Jeff here for POD insights, your source for print on demand seller tips, resources and industry news. In this episode we’ve got the October 2022 print on demand update. We’ll be covering everything you need to know to prepare for the rush of Q4 sales and all that comes along with it, including promotions, production and shipping delays, customer service, and we’ll also be talking about Printify price increases and we’ll answer some questions from recent YouTube videos so stick around and let’s dive into the October update.
Etsy News
In Etsy news this month, I don’t have anything huge but do want to mention one thing I noticed on my seller dashboard recently. Etsy is offering some virtual “workshops” that you can attend as live events and you can also watch the videos of the prior workshops. Normally I tend to ignore this kind of thing because they are usually focused on sellers of physical products that are custom-made by hand or vintage items. However there are some relevant topics for print on demand sellers as well and in full disclosure, I haven’t watched one yet but I thought I would at least mention the topics that are out there. On October 12th they have a workshop on SEO that says it will explain how Etsy search works as well as Google search. They have another workshop on October 13th that’s just called “Holiday Prep”. They also had one on October 11th about understanding seller fees. So a lot of these topics are relevant for all Etsy sellers and if you’re interested, you can check out the videos for any prior workshops or watch upcoming sessions live. You may see this as one of the messages on your seller dashboard but I’ll also link to it in the blogpost for this episode on podinsights.net. I will also watch a couple of them myself and then report back in the next monthly update if I find anything particularly helpful.
Print Provider News
In print provider news this month, we have another price increase to deal with. This one is for Printify print providers and is effective from October 11th. We might as well mention the US shipping surcharge here as well because it applies to all print on demand platforms that I know of, but first let’s just discuss the Printify price changes a little bit. There are a lot of print providers included in this round of prices changes, and unfortunately it applies to some of our core products. I’m not going to go through all of them because that would take quite a while, but I want to point out the ones that likely impact a lot of us.
Let’s start with Monster Digital, who I use for a lot of my fulfillment on t-shirts, sweatshirts, and hoodies in the US. The prices for Gildan 5000 heavy blend t-shirts is going up for both free and premium accounts less than a dollar but the increase varies for the different sizes. The premium price for sizes S to XL is now $7.18, an increase of $0.47. The Gildan 18000 heavy blend sweatshirt is going up just over a dollar for sizes S to XL, with the premium price now $13.91. The heavy blend hoodie is also going up over a dollar with the premium price for S to XL now $16.84. The Bella Canvas 3001 t-shirt now has a base price of $9.00 for S to XL, which is an increase of less than a dollar. The increases on the sweatshirts and hoodies is the biggest impact here because a dollar in increase on something that had a total cost over $20 already definitely makes a difference in your profit margin, and it doesn’t help that this is coming at the same time as the seasonal US shipping surcharge of $0.40 to $0.50 on every order.
In the US, print providers SwiftPOD, The Dream Junction, Drive Fulfillment, and Awkward Styles are all also part of the price increases. If you use Printify, you should have gotten an email or two from them within the last month but I will also link directly to the price increase listing in the blogpost for this episode on podinsights.net. So are these increases enough to justify increasing your prices? Well, that depends. If you absorbed a few of the other price increases we endured earlier this year without increasing your prices, there’s a good chance your profit margins are getting pretty thin at this point and you definitely should check the new prices against your retail prices using an Etsy fee calculator to check the profit margin. You don’t want to go into the highest order volume of the year in November and December with super thin margins because you’ll of course be missing out on profits but you also won’t be able to run sales or promotions if your margins don’t support it. We’ll talk more about sales & promotions for Q4 in our next segment but just wanted to mention that here.
In addition to the price increases, as I mentioned we also are now in the period of the year when the US imposes shipping surcharges on all shipments. This is supposed to help offset the increased cost of overtime for shipping carrier workers during the busiest season of the year, among other expenses. I guess I’d rather pay a little more and not have total gridlock with shipping times, but it’s still not fun. This year, the surcharge in the US runs from October 2nd to January 23rd, and the fee is $0.40 for all shipments under 1lb and $0.50 for shipments over 1 lb. That is up from a flat $0.30 for all shipments last year. Printify does have a help page on this topic so I’ll link to that in the blogpost for this article. This is one that we can’t do anything about and it’s temporary, so I personally just take the hit each year and don’t factor it into my pricing. But if you’re already increasing your prices because of the product price increases, you could just add a little bit of buffer and round prices up.
Alright, let’s get into our big topic for October, preparing your shop for Q4.
