 Drop shipping versus print on demand, which is better. Hey guys, in this video, I'm gonna put drop shipping and print on demand side by side and let you make the decision what's better. I think some of the information in this video is gonna really shock you, especially when we get to the very end. Hey, if you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you subscribe, hit that subscribe button down there and ring the bell, turn on all bell notifications so you're notified every single time I do a new video or I go live and give me a thumbs up if you don't mind. Now, in this video, I'm gonna give you all the ins and outs of drop shipping and print on demand and it's pretty eye-opening and it can make you a lot of money if you apply some of the things I give you in this video. So let's get going and let's start comparing. First off, both of these models, okay, both of these models take away a lot of headaches. You don't have to invest in inventory. You don't have to worry about production runs. You don't have to worry about warehousing. You don't have to worry about package. You don't have to worry about any of this stuff. You can actually just run a business and have no physical items around you anywhere. That's pretty nice, right? I like that idea. Now I have a survival food company and we have to manufacture, we have to have inventory, we have to pay for warehouses and packaging and boxes and postage and all that stuff but with these two business models, you don't have to do that. You rely all on third-party people to do all the heavy lifting for you. I will tell you there's a lot of confusion between what drop shipping and print on demand is and it's kind of blurred by the fact that you could sell a t-shirt on print on demand and you could also sell a t-shirt through drop shipping but there are some different nuances and that's what I wanna get into right now. Now in the old days, you had to build a website, you had to put products up on it, you had to maintain it but you don't do that anymore. You can actually have your store within some of these print on demand companies and the cool thing also is you can ship worldwide. That's a huge advantage because a lot of these POD companies have locations all around the world and that helps with shipping costs. Okay, I think the first thing I wanna do is identify what these two components are. Okay, so what I wanna do is identify the difference in drop shipping and print on demand. Let's look at print on demand first. The print on demand's pretty simple. Basically, you put a picture of a product online, you have a retail customer that buys that product, you then send that order to the print on demand company and then they ship it out to the customer. So you don't have to have a bunch of inventory lying around, there's no waste, you don't make products that people aren't gonna ever buy, there's nothing like that, okay? So it's very economical to do it that way. It's very simple to run it. Now, drop shipping is similar in that you don't have inventory of any of those other things, but you do have a supplier that has products somewhere and what you do is you sell that product to a front end user, a retail buyer, then you send that order to that manufacturer, that distributor and they actually mail it out to your customer, but they actually have to maintain an inventory. Now, the downside to that is if they don't have enough inventory to supply you with what you need, then you gotta quit selling that particular item. Now, with print on demand, it's pretty simple. What you're gonna do is you're gonna come up with a design for a t-shirt or scarf or hat or baseball cap, whatever you're doing and that particular product will be shown on that print on demand company site. You'll drive traffic to that particular product, somebody buys that product and then what the print on demand company is going to do is with the money that was paid by that customer, they're gonna take out your portion or your cost and then they're gonna give you the difference and they're gonna ship out the product to the customer. Makes it really easy. Now, those products are gonna cost you a little bit more than if you did big runs of products and if you printed a hundred of them or a thousand of them, but the thing is you have no waste this way. So you don't have any money tied up in inventory either. It's a pretty clean and simple way to sell products online. Now, with drop shipping, they're actually gonna come to your site so you're gonna have to have a site that you're gonna sell from and they're gonna actually buy it from you and you're gonna receive the money instead of the print on demand company receiving the money and then once you receive the money, you're gonna give that order to that drop shipper and then they're gonna then send it out to the customer. So you've got a little extra step in there. However, it's a good business model too. Most people will use something like a burlow along with a Shopify store. Now, with drop shipping, you're gonna have to have the talents or hire somebody with the talents to build a website and with print on demand, you don't. They can buy it directly from the print on demand company. Now, there's plus and minuses to all of that. It's not gonna be very customizable if you're building your store in a print on demand company site. So it's gonna be very minimal design. If you're building your own site, it gives you an opportunity to really build your brand and who you are and shift gears pretty easily on your own website. Now, if you're gonna do print on demand, obviously you have to have a design first. You can come up with your own design. You can hire designers on Fiverr or Upwork or Freelance or any of those places. And it's funny when you go to one of these print on demand sites, as soon as you get there, they're gonna say things like upload your design now, start selling immediately, get started right now, click this button and you can do that. And you can upload your designs there and you can get started then. Then all you have to do is connect whatever your banking is. Sometimes they use PayPal, sometimes they use your bank account and hook that up and really it's that easy and you can be in business in minutes. Now, if you're gonna do the drop shipping model let's say a T-shirt, the first thing you're gonna have to do is build a website. So you're gonna have to have the skills for the website. You're gonna have to buy a domain name. You're gonna have to get that domain name. You're gonna have to have the site built. Then you're gonna have to add those products to your particular site. You're then gonna need to get a payment processor so you can actually collect money from these people. So that's gonna take some time. And then once you get all that set up then you can start marketing your product. So there's a lot more steps to doing your own website but the branding is