 Don't use print on demand. It's dead. There's no money in it. There's no money in it. It's oversaturated. There's no new or original ideas coming out. That's what everyone says, isn't it? True, yeah, very true, yep. Well, I'm here to tell you that that is completely not true. Just the same way that people say that dropshipping or any of these other e-commerce businesses are dead. I'm here to tell you that that is 100% not true. As always, it's as easiest as it's ever been to get into. And because of that, there is a little bit of oversaturation. But that doesn't mean you can't make any money from it. Regardless of the e-commerce business that you're starting, there's always money to be made. A lot of money. So if you're looking to start a print on demand business, then don't start your print on demand business until you've watched this video. So today we're gonna cover why you shouldn't start print on demand, but also why you should start print on demand. Not only that, but I'm also gonna give you a few tips on how you can properly start your print on demand business. So you can get started on a strong foot and hopefully start bringing in some sales earlier rather than later. Now, let's go ahead and get into it. Now before we do get started, I wanna know exactly what you think about print on demand. Do you like it? Do you hate it? Have you tried it? Have you heard of it? Let me know down in the comments below. I would love to hear your thoughts. All right, so first things first, what exactly is print on demand? Well, print on demand is a fulfillment service. So essentially what happens is you're gonna create your own designs. Then after you create your own designs, whether that be using Photoshop, any web service, or even outsourcing the work, then you're gonna decide what products you're gonna put them on. When it comes to what you can put them on, you really have an endless amount of possibilities. You can put them on t-shirts, you can put them on hoodies, you can put them on cups, on mugs, on blankets, shower curtains, posters, mats, keychains, literally almost anything that you can think of, you can print using print on demand. Then you need to have a marketplace that you're gonna sell on that can be either your own website or an already established marketplace. So you can set up shop on something like Shopify, or you can set up shop on Etsy, eBay, and even Amazon. Amazon, however, is a little bit different, so I'm gonna get into that a little bit later on. So just stick with me for a few minutes. Now before we go ahead and continue, I wanna give you all a little bit teaser of something that's to come in the near future. So pretty soon, we are super excited to announce that AutoDS will be supporting print on demand services. That's all I can say right now. I don't know if I was even supposed to say anything in the first place, but take that as a little bit of a teaser for what's to come. And if you're excited about that, if you're excited about print on demand, if you wanna learn more about it, along with the ins and outs of dropshipping, then make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any future videos. Now continuing on, after you choose your marketplace, after you choose where you're gonna sell it, then you have to choose a provider that's gonna print those items for you. In which case, the two most common ones are gonna be Printful and Printify. Now each one of these services provides full on printing. Personally, I have used Printify in the past and these are just a few of the items that you can offer. So here you can see that you can print on posters, on canvas wraps, on pillows, tote bags, t-shirts, bikinis, koozies, shorts. Like I said, the possibilities are absolutely endless. Now what happens is that after you design your items using Printify or Printful, you're gonna take the mockups and you're gonna add them to your store. Again, whether that be your Shopify store or your Etsy store, just a quick note, those two are the most common for print on demand. So most people that are doing print on demand are gonna be selling on Etsy or Shopify. Of course, you do have the option to sell on different platforms, but those are just two of the most common ones. Now the easiest way that you can start importing some of these listings into your store is gonna be by simply connecting your supplier, whether that be Printify, Printful, or whichever one you choose, to your online store. So that way whenever somebody places an order, it's gonna be automatically rerouted to your supplier and then they're gonna go ahead and print out the product and ship it to your customer. The process itself is pretty similar to dropshipping except with the differences in the products and the ability to customize so deeply. Now what I just explained to you is called active print on demand. So when it comes to print on demand, there are two different types of print on demand services. There's the active, which is the one that I just explained, in which case you're gonna be working with two different sites. Again, your supplier and the place that you're gonna be selling on and you're gonna have to periodically be updating your items, working on your store, working on marketing. You would have to be a bit more active with it than you would typically be with a passive print on demand service. Now what exactly is a passive print on demand service and how does it compare to an active print on demand service? Well, simply put, with a passive print on demand service, you're pretty much gonna have everything in one website. Some common websites for passive print on demand are gonna include Redbubble, Teespring, and Amazon Merch on Demand, formerly known as Merch by Amazon. So the difference here is, like I mentioned, you are gonna have just one central website where you're gonna do everything. So on these three