- Hey, everyone. So on this channel, there is a question that I get asked a lot, and that is this. Sarah, you talk about lots
of print-on-demand websites and apps, Redbubble,
Etsy, Printify, Printful, Merch by Amazon. I'm confused. One day you talk about Redbubble, the next you talk about Printful. Do you just keep changing your mind, or is it because Printful is
now paying you more commissions to talk about them than Redbubble is? I'm confused, Sarah. I just want to know which one is the best. I just want to know what the best one is, so that I can just focus my time on that and stop wasting my time on the others. And look, you know, I understand. So let's settle this once and for all. Drum roll, please.
(drum rolls) The answer as to which is the
best print-on-demand website and app that you should be using is... the one that's right for you. Yes, unfortunately, the truth is, Tailor, there is no best one. Nope. Instead, there are just different ones that suit all different
types of businesses and all types of different goals. And so when I talk about
how to start a T-shirt store for free with a phone,
I'll talk about Redbubble, because I believe that's the
best one to achieve that goal, and when I talk about how to automate a Shopify print-on-demand store, I will talk about Printful and Printify, because I believe that
they are the best ones to achieve that goal. In short, the reason why I talk about different print-on-demand
websites and apps isn't because one is paying me more to talk about them that day. Instead, it's because they
all have different pros and they all have different cons, and so depending on what type
of print-on-demand business that you want to build, you'll want to use different
apps or different websites. There can't just be one
that's perfect for everyone. I mean, you think about it, right? If I'm made a poll on
the channel and asked, "What is better? Or is fruit better or are donuts better?," well, we'd get all sorts of opinions, even though obviously there is
just one correct answer here, since, very clearly, pizza
is superior, much superior. But yes, even though pizza
is clearly the winner, there are still some people out there that will say that as fruit
is both healthy and delicious, that it is therefore clearly the best, and there are some sweet-tooths out there that would say, no, tasty, sugary donuts
are clearly the best. We all have different tastes and wants, and so we all choose the
food that fits our tastes. Well, print-on-demand stores
are very much the same. We all have different things
that we're looking to achieve with our print-on-demand businesses, and so different websites
and apps have been created to help you achieve those specific goals. And so what I've done for this video is I've identified the
five most common goals that I see new business
owners looking to achieve, and I've identified
which websites and apps will help you achieve
those specific goals, so that you can choose the
one that is right for you. And that's important,
because keep in mind, your goals might be very
different from my goals, which means then that, spoiler alert, you're gonna discover
that my personal favorites are Shopify, Printful, and Printify, but just because they're
my personal favorites doesn't mean they should
be your personal favorites. So let's get started by looking
at the first common goal that I see a lot of new
print-on-demand businesses have, and that is this. Goal one: Start a print-on-demand
business for free. Probably the most common goal that I see a lot of new businesses have is that they want to get started for free, with no startup costs or fees, since, well, they're broke, so
they have no money to invest, which is why they want to earn more money. Makes sense, right? And if that's you, you're in luck because there's actually a
wide range of websites and apps that can help you achieve this goal. First up, let's take a look at user-generated
print-on-demand marketplaces where all of the products
on here are designed by the users themselves. Out of these, Redbubble is
overall the biggest and best one. The way that user-generated
marketplaces work like this is simple. First up, you register for a
free account with Redbubble. Next, you upload a trendy picture
or slogan to their website and give it a title, keyword,
and a short description. And then, using their
product creation tool, you digitally place your picture or slogan onto the products that you
think it will look best on. And then you submit your
products to go live. There's no waiting
time, no review process. Your pictures and slogans
go live automatically. Redbubble will store a copy
of the picture or slogan you uploaded in its database and create a product page
for each of the items you selected to sell it on. Now, any of Redbubble's customers browsing through their marketplace will be able to find it and purchase it. And so then every time that
someone comes and buys an item featuring your design, Redbubble
will then print your design onto that product and then
package the product up and then ship it out to the customer. They'll remove the
production and shipping fees from the money the customer paid and pay the rest of the profit to you in the form of a commission. So it's entirely free, because Redbubble never
charges you anything. Instead, they just collect
the money the customer paid and then remove the cost out of it and then pay out the rest
of the profit to you. You just get a commission
check each month. It doesn't get any more free than this, which is why on this channel, you'll often see that
I recommend Redbubble in videos that focus on
choosing a business model that's 100% free, though, of course, Redbubble isn't the only
user-generated marketplace that works like this. Cafe Press is the same,