Q4 Prep
This month, we’re going to replace the what’s new with me and seasons niche updates & ideas sections with a special segment on Q4 prep. We’re still going to do the Q&A segment with some more recent questions from the YouTube channel, so stick around for that but first, October is a great month to prepare for some logistics in your print on demand shop. Up to this point, you’ve been working on creating new listings in preparation for the rush of Q4 sales, but there’s more to prepare and consider and October is a good time for it. There’s a lot going on in Q4 besides increased sales, I think we’re all familiar with the shipping delays and issues that become common as we move from November into December leading up to the Christmas holiday, but it’s also common for production times to increase as well so the overall time it takes for a customer to receive orders can increase quite a bit and communication to customers is important. You also should have a general game plan for what promotions you plan to run for your shop and how you’ll promote them (pun intended). Let’s tackle the shipping and production times topic first because there are multiple things you can and should do to both prepare and react.
On the preparation side of things, we need to consider both production times and shipping times, as well as a specific shipping cutoff date. I want to preface this whole section by saying that I’m speaking mostly to the US market when I mention any specific dates or timing because that’s where I’m located and where most of my customers are. The specific impacts to shipping and production times for print on demand fulfillment in other countries may be a little different. Most shipping carriers in the US will publish a cutoff date where they will no longer guarantee delivery before Christmas. It will also vary by the shipping method, with the lower-cost, economy and standard shipping methods having an earlier cutoff and the expedited methods having a later cutoff. Generally, the cutoffs will range from December 5th to the 12th for standard methods and maybe up to the 18th or so for more expedited methods. Deliveries will still occur up until the holiday, but they don’t guarantee on-time delivery after those dates. It’s important for us to be aware of these dates because if the carrier won’t guarantee delivery before the holiday, neither should we.
shipstation.com
It’s also worth mentioning that you can also make your own cutoff dates for your shop. For example, if your print on demand providers use several different carriers and some have a cutoff of December 10th and others have a cutoff of December 12th, you can simply tell your customers that you can no longer guarantee delivery before Christmas after December 10th. For international shipping where the print provider is located in a different country than the customer, the cutoff is usually much earlier, such as December 1st. For my shop, I usually just say that international orders placed after November 30th and domestic US orders placed after December 10th cannot be guaranteed for delivery before Christmas, but I still check the dates that the shipping carriers put out there each year to make sure that still works. Some orders will still arrive before the holiday after those dates, but the key here is that you don’t want a ton of customers emailing you on December 23rd saying they want a refund because nobody ever told them their order wouldn’t arrive in time. So you want to do everything possible to communicate this information to customers. I communicate the cutoff dates on my shop homepage with an announcement message, and I also add it to the top of all my listing descriptions using the bulk edit tool on the listings page in the shop dashboard. It’s also pretty easy to remove it using the bulk edit tool after Christmas. I usually do this the weekend after Thanksgiving each year. The last place that I add the cutoff dates is in the order receipt email message. My goal is to do everything I possibly can to make it clear that they are taking a risk if they order something after those dates and want it before the holiday. It also serves as some protection because they can’t claim I didn’t give any type of warning about delivery times. But the cutoff dates are not the only thing that we can update.
The second thing you can and should adjust in Q4 is your estimated production and delivery times in your shipping profiles. Both the production time and delivery time will slow down in Q4, at least in the US. I’ve sent personal packages in December via USPS Priority to a location that normally only takes 2-3 days maximum and have seen it take up to 6 business days, and that’s not an economy method. Does it sound like manual work? Well it is because Etsy doesn’t give us a way to update this in a bulk format. Especially if you use a lot of different shipping profiles. But if you’ve set up your shipping profiles so that they are in categories for like items, like one for t-shirts, one for mugs, one for hoodies and sweatshirts, etc. then it shouldn’t take too long to update them. If your shipping profiles have an actual specific shipping method selected, like USPS first class mail, then you don’t need to change the estimated delivery time because Etsy will automatically use their own estimates based on the method. However if you use the “other” option for the shipping method, it’s a good idea to add a day or two to the maximum time. You also want to give yourself some buffer in the production times because that will start to get delayed as volume picks up. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a lot of orders that ship 1-2 days after they are “due” according to Etsy and then they are considered “late” which hurts your shop reputation with Etsy – it’s also a criteria of the star seller program. You can manually update individual orders to push out the estimated ship date, and you’ll likely still have to do that here and there in Q4, but you’ll have to do it way less if you add a couple days to the estimated production time. I use a two-phased approach for this. On November 1st, I go into my shipping profiles and add 1-2 days to the max production times. I do this because you never know when a particular print provider will start running into delays, and adding 1-2 days will not significantly deter any sales – meaning it won’t make the delivery look too slow to prevent people from buying. For example, my t-shirt shipping profile is usually set to estimated production time of 2-4 business days because my average throughout the year is 2-3 days. On November first I bump that to 3-6 or maybe 3-7 business days. This provides buffer for when things start to slow down or if my main print provider has a backup.
