If you’re selling print on demand products online, especially on the Etsy platform, you should be offering your designs on mugs. Mugs make terrific gifts, and customers search for mugs consistently throughout the year, not just in the fourth quarter. Want to know more about why mugs are a must-have in your Etsy print on demand store? Stick around let’s talk about it.
What’s so great about mugs?
T-shirts are the first thing many people think of when considering products to sell in a print on demand business. However, mugs offer some distinct benefits over apparel items. But what makes mugs so great from a print on demand standpoint? The main benefit of mugs is that in my experience, they result in fewer customer service issues. The only real issues that come up when selling mugs are physical damage, such as cracks or chips that can happen during shipping, or print quality issues. Generally, print on demand suppliers will catch print quality issues but sometimes they slip through, just like they do on apparel. The good news is that if there is a defect with the print or physical damage that occurred during shipping, print on demand platforms are usually very easy to work with to get replacement. I’ve used the support channels with Printify, Printful, and Gooten for mugs and other drinkware for these types of issues and all three have quickly assisted in getting a replacement made. Mugs just don’t run into problems with customers who bought the wrong size and want to return or exchange, or just aren’t happy with the fit of something. You just have to make sure that your mug designs are properly aligned to come out centered on the print area, and generally speaking the customer will be happy with it. That means less work for you compared to apparel items. But, this is only relevant if there is high demand for mugs that will provide consistent sales opportunities, so let’s talk about demand for mugs.
Demand for Mugs
In theory you could run an entire print on demand Etsy shop only offering mugs. In fact, I may open a new shop just to try that. I certainly wouldn’t be the first one to do it, but it would be nice to have that type of consistency in a shop. The reason this could be successful is that there is consistent demand for mugs.
Sale Samurai is an Etsy keyword research tool that I use to check out search volume and competition for keyword phrases. It helps me identify lower competition search terms to use on my listings as well as identify new niches that have sales opportunities. Sale Samurai indicates that in a given month, there are over 26k searches for just the term “mug” or “mugs”. Of course, you should never use a single word for your keyword tags or titles, I’m just saying there are lots of monthly searches for mugs on Etsy. You also don’t need nearly that much monthly search volume to make sales if you can find lower competition niche. If you identify a niche with only a few hundred current competing listings (as opposed to the 50k+ that show up for “mug”) just a few hundred searches per month is enough for customers to see your listing. Once you get more specific with keywords in your title and tags, you can show up in several relevant search phrases.
In 2021, my Etsy shop sold 784 mugs, out of 3,934 sales. That’s 20% of my sales for the year and mugs make up about 19% of my shop’s listings, so they are absolutely pulling their weight in terms of being worth the time it took to list them. The best part about this, which again, has a benefit over apparel items, is that the profit margin I’m getting is higher. So when you consider that, it really means that it’s more worth my time to add new mug listings than other products, unless of course I can find a way to increase my profit margin on other products.
Print on Demand Selection & Pricing
Most print on demand platforms have some mug options for you to choose from. Printify and Printful, two of the largest platforms, have you covered when it comes to mugs. Printify currently has several types of ceramic mugs to choose from with a 11oz and 15oz size options in basic white and black, as well as a couple more unique styles like a metal enamel camp-style mug. The basic options are available from providers in the US as well as some additional countries for international orders. Printful also offers basic mugs although their selection is a little smaller than Printify and prices are a little higher.
Right now I use Printify provider District Photo and their cost with the premium plan is $3.56 for a white 11oz mug and $4.79 for shipping. That’s $8.35 total cost per mug. I sell them for $13.99 plus $3.00 shipping, and after all Etsy fees this nets me a profit of $6.58 or 39%. Even when I put them on sale for 10% off, this still provides a profit of 34%. And customers are not hesitant to buy at those prices. One tip I learned is that you really don’t need to put them on sale in the fourth quarter in the US, because customers are so eager to find cute gifts for friends and family they will not hesitate to pay $13.99 plus $3.00 shipping. I made nearly the same number of sales in Q4 in weeks where I did not put them on sale vs. weeks when I did.