and it's 100% free, TeePublic is also the
same and it's 100% free, and Zazzle also works the
same, and it's 100% free. And so if you decide to start
a print-on-demand business by utilizing free user-generated
marketplaces and websites, you can list your pictures
and slogans for sale on Redbubble and scale your profits by also choosing to list some
on other similar websites as well. And the next website that's 100% free on the condition that you
set it up in the right way is this website here, Amazon. Now, usually when you list
your items for sale on Amazon, you have to pay a seller account fee, but the exception is if you use their print-on-demand service when adding products to it. It works similar to dedicated user-generated
print-on-demand marketplaces like Redbubble. You come here and upload
a picture or a slogan, and then you choose the product that you think it'll look best on, usually the tried and true T-shirt, and then you make a
product listing for it, giving it a title and a description, featuring a blurb and two bulletpoints, and then you save it. Amazon will now create a
product listing for it, and that product listing will
be live on amazon.com itself. Customers browsing through Amazon looking for fun T-shirts to buy will be able to find it on there, just like any other type of
product listing on the site, and then each time a customer comes and buys one of the T-shirt
designs that you've uploaded, Amazon's merch factory
will print your design onto the T-shirt, package the T-shirt up, and ship it out to the customer. Just like Redbubble, they will remove the cost of production from the money the customer paid and pay you the rest of the
profit as a commission check. And so once again, this is
100% free on the condition that you use Amazon's
print-on-demand service, because you never have to
pay any upfront costs or fees because Amazon just collects
the money the customer pays and then takes out their fees from it and pays you the profit as a commission. And another 100% free
website is Teespring, but it's a very different type of website, and instead of it being
a giant online store like Amazon or a giant online
marketplace like Redbubble, it is instead a website that just lets you set up
your own print-on-demand shop, which you then have to advertise yourself, but that Teespring will manage for you with no upfront costs to start. You simply come and open
a free Teespring account, and then you choose which
products you want to sell in your store, and then you upload your
picture or slogan to it and place it where you
like on the product, set a price for it, and
then save it to your store. All the products you create
will be listed for sale on your storefront. And just like Redbubble
and Merch by Amazon, Teespring take care of the
production and shipping for you. Every time that someone comes
and buys one of the items that you've added into it, Teespring's factory will print your design onto the product, package it up, and then ship it out to the customer. They'll also remove production fees from the money of the customer pays and pay you a commission, so there is zero fees to pay upfront, so it's free to set up. And another website that you can arguably set
up a print-of-demand store for free with is Etsy. I actually have a free video
tutorial on this channel that shows how to set up a
print-on-demand store on Etsy for free. Unlike Redbubble, Amazon,
and Teespring, though, Etsy do not have their own
print-on-demand factory built into the website and app. So what you do is you create
a free seller account on Esty, and then you connect a
dedicated print-on-demand app and print factory, such as Printful or Printify into it. These apps are free to set up. And no, just to clarify,
dedicated print-on-demand apps like Printify and Printful
can't be used by themselves. They have no store
functionality built into them, so you need to be
connected to another store, such as a Shopify or Etsy store, and so once you've connected
it into say your Shopify store, inside of the apps themselves, you can choose which of the
products that they create that you want to sell in your Etsy store, upload your design, and then
place it onto the product, and then you can just push that product directly from the print-on-demand
app into your Etsy store. A product listing for it
will be created on Etsy, and now, every time that
someone comes and buys an item you're selling on there, your print-on-demand app
will see the order and go, yep, let's make it. They'll then print your
design onto the product, package it up, and then
ship it out to the customer. Except here's the thing, right? Unlike the other websites
I've mentioned so far, since, as I've said, you can't just sew directly
through Printful or Printify because they have no store
functionality built into them, that also means that they
can't collect payments, which means then when a customer
comes into your Etsy store and buys an item that you've added with Printful or Printify, it is Etsy that are collecting the money that the customer paid,
not Printful or Printify, so there's no way that these
dedicated print-on-demand apps can just remove the cost of
production out of the money that the customer has paid like Redbubble, since they never actually collected it. Instead, you get charged their
print-on-demand free upfront the moment that the
customer orders the item. So that isn't very free then, if you have to pay this
fee upfront, right? Well, not quite because it
can kind of basically be free to you if you have
access to a credit card. Yes, I use credit cards to pay for all of my print-on-demand costs with Printful and Printify. So for example, let's say a customer buys
this T-shirt from you for $22.95 on Etsy, plus $4 for shipping. Well, it will take one week on average for this payment to clear
