A New Beginning - Print on Demand $0 to $100k EP. 13

it's been a crazy couple of weeks since the last update video we've started making some money again I had to start up a brand new socket store that's also started making some money and we might be forced to switch over to Shopify completely I'm trying to start a brand new print on demand shop going from zero to a hundred thousand dollars within a year and it has not been easy we've been hit with challenge after Challenge and it's nothing like what I thought it was going to be early on see we started off the challenge easy I opened the original shop on November 2nd of 2020. within a week of opening that shop we got our first sale which led me to believe that this entire challenge would be easy after just the first month in business we were able to do over five thousand three hundred dollars in sales and then we ran into our first set of challenges see around Christmas time we had a bunch of Express orders get lost in the mail because the print provider who is handling those orders the dream Junction was shipping them out with this really weird t-force tracking it's basically like Dollar Tree shipping and they lost all of the orders they were handling in total we probably lost 30 orders so because of all of the orders that we had to refund our ratings with Etsy plummeted and on top of that it was the end of the holiday season but regardless of what was happening I stuck to the plan and I kept posting new products every single day and it was paying off we had a pretty successful January which is typically the slowest month of the year doing about Seventeen hundred dollars but that's also right when I made my biggest mistake see I accidentally leaked the shop name for a couple of seconds in one of the videos that I put out at the beginning of the year and a few hundred of the people who saw that video went to the shop on Etsy and decided it was a good idea to copy the listings and post them for sale in their own shops this smothered all of the listings that I was successfully selling essentially killing the shop I felt kind of down about it for about a month and then I just went back to posting with the genius idea of adding a watermark to all of the listings that I was posting my thought was that this would make it harder for people to copy and steal the listings directly this has seemed to be working as we've started to see some progress over the past couple weeks and that brings us to today now I know I didn't make it super clear in the last video but I had gone back to posting regularly new products to the original store just with watermarks all over the images I was uploading roughly 30 products a day with all of those measures that I've mentioned like the watermarks just trying to make the listings harder to steal and I got up to over a thousand listings on the original shop to get 30 products up I'm using my Photoshop script which I've already released and the product uploader which is still a work in progress It's not finished yet and I'm still looking for a Java developer to help me finish it so if you're a Java developer let me know with a thousand products posted regardless of my experience level even if I was a brand new beginner and I sucked I should see some kind of consistent sales coming in just based on sheer volume I should have some regular sales coming in and actually since the last last video this month hasn't been terrible we're actually somehow still making a little bit of money you can see that we've done almost thirteen hundred dollars this month now the traffic that you see down here the 32 percent it's coming from the people who saved the link or the link to the shop or they're still finding some of those older listings and coming to check and see what I'm doing but however they're finding it we still managed to get 34 orders which in my opinion isn't too bad considering the conditions this brought our conversion rate up to just one percent and in total we made 1288 dollars this month or over the last 30 days but again this is not nearly where we should be with over a thousand listings posted so it definitely feels like the shop has been run over by a truck a few times and you can really feel the damage so on this original shop we're sitting at nine thousand six hundred and sixty nine dollars for all-time sales and I say this shop for a reason I read a lot of the comments on the last update video and almost everybody agree that it seemed like a pretty good idea to start over with a completely brand new second shop and so that's exactly what I did now as you can see the results are fairly interesting so I started the shop a day after I posted the last update video on May 4th and I spent about a weekend uploading as many products as I could again starting over completely from scratch and I was able to get a couple hundred listings up over the course of those three days I really did spend a lot of time on this because I wanted to jump start the business as much as possible because we are not on track to hit our goal of a hundred thousand dollars so I posted a few hundred products for sale and I know that sounds like crazy but I am using those automation scripts that I mentioned earlier again with new mock-ups new products new info charts descriptions and everything so really there isn't anything that people should be able to copy or any way that people should be able to find the shop as for what's happened you probably already saw this chart that and saw that I did already make three sales in the last 13 days which is super exciting we got one sale on the 10th one on the 12th and one on the 14th so evenly spaced which is weird and between the three orders we did over 229 dollars I'm guessing that that was all due to the sheer amount of listings that I posted all at once yeah so I'm just gonna add this total onto the running total from the other shop so that we can keep everything organized now getting those three sales was honestly super exciting and it's probably what I should have done a couple months ago instead of just sitting around doing nothing but of course there is a cherry on top see anytime there's a new shop I feel like there's always issues that come along with it so I got the regular email from Etsy saying that the funds were going to be withheld because it was a new high risk shop and that's whatever I'm used to getting those emails but I got a weirder email from Etsy that was saying that since I had made over 250 dollars in total including tax and shipping and everything I needed to update my taxpayer information other otherwise they would suspend my seller account now I thought this was super strange but nevertheless I went in to edit my taxpayer information and for some reason they have no taxpayer ID on file that's basically where my social security number or my Ein would go again no big deal because I'll just go in and edit it and I have to be careful here with what I show on the internet but when I go in to edit it they have my name locked on one line so my full name is not on two lines like it should be and they gray out the document upload whenever I try to submit a change and when I try to change just the social security number it'll say that there was an error saving my taxpayer information please try again so I can't fix my name I can't fix my name and my number and I can't fix just the number now I emailed the Etsy support team and went back and forth with several emails and they basically just informed me that I needed to delete the cache or my history from my browser update my browser refresh wait 24 hours and I've tried all of those things and it's still won't allow me to update my information so at the moment if I keep growing and using this shop and I reach over the 500 limit they're going to suspend the account now it could be because I already have a few Etsy accounts and they don't want me opening a new one but they don't have it in their rules anywhere of a set number of accounts that you can have so it would be kind of strange if that was the reason here so at the moment I have to decide if I want to invest more time into this second shop that I just opened that could potentially get shut down or if I need to look at my other options pretty much the last chance that I have of saving this challenge is either by getting the account set up properly so that I can use it or switching the entire challenge over to Shopify moving the challenge to Shopify would mean that more people from around the world would be able to jump in and try it out since Etsy isn't available in every country but at the same time it's a more expensive and harder game to play we would be reinvesting a lot of the profit from The Challenge that we already have into the store to run ads and drive traffic to it but if that's something that you guys want to see or that's the only option that I'm left with then maybe that's what we'll be doing so again a ton of issues right now but we're still moving forward and we're gonna try and complete the challenge now for those of you who are starting out your businesses I've started a Discord server and it's a great place where you could come and ask your questions to get help if you're stuck on something it's still a work in progress definitely but we're trying to make it better and easier to use and it's free so I'd recommend joining if you haven't already let me know in the comments section what you think we should do with this Challenge and as always I'll see you soon [Music] thank you

Channel: Alek

Views: 58,529

Keywords: ALEK, Alek, Easiest Business to Start in 2023, Easy side hustles, side hustles 2023, easy side hustle, super easy money online, make money online, AI revolution, POD Etsy, Sticker Business, How Much I made, easy 6 figure side hustle, six figure income, online business, Alek Sheffield, Alek Sheffy, ecommerce, passive income ai, passive income side hustle, how much I made, how much they paid me, money, finance, business, side hustle, passive income, passive income dropshipping

Id: ikmstf4yO90

Length: 8min 41sec (521 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023