different websites, you can go ahead and create your design, make your mockup, and list it directly for purchase from these websites. So instead of going to Etsy or your own website to make the purchase, these services will allow you to sell directly on their platform. That in itself takes a huge chunk of the work out of it. But remember that your profits in something like this could be a little bit lower. Now that you know the different types of print on demand services that there are, let's go ahead and start talking about why some people say that you shouldn't start print on demand. The first one is oversaturation. Well, I'm pretty sure you've heard that practically every business out there at this point is oversaturated. You tell somebody you wanna start a dropshipping business, they're gonna tell you it's oversaturated. You tell somebody you wanna start printing T-shirts, they're gonna tell you it's oversaturated. You're gonna tell somebody that you wanna start print on demand. They're gonna tell you that it's oversaturated. You wanna become a software engineer. It's oversaturated. Everyone's learning about computers and coding. Everything at this point is gonna be oversaturated. There's so many people in this world that it's impossible to have something that doesn't have a lot of people in it already. But that doesn't mean that you can't succeed in any field. One of the main things when it comes to success in any one of these different types of e-commerce businesses is the ability to stand out and find niches that aren't really saturated. There's tons of different niches out there that people aren't into. When it comes to niching down, you can get very, very specific and still have a good amount of people that you can advertise to or people that would wanna buy your product. Take for example, the pet niche. Of course, everyone is gonna be in the pet niche, but did you know that you can niche down even further than just a generic pet? So you can niche down to dogs. Now of course, there's gonna be a lot of people in the dog's niche, not as many as the entire pet's niche, but it's still gonna be a good amount of people. But from there, then you can continue niching down even more. So let's say you niche down to dogs, then you can niche down to poodles. You can niche down to rutwilers. You can niche down to pit bulls. Of course, those are some of the more popular breeds that there are, but if you start looking into it and you start learning a little bit more about dogs and the different types of breeds that there are, you're gonna realize that there's a community for practically every single breed out there. And each one of those communities is a different demographic that you can target. The next reason why people say that you should not start print on demand is because there's no quality control. Well, just like any other e-commerce business out there where you don't necessarily have to see the product before actually shipping it out, quality control can be tough, but that doesn't mean that there is no quality control. There's a few different ways that you can always guarantee good quality. One of them is by simply looking at reviews. When it comes to print on demand, depending on the website that you're working with, like take, for example, Printify, you can choose different companies to print your merchandise. So after you design your product, you're gonna pick somebody to print it. Now, typically you're given these options so you can find printers in the certain locations that you're gonna be selling to. So some are gonna be in the US, some are gonna be in the UK, some are gonna be in Australia, some in Germany, and it's up to you to choose which one you think would be best for you. Now, of course, there's gonna be a ton of different printers to choose from and that's why you need to check out their different reviews. They all have reviews. You can read what people are actually saying about them. You can see pictures that reviewers have uploaded so you're not blindly going into this and just picking a random supplier. If you are, then you're doing it wrong. You need to make sure that you check out the different reviews and see what people are saying. Now, on top of that, you can also order a sample. You don't have to order a sample of every single product that they offer, but you can order a sample of maybe two or three different things and the best thing is that when you do decide to order a sample, most sellers or platforms that you're sourcing your item from are gonna give you a discount. There's always some sort of sample discount so you can sample their products and see if you like them and see if it works for you. So just as a quick example, you can go ahead and order a T-shirt so you can see how the print is gonna be on T-shirts and with that, you can get an idea of how it's gonna be on hoodies and even shorts and then you can order something like a cup or a tumbler so that way you can see how the printing quality is gonna be like on drinkware and if you're gonna be selling these types of items, then you can also order a shower curtain and that can also give you a similar idea of how your prints are gonna look like on something like, let's say, a mouse pad. Personally, I've only ordered maybe two or three different samples and for the most part, I just blindly ship them. I just make sure that the reviews are good before actually choosing a printing supplier. Now, speaking of samples and customization, when it comes to customization, while you do have creative freedom and you have the ability to customize practically any product, when it comes to that customization, you're gonna be limited in certain aspects and that's the next reason why some people say don't start prints on demand. Now, when I say that, you're gonna be limited in certain aspects of customization or personalization. What I