Customers love the basic white coffee mug in 11oz and 15oz sizes. I also sell some of the black mugs, which I recommend for lighter-colored designs or white text. I also sell a good amount of insulated steel tumblers that I get from Gooten, and to some extent I’d group them together as drinkware but they are a different price point than regular coffee mugs and the search volume is not quite as high.
One downside with mugs is that they tend to be expensive to ship, even domestically because of their weight. But this is especially true when it comes to international orders if you are shipping between countries. This is where selling mugs has a drawback – if you want to offer mugs to international customers, you need to look at your platform and print provider’s costs carefully. Let’s say you’re a seller based in the US and use print provider My Locker to sell white 11oz mugs. Normally they charge $5.50 for domestic shipping (as of March 2022) but if you have to ship the same mug to Canada, the shipping charge is $12.00. The mug itself only costs $5.30, so that shipping charge is huge. And on top of that, if your shipping profile is set up to charge more for shipping to Canada, the customer may not even make the purchase because you’d have to charge at least $8-10 to get most of that cost back, which could make the total price seem unreasonable. Lastly, international shipping is not fast. It can take 2+ weeks for a package to get through customs and be delivered even if it’s not traveling to a different continent, and that will further annoy a customer who may already be thinking they paid too much. Printify does have a mug provider located in Canada who could cut down on the shipping time, which is good, but their price currently ends up being almost the same as shipping from a US provider unfortunately so that doesn’t help us offer a competitive price. Printful’s current shipping price for an 11oz mug in Canada is $8.95, but the staring price of the mug is higher, so the total cost still comes out to about the same compared to Printify. So what can we do if we want to offer mugs for sale to customers in Canada but not charge so much for shipping?
If you’re comfortable with having more than one POD platform, this is where Gelato can help. Gelato has print providers located in over 30 countries and they offer some of the best international shipping rates for mugs that I’ve found. Their current price for an 11oz white mug shipped to Canada is $5.46 plus $9.18 shipping, for a total cost of $14.65. It may only be $2-3 less than the other platforms, but that $2-3 reduction could be the difference between a competitive price, and one that seems unreasonable to the customer. Consider this – if you were a customer in Canada, would you purchase a mug that cost $13.99 plus $8.99 shipping or one that cost $13.99 plus $11.99 shipping? That’s only a $3 difference, but seeing a number under 10 is more appealing. And technically, I don’t pass along the entire shipping cost on my US mug pricing, so I could offer $6.99 shipping to Canada to get to the same profit margin as my US orders and that seems very reasonable.
Design Flexibility & Niches
Other than Q4 always being busy, the great thing about mugs is they really don’t have a “season” because they are well suited as being a gift item for any holiday, birthday, anniversary, or other occasion. Of course, there can be seasonality to certain designs.
Let’s say you create a hundred listings that are all types of “mom” mugs. Meaning mugs that have designs like “world’s best mom” and other mom-themed sayings or graphics. While all moms have birthdays throughout the year and you will make some consistent sales, there are two semi-seasons for this type of mug design. Right before mothers day (in May in the US) and right before Christmas, these mugs become extra-popular gift items where interest peaks. The same is true of “dad” themed mugs, which peak in popularity around father’s day and Christmas. The way you get to consistent sales year-round is by diversifying your mug designs. Mugs do have some types of designs that have more a neutral seasonality to them, and that would be more general designs. In recent years, mugs that have positivity themed sayings or inspirational messages on them have become popular, and these can sell at any time of year.
So if there is some seasonality of designs to keep in mind, how is it really different than apparel? Well, in addition to seasonality of the design, apparel items can have their own inherent seasonality too. Depending on the weather patterns of the geographic location, customers tend to wear things like t-shirts in warmer months and sweatshirts or hoodies in cooler months, so sales volume of these items also tends to follow trends with the weather season in addition to timing of holidays or events. With mugs, there’s no difference between warm months and cold months or anything like that. That makes it simpler for you to plan out your designs because you have fewer decisions to make. For example, if you want to make Christmas themed apparel, do you offer it on a t-shirt? Or do you only do it on warmer clothing because it’s a cool time of year for a large percentage of the US? No time or effort is spent on this type of question for mugs. Because there is only one type of seasonality to consider, you can more easily plan out a variety of designs for consistent sales throughout the year.