gonna be a whole lot better with your own website. So that's kind of up to you which direction you wanna go. Now, I think the one thing that really scares people when they're selling print on demand products is they are not a designer. They're not a designer at all. And you can hire a designer but you don't need to. You can go to placeit.net and at placeit.net they've got tons of templates for T-shirts and hats and blankets and whatever you want and you can actually design it there without any skills whatsoever by just using their templates. Now, choosing your own print on demand company that's up to you. There will be some suggestions in this video. However, you do wanna go and look at reviews, look at what people had to say about them, look at comments, that type of thing and read through that to make the best pick for you. Also, don't get stuck in the rut of saying, well, I picked this one company. This is the company I'm gonna use. You could use two companies. You could use five. You could use 10. You can use as many as you want. You could take your same design and put it on several of these sites and you'll be surprised that your design will sell differently on all these different sites. Now, if you want to customize the amount of profit you're gonna get and you wanna be able to change it to the amount that you want, you're gonna wanna go to certain sites. Those particular sites are Threadless, Zazzle, Spring, Redbubble. All of those will let you customize your profit margins. If you wanna do it based on the website deciding how much profit margin you're gonna get, you're gonna wanna go to different ones. You can go to T-Public. You can go to Society Six. You can go to Design by Humans or you can go to Merch by Amazon. All of those have a fixed amount of profit that you'll get for your t-shirts. Hats, blankets, jackets, hoodies, whatever you're gonna sell. They have a fixed amount. Now, keep in mind, the ones that are fixed can have some very low payouts, some as low as $2 per t-shirt. However, however, you are exposed to a huge market in these places and your products get in front of millions of people. So you've gotta kinda weigh that out which one's gonna be better for you. Now, as far as drop shipping goes, you can choose your own profit margin as long as they don't have an MAP which is a minimum advertised price. I know our survival food has an MAP, minimum advertised price and you're not allowed to sell it below a particular price. But that having been said, you can charge as much as you want for it and that can be very helpful if you're really good at marketing. I think another area people get tripped up is they don't take all of their expenses into an account. Let's say you go to the drop shipping model and you build a website. You've got the cost of that domain. You've got monthly hosting for that domain. You've got credit card fees. You've gotta pay. There's all kinds of fees out there. So you have to add all that up and figure out how much real profit you're making per t-shirt, per jacket, per hat, per blanket, per whatever you're selling. You've gotta figure all that out when you're dealing with some of the ones where you're actually selling from their site. The POD companies, you don't have any of those costs involved. Now, if you wanna be able to figure out all your costs and margins, I got just the place for you and it's free. It's the Placet Profit Margin Calculator. I will put a link below so that you can have that link for that particular calculator. I'll put it on the screen here real quick. You can kinda see how it works. It's got the POD site. It's got the t-shirt style right here. It's got the t-shirt, base cost, profit margin, royalties per shirt, all that kind of stuff in there. It's got your final t-shirt price, amount of t-shirts you aim to sell, and your marketing investment to get the customer. So you can actually download this from Placet. I'll put the link below so you can grab that and it will give you a heck of an advantage. Okay, so let's review real quick. If you do a print-on-demand, you can get started super, super quick. You're gonna be kinda held to their standards of whatever that is though. You're gonna have to get payouts later on because the customer's actually gonna pay the print-on-demand company and you're gonna have to get your money from them. If you do your own website, you do have the pain in the butt of setting up the website and all that. However, you're gonna get the money instantly and you transfer the order over to the print-on-demand company and you can make higher profits really by doing the dropshipping because you have more control over pricing. Now the question remains, which one's best for you? I don't know. You gotta decide that. What you can do is you can try both models if you want. The easiest model to try really is the POD one because you have to build a website and do all that. So if you're looking for ease to get into it, I would go that direction. You can always add dropshipping later on if you find that you're being profitable on certain shirts. You can do those shirts over on your own website later on. Get started on a POD site just to get your feet wet and understand how it works. So that's it. There's two ways to go. Either way, you don't have to have inventory. You don't have to have a warehouse and all these employees and all this. And either way, you can make a lot of money if you just put in the effort and that's the key. Put in the effort. Too many people I see will watch one of my videos say, oh, that's a great idea. They love it and they never do anything at all. Why? I don't know why. I can't tell you why. I can just tell you that some people don't. I hope you do. I hope you're not like one of those people who don't do anything. I don't think you are. You wouldn't have watched to the end, right? You're one of those people who completes things. You completed this video. Now to really complete the video, you need to hit that subscribe button down there or you're not complete. You're not gonna be complete, okay? I hear bad stories about people who don't hit the subscribe button. They actually walk down the street and they'll step in dog poop. Can you believe that? Now, I'm not saying that's gonna happen to you, but I'm just saying it could. It could happen if you don't hit that subscribe button. And don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified every time I upload a video, every time I go live, you'll be the first to know about it. And give me a thumbs up if you don't mind. That helps the algorithm a lot. I wanna hear your comments. Have you tried to do any parental demands? Have you tried to do any drop shipping? What were your experiences? Did you find some companies you like? Did you find some designs you like? Do you still have questions? You can also put that in the comments below. 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