mean is extremely detailed and creative things. So let's take, for example, you're a creative, you have a creative mind and you have an idea for maybe a hoodie or something like that that has patches all over the place. With prints on demand, that's not something you can do. They don't offer patches pretty much anywhere on the shirt or on a hoodie or whatever it may be. While you can sell your custom patches for people to put on whatever merchandise they want to, you can't ask a print on demand supplier to get a particular hoodie or a t-shirt and just fill it up with different patches with different icons on it or whatever it may be. It's way too much work for a print on demand supplier and it's not something that they're gonna do. Another example could be lately I've seen hoodies or t-shirts that are split in half and they're sewn together with two different parts of two different garments. Again, that's not something that you're gonna be able to ask for. Things like this need to be done in-house. So it's something that you're gonna have to find your own supplier for either locally or you're gonna have to reach out to. People that specialize in these kinds of things. When it comes to things like t-shirts, a lot of the times you can get designs or writing on them that sticks out. Some of them can be puffy, some of them can be like little brick, some of them could be really thick so that way it sticks out of the shirt. Those are things that you're not gonna be able to do with print on demand. So if you're looking to get highly customized with your items or you have a bunch of different really creative ideas with very specific customized pieces, then print on demand might not work for you. Noted. But let's say you have a design that you drew or you came up with using AI or you outsourced, you can put that on practically anything you want. As long as you're printing a design, you're not gonna have any issues. Next up, print on demand has a very bad rep. A lot of people talk so much crap about print on demand. The same way they do about a lot of other e-commerce businesses. And please, don't let that deter you away. Think about it this way. People tend to focus on the negative reviews rather than the positives. A lot of the times whenever you go out to a restaurant or to a store and you have a bad experience, you're a lot more compelled to leave a bad review, right? If you have a good experience at a store or just a basic experience at a store, typically speaking, you're not gonna be writing a review. You're gonna completely forget about it and you're just gonna go on with your life. Because of that, people tend to focus on the bad more rather than the good. But if you start comparing it to all of the different other reviews, you're gonna see that, let's say for example, you have a four or 4.5 start rating, the negative reviews are gonna be minimal compared to the positive reviews. So don't let word of mouth get to you. Don't let it discourage you. And most importantly, don't let it stop you from actually starting one of these businesses. Remember, a lot of the times the people that talk crap about it and the people that talk bad about these different things are the people that didn't succeed for one reason or another. And the last reason I'm gonna cover is profit margin. Now yes, when it comes to print on demand, you're gonna have a lesser profit margin than you would if you were to, let's say, print these items yourselves. But that's okay because at the end of the day, you're not really doing a lot of the work. All you're doing is just designing, putting it on mockups and that's pretty much it. You're not fulfilling orders, you're not shipping anything, you're not printing anything. All you have to do is create more designs, do a little bit of product research and come up with more mockups. That's pretty much it. Now because of that, because you're saving so much time and you're not fulfilling any orders manually, you have the ability to focus more on your sales and more on your marketing. So while you do have less of a profit margin, you're still gonna be making either the same or even more money because you can focus your time more on actually getting more sales and marketing your products. Now, let's talk about why you should start print on demand. Well, for one, starting print on demand is extremely easy to get into. Making designs now is easier than it's ever been. There's tons of different services online, some of which are completely free that you can use to start coming up with different designs. So if you're not a designer or if you're not really good at it, but you do have a vision of certain things that you wanna print or design, then you can use an online service to help you get started. Now, just to name a couple of service that can help you out with designing. First off, you have Kittle. Kittle is a paid service, but you also have access to a bunch of free different features on there. But just as a quick overview, they have AI tools, some of which can help you remove backgrounds, others are image generators. So you just tell it what to come up with and it'll design it for you. And they also have an AI quote generator so you can come up with different quotes on the fly. On top of that, they have a bunch of other features that are actually really well worth it. So Kittle is something that could be worth checking out. Another option that you have is Vexels. So with Vexels, it is a paid service as well, but you have access to hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands. I don't even know how many they have. Different designs that are actually really cool. Like look at this one right here. It's a variation of a Starry Night. They have this skeleton one over here. They're good designs. They're mature designs. They're not corny. They're not cheesy. But if that is something that you're