want to sell products to multiple countries, knowing that you are going to use different print providers for customers in different countries. So on the back end, orders will be routed to print providers based on the customer’s location, either manually by you if you want to do this with a platform like Printify, or automatically by the platform, which is how Gelato does it. That’s good news for your customers because their orders will be fulfilled locally whenever possible in their country, to make delivery times as fast as possible, but at the same time bad news for you when it comes to figuring out how to set up your shipping profiles. This is because Etsy only allows you to assign one shipping profile per listing, and each shipping profile can only have one origin country and postal code. You cannot set different shipping profiles for each country on the same listing. An example might help here – let’s say you sell mugs and you set your mug shipping profile up with the USA as the origin country because you use a US-based print provider on Printify to fulfill your mugs orders in the US. But you also sell the same mugs in Canada, the UK, and Australia. When orders come in for Canada, the UK, or Australia, you manually edit the orders to move product to a different print provider located in the appropriate country. You have two choices for how to approach setting up your listings and shipping profiles.

You can use one shipping profile that reflects the origin country in which you make most of your sales, or focus most of your marketing efforts. Let’s assume most of your sales are coming from the US, or if you’re just setting up your shop, you expect to make most of your sales in the US. You would create your listing using the US-based print provider and set up the shipping profile using the US as the origin country. You add Canada, the UK, and Australia as additional shipping destinations in the shipping profile, and set the shipping charge to a reasonable amount based on what you expect to pay for shipping with the print provider that you intend to use for each country, plus a little extra to cover any taxes that you will be charged (example: I’m located in the US and I am not charged tax on my orders fulfilled in the US on Printify, but I am charged tax on orders fulfilled in Canada, the UK, and Australia). With this option, your listing will indicate to customers in all countries that the product ships from the US but the estimated delivery time will still be based on what you selected in your shipping profile for each country. This might deter some customers outside the US from purchasing because they assume delivery will be delayed due to the international shipment, even though you plan on having it fulfilled in their country. One thing you could do is to add something to your product descriptions to tell customers that if they are located outside the US, you have additional production partners in those countries to help reduce delivery times, but not everyone reads the descriptions of course. It’s also worth noting that if you do use Printify as I mentioned for this example, you would have to edit each order manually if it is for a customer outside the US because you created the listing with the US-based print provider, so that is also extra work for you. If you use Gelato, however, you would not need to manually edit orders because Gelato automatically routes orders to the print provider located closest to the customer and you can still set up the shipping profile to show the US as the origin country.
The second option is more work for you in terms of setting up your listings, but likely would lead to the best sales opportunities in each country by having separate shipping profiles. This option would be a lot of work if you wanted to have separate shipping profiles for multiple countries, but it could be manageable if you want to focus on 2-3 countries. Let’s use the same example to walk through it – I would first create a new listing the same way, let’s stick with Printify as the platform for now. So I create a new listing on Printify with my US-based print provider and I publish it on Etsy with the shipping profile that shows USA as the origin country. Then, I copy the listing in my Printify account and use the replace function to change it to a print provider located in Canada. I publish that listing to my Etsy account as well, but for this one I use a different shipping profile with Canada as the origin country. This will result in having almost identical listings in your shop, except for the shipping profile. But this means that shoppers in Canada can find your listing that shows a more reasonable delivery time in Canada, and customers in the US can see a listing that shows a reasonable delivery time for the US. The only fly in the soup or caveat here is that Etsy requires you to have domestic shipping in all shipping profiles, meaning you have to ship to the country where your business is located. For example, I’m located in the US, so my shipping profiles all must include a domestic shipping method for the US, even if I’m creating the listing to target customers in Canada. So at minimum, your shipping profile in this example is going to have two countries in it, your domestic country and the country that you are targeting the listing for. Will customers in each country see both of the listings? Probably, especially if they go to your shop page directly. However, over time, Etsy’s search algorithm will make it unlikely that both listings have the same search ranking. Etsy favors showing customers products that are produced locally in general, so that should already give the listing with the local origin country a more favorable search position. And over time, as customers in Canada click, favorite, and purchase the listing with Canada as the origin zip more frequently than the US version of the listing, the algorithm will learn to show that listing in search results to customers searching from Canada, and the same will be true in the US for the listing that has the US as the origin country. So ultimately is this a viable option? I think it could be, but as I mentioned it probably would work best if you are only targeting 2-3 countries maximum. If you want to sell in 5-10 or more countries, this would be a lot of work for every listing that you create and may not be sustainable. However, you could selectively choose to do this for some of your listings but not all of them.

Which option do I use? I sell in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia. I’ve removed all other countries from my shipping profiles. I use the first option, so all my listings use the same shipping profile with USA as the origin country. I base the shipping charge for the other countries on the expected shipping cost for the print provider that I plan to use for each country, not the international cost from my primary print provider, and I add $3 USD to cover international taxes that I will be charged. I do make semi-regular sales in each country, mostly for mugs, t-shirts and sweatshirts, so having my origin country as USA does not seem to completely discourage sales in other countries, although I can’t say I wouldn’t be selling more in each country if I did have duplicate listings with their own separate shipping profiles. Hopefully someday Etsy will let you set your shipping profiles up differently for each country, but we do have to remember that even though Etsy allows print on demand products on the platform openly, it still is a platform that largely intends to cater to sellers of physical products that most likely have a single origin country vs. multiple, meaning I don’t really see Etsy creating new features solely for sellers like us who have multiple production partners around the world. So for now, these are the options available. I wish it was a little bit simpler, but these have been great questions.

The second question for this episode is about new listings and existing sales or promotions in your Etsy shop. The question came from Bliss Essentials, and they asked if there is any way to include new listings in your existing sales for the same product section of your shop. For example, let’s say you’ve set up a sale for 15% off to run for the upcoming weekend and you’ve added the whole mug section of your shop to that sale. They were looking to know if there is a way to automatically include any new mug listings that you create to that sale. Unfortunately the answer to this one is pretty short – there is not a way to do this currently. This is an Etsy feature that I really wish they would add for us. You would think that if you’ve added your whole mug section to the sale and then you add new listings into the mug section of your shop, those would automatically be included in the sale, but unfortunately that’s not the case. If you want the new listings to be included in the sale, you will need to go into your Marketing > Sales & Discounts page in your seller dashboard. On that page, you will see a list of your active and past promotions. You’ll need to click on the active sale that you want to add the new listings to and then select “edit included listings”. Then you will be able to add the new listings by adding the same section of the shop to the sale again, or by searching for the individual listings. Save your changes and the new listings will now reflect the active sale. Unfortunately you need to do this for any new listings that you want to include in an active sale, so if you’re trying to be efficient and create your sales in advance but you’re also consistently adding new listings, it means you’ll have to keep adding any new listings into the sale until the sale is over. I am hopeful that someday Etsy will give us the ability to check a box or something when we’re creating new listings to include the new listing in an active sale or coupon code, but for now we have to manually add them after publishing. This was a great question and definitely something frustrating if you run sales frequently.

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 reading.