A Guide to Start Print on Demand Business from Home

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Ecommerce penetration has been thriving at a great pace, currently valued at over $4 trillion. This pandemic worked as a revelation for most small businesses to understand the significance of the eCommerce industry.

The online presence of the business is not an advancement. It is a compulsion now.

Not only businesses but also employed people who have lost their jobs due to Covid-19 need to understand eCommerce as it is one of the easiest ways to make money from home.

In this post, you will learn the easiest way to start an eCommerce business from home with minimal investment and no inventory.

The business I am talking about is print on demand.

What is Print on Demand?

What is Print on Demand?

Print-on-demand services form the dropshipping business model that does not need you to acquire any inventory to sell; just display the product on your eCommerce store.

You only need to provide a design to be printed on the product for customization and display the product image on your eStore.

When the customer purchases from your store, the order will be directed to the print-on-demand service; it will print your design on the selected product and directly deliver it to your customer.

Print-on-demand service will charge for its product and shipment. Therefore, you need to set the retail price with your artist margin to earn profits from the revenue.

Major products that print on demand service offers for customization are,

Clothes (T-shirts, hoodies, skirts, etc.)

  • Mugs
  • Bedsheets
  • Pillowcases
  • Curtains
  • Sofa cover
  • Phone cases
  • Wall décor
  • Tote bag
  • Posters
  • Jewelry

How to Start a Print on Demand Business in 5 Steps

Step 1- Find a Profitable Niche

Niche hunting is the most crucial step to set up a successful print on demand store. The best way to pick a niche is to get into something you are passionate about or have a firm knowledge of.

You can easily connect with the audience sharing similar interests and make relevant products design for them.

After identifying your passion or interests, then check if it has rising worldwide trends.

For example, you like ‘heavy metal,’ but the worldwide trends of this music genre have been going down over the years, so it might not be the best niche for you to select.

Heavy Metal Trends

 

That is the formula to pick up a profitable niche – First, identity your passion and interest and then check its trend.

Step 2- Create a Community

A niche-dedicated community is a golden asset in the eCommerce industry. I prefer to create a dedicated Facebook community before promoting the product.

Once you finalize the niche, you need to prepare a community with the audience associated with that niche. For example, you selected the ‘rock-climbing’ niche, then everyone in the community should have a keen interest in rock climbing.

A Guide to Start Print on Demand Business from Home

Then identify the relevant Facebook groups to promote your community without advertisement.

Use Google to hunt down the relevant groups on Facebook.

Just type “Niche keyword + Facebook groups” on Google and all the top groups of your niche will appear.

Join all the relevant groups and promote your page’s content in these groups to grow your community. By following this technique, we have managed to gain 300,000+ Facebook likes for free.

Step 3- Create an Ecommerce Store (Shopify)

Shopify is a user-friendly eCommerce platform that does not require any coding knowledge to set up an eCommerce store. It offers a drag and drop option to customize the theme page, making it easier for a non-technical person to set up an eCommerce website from home.

Its basic plan starts from $29/month that works great to set up a print on demand business.

Step 4- Integrate Print on Demand Service into Shopify

Shopify allows multiple prints on-demand services to integrate including,

  • Printify
  • Printful
  • Custom Cat
  • Teelaunch
  • Gooten

You can add any of these services by just adding it from Shopify’s app store.

Step 5- Marketing & Promotion

You need one successful design to earn hundreds and thousands of dollars from print on demand business.  Facebook advertisement is an effective way to find out the winning designs.

The community will help you here by cutting your advertisement cost. Moreover, if you have an engaging community, you can drive traffic organically by publishing products on your Facebook page. Once you start getting sales, you need to create a lookalike audience to get more relevant to your current customers.

You can replicate the winning design on shoes, wallpaper, pillow covers, etc. to increase the profit margin.

The best part about this business is that you only around $200 and a decent laptop to operate a complete business from home.

A Guide to Start Print on Demand Business from Home

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