November is also the time to start paying attention to Printify’s print provider status page. They usually will send an email or two in Q4 reminding you to check that page out for up to date information on production delays for all their print providers. You may not be impacted by significant delays, or you might not be so lucky, so it’s a good idea to save that page as a favorite during this time of year. Phase two of my approach to updating shipping profiles happens on the shipping cutoff date, unless I’m impacted by a delay with one of my specific print providers first. If you find that you have a provider with a significant delay, you should update that shipping profile right away of course. But assuming I don’t have to do that, then once I get to the shipping cutoff date that I put all over my shop, I go back into my shipping profiles and make one more update. I again add a couple days to the max production time, so my t-shirt profile will say 4-10 business days of production time. And if the shipping method is “other” I will add a couple more days to both the min and the max delivery time. This helps tell shoppers at this point that it’s unlikely the order will arrive before Christmas. My personal opinion is that if I have a choice between getting an order from someone who is going to complain when their order doesn’t arrive before Christmas or getting no order at all, I’d rather have no order at all. So by pushing the production and shipping times out as well as putting shipping cutoff dates all over the place, I’m trying to prevent getting orders from anyone who would message me a couple days before the holiday asking for a refund. If someone wants to place an order because they don’t mind receiving it after Christmas, that’s great.
Before we leave this topic let me just explain quickly what exactly updating the shipping profiles does in terms of the customer view. On every Etsy listing in the shipping section, Etsy provides the customer with an estimated delivery date. They combine your production time range and the estimated shipping time range to give the customer a range of estimated delivery dates. For example, if your production range is 2-4 days and the shipping range is 3-5 days, and if you assume today is November 1st, then Etsy will show an estimated delivery range of November 6th to the 10th. By adding to your estimated production time and shipping time, you’re pushing out the estimated delivery date that Etsy shows the customer. At a certain point (for me it’s the cutoff date of December 10th), you actually want that estimated date to be December 26th or later because you want it to be crystal clear that it’s not likely for the order to be delivered before Christmas. You can actually make changes to your shipping profile and then just go look at one of your listings to see what estimated delivery date it shows to confirm it’s what you want it to be at that point in time. If it sounds like I’m trying to discourage sales after December 10th, I guess that’s one way to look at it. But again, the way I look at it is that If you don’t make it as clear as possible, you’re taking a risk of getting sales from people who expect their order to arrive before Christmas and then you end up having to cancel or refund them when it doesn’t happen just to avoid having a bunch of complaints against your shop. So personally I’d rather just not get the sales during this time unless the customer is ok with receiving it after Christmas. And plenty of customers are, so this should not result in you getting zero sales in December by any means.
There’s one more thing that I do in the last few days before Christmas, and some of you are probably going to think this is overkill, but that’s ok. I’m just sharing what I do and you need to make your own decisions as business owners, but since it might help someone or give you an idea, I’m going to put it out there. From December 20th to the 23rd, I send a message to every customer who places an order, and I hold every order for 24hrs. I save the message text as a preset so I just click the “send message” button on each order, click on the saved reply, then click send. In my message, I tell the customer that I want to make sure they are aware their order will not arrive before Christmas, and to please contact me within 24hrs if they want to cancel. If they don’t write back, the order is submitted to production 24hrs later. If you use automatic order submission on your print on demand platform, most of them offer the option to automatically hold orders for 24hrs before submitting so you don’t need to do it manually. You may be wondering…is this necessary? Surely someone couldn’t assume an order they placed on December 22nd would arrive before Christmas, especially when the estimated delivery on the listing clearly showed a date well after…right? Well this won’t be news to you if you’ve been a seller through a Christmas season before but if this is going to be your first, let me be the first to tell you that some customers don’t read anything before buying stuff online. That’s right, I’ve done this for the last two years and both times I got some responses asking to cancel the order. That means they assumed it was going to arrive in less than 5 days with basic economy shipping at the busiest shipping time of year and they completely ignored the delivery estimate in the listing as well as the message in the description. So for me, this is not overkill and it helps prevent those angry Christmas-eve messages asking for refunds because something didn’t arrive in time, and that’s worth the effort in my opinion.
