Jeff here for POD Insights, your source for print on demand resources, tips, and industry news. My apologies for missing the last couple of monthly updates. I’ve had a few issues with my recording gear and then time kind of got away from me so we’ve got a lot of updates to cover. Let’s get into the update for this month. 

Etsy News

Ok so this episode is going to be mostly updates for Etsy and the print on demand platforms since I’ve missed quite a few. Let’s dive into Etsy updates. 

We’ve got a few Etsy updates to talk about since the last update. First, let’s talk about something that just started coming up recently, without a formal announcement from Etsy as far as I can tell. Many sellers recently started getting the red flag message on listings that says “updates required”. After looking around the Etsy seller forums, it seems that Etsy is getting rid of the option to select “other” as the shipping method in shipping profiles, and requiring us to select a specific carrier service. To test this, I updated my main t-shirt shipping profile and switched the US shipping from “Other” to USPS parcel select, which is the slowest USPS shipping option I could select. After saving that update, the message went away from all my t-shirt listings. At the same time, I haven’t seen official confirmation of this from Etsy, but it does appear that removing the “other” shipping method will clear that flag from your listings. I will keep an eye out from an announcement or message from Etsy explaining why they are no longer allowing this option. 

In other Etsy news, there have been some other changes being tested including how your after-sale offers are sent. If you have enabled thank you offers in the past, Etsy would send an email to your customers when their order is shipped, with a thank you message and a coupon code with a discount that you select. Recently I noticed in my shop messages a note from Etsy that they are experimenting with sending these after-sale offers through Etsy messages rather than email. I actually saw one that was recently sent as a message to my customer as well. I then found an article on Etsy called “building better tools with experiments” and I will link to it in the description of this episode and in the blogpost on the website. It’s a pretty general article, basically saying that Etsy runs these experiments with some sellers’ accounts to test new features before deciding whether to roll them out to everyone. So don’t be surprised if soon your automated offers are sent via Etsy messages rather than email. 

Let’s continue with more Etsy news – I wanted to just quickly address the increase in reports from print on demand sellers having their listings or their shop taken down for violating the Etsy handmade policy. I just posted a video on the YouTube channel discussing this in more detail, but basically more sellers have been noticing recently their listings being taken down due to violating the handmade policy…however they’re not violating the policy. It all stems back to Etsy’s efforts to reduce mass-produced dropshipped products on the platform, and unfortunately some print on demand sellers are getting caught up in it. Check out the video for more details and my thoughts.

The last Etsy update I have for now is something I published a video about a few weeks ago. Etsy has started cropping the thumbnail images on shop homepages to a 1:1 square aspect ratio, and recently, they’ve also started doing this in their search results. If you haven’t noticed this, check your shop homepage. Why does this matter? Because if your product mockup images are not square, then the crop that Etsy is applying might mean your design is no longer centered in the thumbnail image. So I would just recommend doing a quicks scan of your shop homepage to see if any of your primary thumbnails look off. You can go into individual listings and use the cropping feature to make sure your design is centered properly. Going forward, you can also upload mockups that are already square so that cropping shouldn’t effect how the design is centered. Of course check out that video if you haven’t, I’ll link to it in the description and blogpost. 

That’s it for Etsy news this month, now onto print provider news. 

Print Provider & Industry News

We’ve got a few updates this month from print providers, including some big new features from Printify and Printful. Let’s start with Printful – they’ve release a couple big updates within the last month including new membership levels and a workflow for creating product templates for multiple products with the same design. I published a video recently covering these Printful updates as well.

Printful previously had a free account as well as a paid plan. The paid plan did not give you access to discounted product pricing, just more features and some benefits like free embroidery digitization. Product discounts on Printful previously had to be earned through sales volume every month. The monthly discounts were not my favorite structure because the discounts you could earn were pretty low in my opinion, and you also had to re-qualify every month. If your sales decreased for one month, the following month your discount could decrease or disappear altogether. This made it hard to predict what your product pricing should be, especially for products that are a little more price sensitive. The thing that really made this a problem for me is that Printful’s product pricing is a bit higher to start with. Their pricing on basics like t-shirts, mugs, and sweatshirts is mostly higher than other platforms, especially when you consider that platforms like Printify offer a paid membership that gives you instant access to substantial product discounts. For this reason, when I started seeing some early success with my Etsy print on demand shop back in 2020, I went for the Printify Premium plan and haven’t looked back.