into your bank account. So what you do is you pay
Printify $12.55 upfront using your credit card to
make and ship their T-shirt, and then, one week later, when
the money the customer paid arrives into your bank account, you pay off your credit card bill. Most credit cards will
give you four to five weeks to pay off charges before
you accrue interest, so if you have a credit card, selling on Etsy is basically free. But of course, if you
don't have a credit card, you'd have to pay for those
production costs upfront, and it wouldn't be free. So as you can see, if opening up a
print-on-demand store for free is one of your goals, then in many ways, you're quite lucky because
you've got lots of options, but on the other hand,
you're also sort of unlucky because you've got lots of options. How are you supposed to
choose between them all? Well, luckily if you don't want to, you don't actually have to choose, because as far as I'm aware, yes, you can upload your
designs and pictures to all of these websites,
since I don't think that any of them have
exclusivity agreements that you sign when you register, although I still recommend reading each website's terms and
conditions before you get started, just to double-cheek. But you see, here is the thing. Not everyone has the time to upload their designs
to so many websites, and so they have to be selective and choose the best one for
them to get started with, and so what I recommend that you do then is that you keep watching and then you don't just
find one website or app that meets one of your goals, but you find a website or app that meets multiple of your goals. We're gonna cross-goal here
to find the best one for you. And so then, on that
note, the next common goal that I see a lot of
people wanting to achieve in their business is goal number two, start a print-on-demand business
that requires no marketing. So here's the deal, right? Some of us start mind
marketing and advertising. I actually quite enjoy it, and I discuss the ways that I
market and advertise products inside of my free ebook, "The 6 Steps that 6-Figure
Online Stores Follow to Make Over $10,000 a Month," and you'll finally download my free ebook in the video description below. But anyway, back to the video. And here's the thing. While I quite like
marketing and advertising, I absolutely understand that
some people just don't like it. Nope. Instead, they'd rather sell on a print-on-demand marketplace that markets and sells
products for them on autopilot. And so if that is you,
probably the easiest way that you're going to achieve that goal is to choose a website that is
constantly advertising itself and is already very popular, that people are already
coming to every day, looking to buy products, so that you don't have
to market them yourself. Now, out of these, Amazon is clearly the
biggest and the winner, being literally the biggest
e-commerce website in the world, getting billions of visitors each month. Etsy comes up next and is
still extremely popular, getting hundreds of millions
of visitors each month, which isn't quite billions,
but it's still pretty good. And while Redbubble
may not be quite as big as these juggernauts,
it is still pretty big, getting tens of millions of
visitors a month, but yes. This is why the successful
Redbubble stores tend to make hundreds of dollars a month, whereas the successful Etsy stores tend to make thousands of dollars a month. Etsy just bigger and gets more
traffic, whereas Teespring? Not only does it get seven
million visitors a month, but most of that traffic comes from people advertising their own Teespring stores on social media sites like Facebook. So for example, this here is the successful
Engineer Memes Facebook page that opened up a Teespring
store to sell merch onto their fans, and they'll advertise it on
their page to their followers. And so that's the thing
about Teespring, right? Don't sell on here if
you dislike marketing, because it doesn't get much traffic at all outside of the people directly advertising their own products. My advice is to only sell on Teespring if you want to market and
advertise your store yourself. So that's that goal, but now we're gonna
come up to another goal, which, interestingly
enough, does not align well with the previous two goals,
and that is goal number three, start a print-on-demand business
that makes the most money. You think about it. Redbubble, Merch by Amazon, they take care of a lot for you: advertising, marketing,
website maintenance, customer service, production, shipping. And so to pay for all of these things that they're doing for you, they take fees out of the money
that the customer has paid. For example, on Redbubble, if you set a standard a
T-shirt to sell for $20, Redbubble will remove around $17 in fees, leaving you with around $3 in commission. And with Amazon Merch, if you set a standard
T-shirt to sell for $20, they'll remove around $15 in fees, leaving you with around $5 in commission. Now, I very much disagree
with the people who say that these fees are too high, considering that they
take care of everything, especially when you consider
that for most businesses, 18% profit margin is average. But the reality is is
that most of the fees that Redbubble and Amazon charge you are going towards the marketing costs, as it's the biggest cost
in running a business. That's why it seems so high. It's not because it costs
Redbubble $17 to make a T-shirt. It's because they also have
to pay their marketing team and advertising costs, which is why if you learn how
to market products yourself, you can instead opt to open
your own e-commerce website with something like Shopify and market the products yourself, too. In fact, as I explain
in this video or here, which I will link to in the