A video walk-thru of all this information for production & shipping times is below:
Phew, now that we have a plan for production and shipping times in Q4, let’s talk about promotions and promoting those promotions.
You definitely want to have a plan for any promotions that you plan to run in Q4, because you’ll want to share those promotions in advance with your social media followers and email subscribers. Running a “flash sale” in your shop and not sharing it anywhere might trigger a few more impulse-buys from customers who were already on the platform during that time, but it won’t increase traffic to your shop. When you raise awareness about your promotion more broadly, it can increase traffic as well as help make some additional sales.
Of course, the big promotion events are Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. You can choose to participate in all, some, or none of them. It’s totally up to you. If you are getting a high amount of sales already, you may not want or need to give deep discounts. You can also participate without giving “doorbuster” deals. If you don’t regularly run sales in your shop, a simple 15% off sale or coupon code can be enough. You don’t need to offer 30% off and cut your profit per order down to pennies. If you do frequently run sales in your shop, consider giving just a slightly higher percentage off if you want to do a promotion for one of the big days or the whole weekend. Personally, I frequently have my listings at 15% off, so I do a Black Friday promotion for 20% off for the general public, and 25% coupon code for email subscribers only. I only do that 25% off one time per year because it’s a pretty big hit to profits with my pricing structure, so that’s why I restrict it to my email subscribers which are all past customers. You could choose to ignore Black Friday and Cyber Monday and really leverage Small Business Saturday since we’re all small business owners, as I mentioned it’s all up to you and what you feel is a good fit for your shop. You can also choose to add your own promotions outside the big ones too. For example you could do a “get it in time for Christmas sale” the first weekend of December before the shipping cutoff dates. All of these promotions can be scheduled in advance in your Etsy seller dashboard. However the one thing I will put out there is something I mentioned in a previous episode – in my experience on Etsy, at this time of year when people are primarily shopping for gifts vs. themselves, I have not seen a significant difference in sales volume during weeks where I was running a sale vs. when I was not, excluding Black Friday. So if the sales volume may not be that much higher, you could choose to just keep your profit margins higher and not run additional sales. Of course, a well-executed and communicated promotion can definitely increase traffic to your shop as I mentioned, so your experience may not match mine depending on your brand and your followers.
Once you plan out what sales or promotions you want to run and when, you can work on some marketing materials like social media posts and emails to get them ready. You can even schedule them in advance if you use a tool like Canva’s social media calendar or another tool to schedule social media posts. Email marketing tools like AWeber and Alura can also schedule an email campaign for you ahead of time. Usually a series of communications is better than just one. For example, if you’re doing a Black Friday coupon code just for email subscribers, you can send them an email on the Monday before with a “preview” message. Let them know to be on the lookout for an email with a coupon code later this week. Then schedule the actual email with the coupon code to go on Thanksgiving so they have it before Black Friday. You could even do more than that, as much as a week in advance of the promotion kind of give a teaser in an email about it. The point is that the more awareness there is, the less likely they are to miss the promotion and the more likely you are to get more traffic to your shop during the promotion. The same goes for social media. Drop some hints in your posts that a special sale is coming for Black Friday several days in advance and keep doing that right up until the post sharing the sale information.
Taking some time to plan all this out in October will mean you can enjoy the holidays with your family and friends while pre-scheduled posts and emails go out and help generate sales, and after recovering from eating too much turkey on Thanksgiving you can get to updating your shipping profiles and shop messages for December. My first holiday season in 2020 I really didn’t have much of a plan and pretty much everything I did was last-minute or in reaction to issues that came up. The 2021 season I was much better prepared and found it a lot less stressful by planning things out the way I described, so I hope this has helped you feel a little more prepared as well.
Q&A
It’s time to answer some questions, for this episode I’ve got two more fro the YouTube channel. I was going to pull three but this episode is already a bit longer with all the Q4 prep conversation so we’ll keep it to two this month.