looking for, you know, like the corny designs, you can look for them on here. And I'm pretty sure you'll be able to find a few of them. Aside from that, you can simply just go on Etsy. You can type in whatever you want. Let's say alien and type a file name right next to it. So PNG or JPEG. So right now I just looked for alien PNG. And these are all of the different designs that they're offering on Etsy. Now, after you have the design that you want to print, then you actually need to make the mockups, which a lot of people think that that could be really hard because of the fact that you might need to use Photoshop. But that's not the case with print on demand. Pretty much any supplier website that you're using, like Printify, Printful, Redbubble, Teespring, whatever it is, they have mockup generators. So once you upload your design, they're automatically going to create the mockups for the different products that you want to offer. From there, you can make any adjustments or you can tweak it however you want before actually making it go live on your site or your store. Now with the integration of the selling platform and your supplier, or by simply using an all-in-one website like Amazon Merchant Demand, you can also enjoy the benefit of automation. So you really don't have to do anything when it comes to fulfilling the orders. Somebody places the order on your store that's gonna be automatically rerouted to your supplier and they're gonna get the printing done and shipped out. You don't even have to pay for the item because you can put your credit card or your debit card in file and it'll be charged automatically. And of course with automation comes a lot less steps, so you have a lot more free time to keep on focusing on your sales and your marketing so you can keep bringing in more and more customers, more sales, more profits. Print on Demand also has a massive product catalog. Like I mentioned earlier, you can print anything from t-shirts to beach towels to even sandals. And on top of that, another reason why you should start Print on Demand is because there's no minimum order quantity. A lot of the times with a certain business, if you want to have customized items, you probably have to order in bulk. More than likely, you're gonna have to order in bulk. But with Print on Demand, because of the ease of actually printing on these different products, you don't have a minimum order quantity. Somebody can order just one if they need to. So if somebody just wants one mug and one t-shirt, that's perfectly fine, there's no problems with that. And last but not least, when it comes to why you should start Print on Demand, it's easy to go global. You can go international whenever you choose or you can go international from the start. Print on Demand companies have printers all around the world, so you can get your products to your customers pretty quickly. Now just a couple of quick tips on how you should start Print on Demand. For one, focus on getting sales. I know with Print on Demand, sometimes it could get discouraging because you have to offer your products at a lower rate, which means you can have lower profits. But at the beginning, focus on getting more sales. You can focus on raising your profit margins later because honestly, what good will it do if you can be getting some massive profit margins but you're not getting any sales? I would rather have tons of sales with a smaller profit margin than only a handful of sales with a fairly okay profit margin. Because let's be realistic, you're not gonna be able to double or triple your investment on each one of these products. If a shirt is costing you $15 to Print, you're probably gonna be selling it around $25. More than likely, if you sell it for $40 or $50, you're not gonna be getting any sales. So when starting, focus on learning the business, focus on learning what works and focus on getting more sales rather than getting higher profit margins. Later on, once you're established, you know what you're doing, you know how everything works, then you can start to focus on starting to raise your profit margins. Another quick tip to get started on a strong foot is if you're not getting any sales, it's not gonna be because of the business model. It's gonna be either because of your product or because of your marketing. Remember, the business model is not to blame for you not getting any sales. You have to tackle your marketing, you have to tackle your products in different angles. If you notice that something's not worth it, then start to focus your attention on something else. Come up with different designs, come up with different products, try different niches, try different niched designs. You might realize that a certain design will work better on a mug than it will on a t-shirt and then sometimes it'll work better on a pair of sandals, let's say, rather than a shower curtain. Try different products, try different designs, try different marketing techniques, different marketing tactics and just make sure to switch things up. Make sure that you don't spend too much time and too much money trying to market one product that's not selling. And that's why you should not start Print On Demand at least until you watch this entire video. So if you did watch this entire video, huge thank you for sticking around all the way to the end. It truly means a lot. Please, since you made it this far, just go ahead and smash that like button and while you're there, make sure you hit that subscribe and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. It really helps me out, it really helps the channel and it helps us grow so that way we can keep bringing you the most updated information in the dropshipping and pretty soon Print On Demand business. Once again, huge thank you to everyone for watching. My name is Mario with AutoDS and we'll catch you all next time.