But now, in a way overdue move, Printful has done a complete overhaul on their account tiers and come out with the new Growth and Business memberships. And for the first time, you’ll be able to buy into the Growth membership before you qualify through sales volume. There is still a threshold to meet if you don’t want to pay the membership fee, but that threshold has also been revised and is much more reasonable. In fact, the memberships in general are now much more reasonable overall. Printful also still has the free account for anyone starting out or if, like me, you only fulfill a few products through Printful and it may not make sense to pay for the Growth plan. I’ve always liked pretty much everything else about Printful besides their pricing and previous discount program. Their user interface is one of the easiest to use for new sellers, they have a dedicated workflow for personalized products, and they provide a basic custom branded packing slip with all orders. Now with the new Growth plan, I might consider having more of my products fulfilled through Printful. 

The Growth plan can be earned through sales volume, and the threshold is $12k in sales within a 12-month period. That’s not unreasonable and if you’re an established shop with regular sales, you could that volume or even more in the fourth quarter alone. The best part about the new program is that once you hit that requirement, you keep the Growth plan for a full year. No having to re-qualify every month like the old discount program. That is probably the best decision they made here – because it allows for pricing stability for sellers. The Growth plan provides up to a 20% discount on DTG printed products and up to 30% on other products, and a 7% discount on branding fees. My account recently received a free trial of the growth plan through October 19th, but I won’t qualify for the free plan because I use Printify for most of my fulfillment. After some looking around I found that the price of the growth plan if you want to pay before reaching the sales threshold is going to be $24.99 per month. You cannot pay for it annually, only monthly. This was also a smart decision, because if you see your shop’s sales trajectory is heading for over $12 in annual sales, you can start getting the discounts earlier by paying for the plan and adjust your prices sooner. By the way, $12k in annual sales is based on your cost, not your revenue or profit. They call it sales so you might think it’s a measurement of your sales, but really it’s sales for Printful – basically how much have you paid Printful in fulfillment cost. The last great thing to mention about this option to pay for the Growth plan before you qualify is that once you do qualify, you just stop paying for it. You’re not locked into paying for a fixed period of time, so as soon as you cross the $12k threshold, the next month you just don’t pay anymore, for a full 12 months. To me this is about a million times more appealing than their previous paid plans. I will provide a link to the page with more information about the Growth Plan.

The Business plan is the next highest tier and it requires $60k in sales over a 12-month period. The discounts on products don’t increase much – to 22% for DTG products and 33% for all others, but you do get free embroidery digitization. If you create and sell a lot of embroidery products, that is a nice benefit because Printful charges $6.50 for each new embroidery design on the first order so the print file can be digitized for their embroidery process. If you ever stop to think about that term…it’s kind of funny. Your print file is already a digital file, and they’re digitizing it again. I bet they just couldn’t think of another name for it. Anyway, I don’t believe you can buy into the Business plan, my understanding is you can only qualify for this one through the $60 sales volume requirement. 

What do you think of the new account tiers at Printful? I think this was a great decision for them and they’re finally catching up with some of the benefits that other print on demand platforms offer. Their product pricing may still not be quite as competitive as Printify Premium or the Custom Cat Pro plans, but it’s getting closer with these new memberships and factoring in the things that Printful actually does better than other platforms like embroidery products, a direct integration with Amazon seller central and the dedicated workflow for personalized products, it’s making Printful a lot more appealing. 

Next up I want to talk about a new feature with Printify that has some promise but also a little bit of potential confusion or concern around it, and that is the new express shipping option. For certain products, and un the US only, you can now have orders fulfilled and delivered to your customer in as little as just 2 days. And the best part is that this option comes at a cost of only $7.99, which is only a few dollars more than the standard economy shipping option with most t-shirt print providers in the US for products like the B+C 3001 or Gildan 5000. This sounds a little bit too good to be true, right? Well from what I can tell so far, it’s not any type of deception or false statement from Printify, but there’s more to understand about this and how you might use it in your shop depending on the products that you sell. Specifically, there are three points to consider here. 