Question #1 comes from Illona on the video about creating combination listings using Printify SKUs to add multiple product variants into one Etsy listing. The question was about using customized variants within a listing to offer bundles or packs of a product with pre-determined pricing, and whether there is a way to have orders for something like that sync with your Printify account. So for example, if you sell stickers and you have one Etsy listing with say 4 different sticker designs that all have the same theme, you could have separate product variants for each of the designs that links back to a Printify SKU but you could also add a variant that says “4 – Pack, one of each design” and then you set the price to be a little bit better than buying one of each separately. Kind of like giving a pre-determined quantity discount to get one of each. The answer to the question is half-yes and half-no. If you could tell from the example I just gave, you can absolutely do this on the Etsy side of things within your listing variants. You can include a variant in the listing that is for a combination or bundle of products and set a separate price for it. As long as you make it clear in the listing images and description what the customer is getting, this can be a great way to offer quantity discounts or bundle packs without having to use a quantity-based promo code. The “no” part of the answer is that unfortunately, there’s no way to automate the order on Printify. You will have to manually update the order to include the correct combination and quantity of products after it comes in. This is because SKU numbers have a 1:1 relationship with product variants on Printify. One SKU can only be associated with one product variant. In other words, you can have an order for multiple of one SKU, but one SKU cannot be associated with multiple things. What we would need to accomplish this would be the ability to create out listings on Printify just like we do today, but then group together products into a bundle listing so that Printify can identify the incoming order as a group of products vs individual variants. I’m sure there’s a way to do this from a programming standpoint, but I also don’t believe it’s as easy in practice as it sounds, otherwise they most likely would already have this feature because I know sellers have requested this feature for a while. So ultimately, you can offer a bundle or pack to customers on Etsy by creating separate variants within your listing, but you will have to manually edit and submit the orders on Printify, at least for now. I will definitely make a video on the YT channel if they come out with this feature, or if any POD platform does.
Question #2 is about updating the stock status of your products on Printify listings. The question came from YouTube viewer Bare Bones on the video I recently posted about Printify embroidered beanie hats. If you haven’t seen that one, I’ll embed it in the blogpost for this episode on the website. The embroidery from MyLocker came out pretty nice and I also walked through converting your designs to the available thread colors. Back to the question – they wanted to know what the process is to update the stock status of product variants in your listings when something goes out of stock. I thought this question was a good one to talk about because I personally handle this differently for a product like the embroidered hats vs. something like t-shirts or sweatshirts. But first let’s just level-set on the main issue here – Printify does not do a continuous/ongoing sync between your Printify account and your Etsy listings. The information in the Etsy listing is static – it will not change unless you republish the product from your Printify account. You can selectively republish certain parts of the listing, such as the mockups, or just the pricing and SKU information. So you can republish just to update the stock status of your variants without impacting the mockups or other aspects of the listing. However you have to do this every time the stock status changes if you really want to stay on top of it, it will not happen automatically. Alternatively, you can also simply use the variant toggle buttons within the Etsy listing instead and not republish from Printify. You just have to remember to go in and turn the variants back on when they are back in stock. For a product like the embroidered hats, doing this is a lot more necessary in my opinion – the reason being that there is only one print provider on Printify for embroidered hats. So if the black unisex hat is out of stock, you can’t simply place the order with a different provider on Printify. You would have to go outside Printify to another platform like Printful and hope they have the exact same hat available if you keep getting orders while it’s out of stock. That’s not a fun situation so it’s definitely worth disabling the variant in the listing to avoid getting orders until its back in stock. However, the same is not true for products like t-shirts. If you sell a Gildan 5000 or Bella Canvas 3001 t-shirt, there are lots of providers on Printify who carry the same sizes and colors, and most of them have prices that won’t totally destroy your profit margins if you need to place a few orders with someone other than your primary provider. So I personally don’t bother updating the variants in my listings for t-shirts unless something happens where several print providers all are out of stock of the same thing. If it’s just my main provider (which is Monster Digital) who is out of stock but I can go get it from another provider like SwiftPOD or Drive Fulfillment in the meantime without taking a big hit on profit, then I find it easier to manually update the orders rather than manually update the listing and then have to remember to go update it again later. The last thing I’ll say on this for now is that this is not the way it works with Printful – Printful does have an ongoing sync between your account and the Etsy listings. There is a setting in your Printful account under Settings > Stores > Orders and the “Sync as you go” section, where you can check off a box to have the stock status of your listings updated automatically. It will only update the stock status when a variant is out of stock for over 24hrs, and it will automatically update it again when it’s back in stock. Hopefully this is a future feature of Printify as well, but for now we have to manually make any necessary updates for listings with Printify.
If you have a question that you’d like me to answer and consider including in the next monthly update, go to podinsights.net and use the contact form at the bottom of the homepage to email me. You can also post a question on any video on the YouTube channel.
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.