There are basically two ways to apply a design to traditional mugs – a full wraparound print, or centered on each side. The full wraparound style can be used for wide designs that won’t fit on one side, however they can be a little difficult to display in mockup photos. A design that is centered on the left/right sides of a mug can be printed on one side only or on both sides. I’ve seen comments in my customer reviews that indicate customers like it when the design is printed on both sides, so it can be appreciated by both right-handed and left-handed individuals. Most of the mugs in my Etsy shop feature the same design centered on both sides. Generally I find that most designs I create for t-shirts or sweatshirts also work well on mugs. Most design niches have some level of demand for mugs. Of course, there are exceptions but any design that could be given as a gift could be used on a mug since mugs tend to be popular gift items. In my experience it can be a little tough to use round or circular-style design on mugs. Centering the design on each side of the mug can be a little tough because the curve of the mug combined with the round shape of the design can make it look off-center even if it’s not. Designs that are in landscape format, meaning wide but not tall, don’t work very well on mugs unless they will wrap all the way around both sides. If you need any inspiration for the shape of designs that look good on mugs, the best thing to do is to search Etsy for a few different mug designs and check out the design layout of some top sellers.
Personalized mugs are something people go to Etsy looking for – personalized gifts in general are popular on the Etsy platform. Print on demand products provide a good opportunity to sell personalized items because every item is made to order, so each one can be customized based on your customer’s request. However, that doesn’t mean every POD platform makes it simple for sellers to offer personalized items.
Listing personalized items on Etsy is very easy – within your listing you simply enable personalization and add a brief explanation for the customer. You can make personalization optional or required for the customer. Let’s say that you have a great design featuring a California beach theme and the base design says “California” on it. You could offer the option of personalizing the text to say any specific town or beach name the customer wants, like “Santa Cruz” or “Long Beach”. Some customers will buy it without personalization, but you’ll also capture the sales from customers who were looking for a personalized item. If you use Printful as your POD platform, you can enable a specific setting in your account to hold personalized orders as a draft so that you can manually customize the design before sending it to production. The great thing is, Printful has a workflow which steps you through personalizing the design for that one order that does not alter the master print file for your listing, and at the same time any orders coming through that don’t have personalization applied will go straight into production so you don’t have to manually touch every order. It’s a very nice setup and works very well for selling personalized items. Printify on the other hand, does not have this option or workflow. You can sell personalized items through Printify, and I do in my own Etsy shop, but it takes a little extra work compared to Printful. The most burdensome aspect is that you cannot choose to hold only personalized orders with Printify, at least not currently. This means you either have orders automatically submitted to production or you have all orders held as a draft until you manually submit each one. The longest hold period for automatic order submission is 24hrs, which would give you 24hrs to customize an order before it is automatically submitted. This may be plenty of time for you, but if you accidentally go over 24hrs, the order will be submitted without the personalization and you may not be able to cancel it. For this reason I use the manual order submission on all my Printify orders in case I need to personalize them. You also need to swap the item within the order for one that you’ve personalized in order to avoid editing your master listing, and there’s no automated workflow for that. It sounds like more work than it really is though.
Gooten also has an account setting to hold personalized orders as drafts. Their workflow is not quite as intuitive as Printful’s, but they do allow you to change the print file on the ordered item without affecting your master listing which is nice. Gelato doesn’t currently have an account setting to hold personalized orders from Etsy. They do have a customer-facing personalization feature that works with other integrations like Shopify, where customers can upload their own images to personalize an item, like uploading a photo to be printed on a mug. That’s a pretty cool feature to have if you sell through your own website.
Conclusion
I hope the information I covered today made the case for you to consider offering print on demand mugs in your Etsy shop, or to put more focus into mugs if you were already selling them. I believe they offer a great business opportunity for all POD sellers due to their popularity and broad range of designs you can use with them. That’s it for this episode – for more on selling mugs using the Printify platform including a review of three popular types of mugs, check out the video below from my YouTube channel.
Thanks for reading.