First, let’s just be clear – it’s in the US only for now, so this option does not apply with any print providers outside the US. Also, there’s one significant part of this option that was not clear when it was first announced – in order to meet the stated 2-day delivery of the express shipping option, Printify will move production of your order to a participating print provider that is closest to the customer as well as using a faster shipping method. So this is point number one that might be a concern for you. You’re not just getting an upgraded shipping method, you’re moving production closer to your customer, unless your selected print provider happens to be the closest to your customer. For example, if you use Monster Digital and they are shipping from Texas and your customer is in Texas, of course the order would still be fulfilled from Monster Digital. But if your customer is in California and SwiftPOD is a participating print provider who has the same product in stock, Printify will move your production to SwiftPOD for that order so they can meet the desired 2-day delivery. 

This has two implications for us as the seller if we choose the express delivery option for orders. First, you’re not controlling which print provider fulfills your order. This one may or may not matter to you. If you have used or currently use a platform like Gelato or Gooten, you already don’t control which print provider fulfills your orders because they automatically route them to a provider for you. This is essentially the same thing – Printify will choose the closest print provider who can fulfill your order. The only reason why you might care about this would be if you have specific print providers that you prefer not to use. For example, if you avoid certain print providers because of past order experience, you wouldn’t be able to control that with the express shipping option. But more importantly, you currently cannot control the cost difference. 

This is point number two that could be a concern with this program. If your order is moved to another participating print provider in the US, you will be charged that print provider’s price for the fulfillment, not the price with your selected print provider. So if we keep the same example I just mentioned where I made my listing using Monster Digital but my order is going to be sent to SwiftPOD because my customer is in California, I’m going to pay whatever SwiftPOD’s price is for the fulfillment plus the $7.99 express delivery cost. And in many cases, product prices are not consistent across print providers. In fact, I use Monster Digital in part because their pricing is among the best for products like the B+C 3001 t-shirt. That means if any of my orders are moved to another provider, it’s likely the price will be higher, and I’m not a fan of that. This is one detail that wasn’t fully explained when the express delivery option was first announced, but it’s very important to understand. 

Later in August Printify sent an email acknowledging some questions they’ve received about express delivery, and this topic was mentioned. They also stated that they would be working to bring more features and options to the express delivery program to make it work for more sellers. This is one area where they certainly have some room for improvement. With Printify’s existing automatic order routing feature that can send production to different print providers when a product is out of stock, there is an option where you can set the maximum price difference you’re willing to accept so you’re not blindsided with an order that is way higher in cost, wiping out your profit. The express delivery program needs a feature like that in my opinion. But I also recognize that would throw a wrinkle into the whole program, because if there is no participating print provider within the limit that I set, then the order may not be able to be delivered within 2 days, eliminating any benefit of choosing express delivery and paying the higher shipping cost. So I can see this may not be a simple solution, but not allowing us to see how much an order will cost until it’s already been sent to production is not great. 

The third and final point to consider that could raise some concerns is exactly how you might implement this in your shop. This one could easily be a much longer consideration but I’ll try to keep it concise. Basically, if you have an existing business with a high volume of listings and an established shipping strategy, especially if you sell on Etsy, changing up your whole strategy for shipping can be a bit of a headache. If you use a relatively small number of shipping profiles by product category, it would be easy enough to make a change that applies to a whole section of your shop, but if this would require you to also adjust your product prices, then there would be some additional work involved. For example, if today you charge $4 for shipping on your t-shirts based on a cost of $4.75 for shipping, that means you would have built the $0.75 into the product price but otherwise your shipping cost is covered by the shipping charge your customer is paying. If you adopt express shipping as the primary option for your t-shirt listings, then your cost is going up to $7.99 which is an increase in your cost of $3.24. You could simply add that to your existing shipping charge of $4 and set it at $7.25. And if you advertise 2-day delivery on your listings, which is more work you will have to do to update at least one listing image to tell customers about it, then perhaps customers would be willing to pay $7.25 for shipping. But if you want to keep the shipping cost around $5, that means you would have to increase your product prices to cover the difference and maintain the same profit margin, and that could be a bit more work but the bulk listing editor on Etsy does allow you to bulk-edit product prices so that might not be the biggest hassle if you wanted to set your shipping price to $5 and add $2.25 to your product prices. 