video description below, my favorite form of marketing
is pretty much free, Google SEO traffic. Because of this, this is easily the most
profitable way to run a store. So here's how a Shopify
print-on-demand store works. I've set up an example one here,
Brewer Treats, to show you. What I've done is I've connected my two favorite dedicated
print-on-demand apps, which are, of course,
Printful and Printify. I then went into each one and
selected my favorite products from their catalog and
uploaded my picture and slogan onto those products and
placed it where I liked it, and then I pushed them to my store. And so now, whenever a customer comes and browses through the
website and decides that, hey, they'll buy a T-shirt from me, each time the customer goes
and purchases that T-shirt with shipping being an additional charge, the print-on-demand app
that I created it with, such as Printify, goes, yep,
we'll charge you the base cost to print and ship that T-shirt. They'll then send the
T-shirt to the print shop. They'll then print the
design onto the T-shirt, package the T-shirt up, and then ship it out to the customer. Now, you just do the math. So if I were to charge $20
for this T-shirt in my store, with the shipping being an additional cost to the customer, of
course, it costs around $8 for the T-shirt itself within Printify, so I'm left with around $12 in
profit, versus on Redbubble, where if you were to set it to charge $20 for a standard T-shirt, you're left with around $3 in profit. And so if you do take the time to learn marketing methods yourself, especially free marketing methods, your profit margins can be way higher because you're not paying another app to do the marketing for you. Not only this, though, but when you sell privately
in your own store, you can charge much higher prices. So as I discuss in this video here, where I discuss my favorite
print-on-demand items that I sell, a video
which I'll also link to in the video description below, one of my favorite products is T-shirts, and as I say in this video, I do not charge $20 for a T-shirt, nope, and instead, I'll charge
between 25 to $30. Why? Well, it's because if you
were to sell a T-shirt on Redbubble for $25,
nobody would buy it, right? Because people browsing through
Redbubble would be like, "Man, every other T-shirt on here is selling for way less than $25. I'll just go buy one of those
cheaper T-shirts instead," whereas if I advertise my own store, every time a potential customer
comes in here, guess what? All of my T-shirts, they
all cost at least $25, so there are no competitors
here driving my prices down. So I get to set my price, and so actually, my profit margins are
even higher than $12. Boom. If you're interested in learning more about getting your own traffic for free, it's something I also share
my methods for getting inside my premium
e-commerce training program, The Ecomm Clubhouse. If you're interested in seeing if my course is right for you, I have a link to it in the
video description below. And actually, there is another common goal that I see leads a lot of
people to choose Shopify, and that is goal number four: start a print-on-demand business that gives them the most freedom. Look, here's the reality,
whether you like it or not. When you're selling on
a third-party website, whether that be Etsy,
Redbubble, or Amazon, you have to play it by their rules, and it turns out that they
actually have a lot of rules, especially Amazon. You have to apply to even be allowed to use
Amazon's print-on-demand service, and I can tell you now,
not everyone gets accepted. And then they place limits on how often you can upload
pictures and slogans. I have a whole video case study here if you're interested in checking it out. Again, I'll link to it in
the video description below. But as I said, it's not just Amazon. Even though Amazon have the most rules, Etsy definitely have some as well. I'll get people every day telling me they got banned from Etsy, and usually the most common reason is because Etsy has a bunch of rules about who can and can't use
their payment processor, and if they find out
that you can't use it, they'll ban you, and sometimes they will
even ban you incorrectly. Yep, they'll accidentally ban people who they think are not
eligible but actually are, which is why I always tell
people to appeal the ban. I'd say that at least half the time, Etsy realizes that you're
actually eligible after all and unbans you, so it's
definitely worth a shot. But either way, when you're selling on
a third-party website, you just have to accept that, in exchange for the enormous
convenience that they provide, that you are at the mercy of their rules and their banning algorithm. And so understandably, if you want the most
freedom and flexibility, then opening up your own
store on your own domain using something like
Shopify as the way to go. As long as what you're
selling, isn't illegal, you can usually sell it with Shopify. For example, Redbubble
is the least rule-heavy out of all these platforms,
but they still have some rules. So take pornography or
even soft pornography. That is explicitly banned, whereas if for some reason
you wanted to sell pornography with a Shopify store, you can do it. Not all their payment processors
will accept those payments, but they have a list of payment processors that will integrate into Shopify that will let you sell stuff
like that if you want to. And actually, there is another goal that I know a lot of
people do want to achieve with their print-on-demand stores that is a;so important to me,
and that is goal number five, start a print-on-demand business that consistently sells
high-quality products. So here's the thing with Redbubble, right? They do so much for you. They do marketing. They do advertising, They do website maintenance.