But wait, the first thing we should have done is ask ourselves: do we really want to do this? Do we want to make express delivery the primary shipping method for all our t-shirt listings and advertise 2-day delivery? After all, it’s not available outside the US, so if your product listings are shown outside the US, you would have to make it clear that 2-day only applies in the US, and it’s also not available on all products. So if a customer bought a t-shirt and say a mug or something else from your shop, one item would arrive in 2 days and the other could take a week or more…that’s not a great experience. Also I can’t help but worry that on some occasions deliveries might not make it to the customer in 2 days…if we really put it out there that deliveries arrive in 2 days that could create more scenarios where customers are upset because something arrived later, especially if it was for a particular event or date. You could always choose to say 3-day delivery on your listings and descriptions just in case, and then have customers happy when most arrive in 2 days. But another option would be to use express shipping as an optional upgrade in your shop rather than the primary shipping option. 

If I do use express delivery, this is how I personally see myself implementing it. On Etsy you can enable shipping upgrades in your shipping settings, and then on each individual shipping profile you can choose to add a custom express shipping option and the price. This would allow you to not offer express delivery on products where it’s not available, and allow customers to pay for the upgrade only if they want or need it. If your standard shipping, for example, is $4 and you add express delivery at your cost of $7.99, customers can choose during checkout whether they want to pay the highest cost to get the order faster. There’s only one catch with doing this – you will have to manually edit the order and select express delivery before the order is submitted to production. This is because express delivery, on Etsy at least, is a totally separate shipping profile. It has to be in order for Printify to recognize it on an incoming order, otherwise the order will just default to the standard shipping from the print provider. But if you already have order fulfillment set to manual, this could be a way to offer the express delivery option without having to adjust your whole strategy. You can still advertise “express delivery available” or “delivery in as little as 2 days” on your listing images and in the description – you would just have to give a few instructions to the customer like “for express delivery, select express shipping during checkout which will cost $7.99”. Because I already use manual order fulfillment, I could see myself using this method and it’s likely an option that customers would use especially during Q4 as it gets closer to Christmas and they want to make sure gifts arrive in time. 

I have one other small Printify update to mention. A few months ago Printify started offering custom branded inserts from a few print providers including SwiftPOD and Monster Digital, and they were free during the introductory period. Starting October 1st, they are no longer free. But the good news is, if you started the inserts and want to continue they are pretty affordable. The cost will be $0.15 per order on the Printify free plan or $0.10 per order on the Printify Premium plan. One thing that’s important to point out is that if you get an order for multiple items from separate print providers and more than one of them does inserts, you’ll be charged for each one. So for example if you get an order for a hoodie printed by Monster Digital and a t-shirt printed by SwiftPOD, you’ll be charged $0.20 for the inserts on that order because both print providers are going to put one in the package. If you have automatic order routing enabled and your normal print provider includes inserts but your order is routed to a provider who does not do inserts, you won’t be charged for the insert. If you want to enable inserts for your shop, you can do that by going to the Store Settings page in Printify and then the Branding tab. 

Alright one more update for both Printify and Printful. I recently published a video about this as well so I’ll link to it in the episode description and on the blogpost. Both Printify and Printful now allow you to choose to change your mockups to display in the CMYK color profile rather than RGB. Both platforms still recommend uploading your designs in the RGB color profile. 

That’s it for print provider news this month, and because we had so many updates this month. 

Niche Ideas & Seasonal Trends

I few weeks back I published a video all about Q4 prep and the types of calendar reminders that I use to keep myself on top of things. I would suggest checking that video out if you’re feeling like you need to get organized for Q4. Pretty soon we’ll be talking about potential shipping delays or production delays as we get into the busier sales time, so getting organized ahead of that is always a good idea. 

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.