They do customer service. They do production. They do shipping. And they do this while
keeping their product prices surprisingly low, but
keeping the commission checks surprisingly high, and the
way that they achieve this is that they cut corners by
outsourcing the product printing and shipping to third-party factories. Redbubble outsources all
of that, and unfortunately, they don't tell you who
these factories are, and instead, they just list the countries that they're located in,
and what this means then is that you pretty much can't do any sort of quality control. If you upload a T-shirt to
Redbubble and someone buys it, then you have no idea which
third-party Redbubble print shop will print it. And some of these print
shops that they work with, they're not great. Take this video review I did here. I compared three websites
for print quality: Redbubble, Teespring, and Printify. I got this picture printed onto a T-shirt that I purchased from each of them. Well, the Teespring T-shirt was washed out and not a great print,
which wasn't a surprise, as to be frank, Teespring merch consistently
gets bad reviews. Whomp, whomp. But the Redbubble T-shirt
wasn't good, either. The colors were also washed out, and the lines were not
printed sharply at all. Whereas the T-shirt I got
from Printify was awesome. Nice, vibrant print, and the lines on it were
also printed sharply, too. And here's the thing, right? I knew that this print would be good. I knew I could trust it to look awesome. And the reason for that is
because when you order a product for your customer at
Printify, it's not a mystery who is going to print
their product for them. When I connect this to a Shopify store, I can go in and select which
of their specific print shops in their system will print my products. My favorite one here is
called Monster Digital, which is also known as TSC Miami. You can actually go and
look the print factory up and do due diligence on
them and order samples. And so if you are a more premium brand or an artist that cares
a lot about your designs being associated with
high-quality products and prints, then chose a print-on-demand
app or website that tells you explicitly where the products that
being printed out of so that you can do due diligence, and sometimes, they're done in-house. Amazon prints their merch in-house, so the quality is consistently good. You can also only let
Printful's in-house print shops print your products if you
choose to sell with them, so the quality is also consistently good. And on Printify, while
some of their print shops are admittedly pretty
bad at printing merch, you can read reviews to avoid the bad ones and only pick the good ones,
such as Monster Digital, to print the products you sell. But you see, here's the thing, right? For me, this is very important, and I will prioritize
this over other things, but you know what? Not all artists and not all brands are going to prioritize this,
and that's absolutely fine, because guess what? Not all consumers care, either. Take Redbubble. They target a younger audience,
teenagers and 20-somethings, who often don't have a lot of money, but they enjoy cool art and slogans and also value a fun buying experience. For these types of customers, Redbubble's funky vibe, packaging, and overall aesthetic is great for them, and they'd rather pay lower prices, even if it means the products aren't as good as they could
be if they were more expensive. For these people, Redbubble
is right for them, and Redbubble gets a lot
of happy repeat customers. And so remember, no one website
or app can do everything, and no one app or website is good or bad. They're just different, and
they all offer different things for different businesses
and for different customers who all value and want
different things, too. So then, which website,
or should I say websites, are right for you? Let me know in the
video description below, and if you'd like to learn even more about setting up a print-on-demand store, you should be sure to subscribe and click that little notification bell so that you don't miss
out on any of my videos, and if you'd like to see me
reviewing different products from Redbubble, Teespring, and Printify, you should be sure to
watch my video review. So go ahead, watch my next video, and I'll see you over there.
