 Have you ever wondered why some shops generate tons of money while others only get one or two sales? If that. I'm broke, okay? Well, after working with print on demand for quite a few years, I can easily say that the reason this happens is because beginners make some specific mistakes. And this is something that people do across the board. This isn't unique to just one or two different people. I don't know what I'm doing. A lot of people make these mistakes which can eventually cause them to fail and just completely give up their business. Now, some of these mistakes at the time can sound like some really good ideas, but at the end of the day, they can be very deathly detrimental to your business. They can even get your store completely shut down. Oops. Now, what mistakes exactly am I talking about? Well, in order to find that out, you're gonna have to stick around all the way to the end of the video because I'm gonna be giving you 10 print on demand mistakes that you need to be avoiding so you can be successful on your print on demand venture. I'm also gonna give you one print on demand business idea that has the potential to make a lot of money. So if that's something that interests you, if you've been looking to get into print on demand and wanna get started on the right foot, then make sure you check out this video all the way through. Before we get started, I do wanna let you all know though that we have a cheat sheet to go along with this video. If you want access to that, all you have to do is go ahead and comment down below, hashtag POD mistakes, and let me know which one of these mistakes you're guilty of or which one you're gonna avoid because you watched this video. In that cheat sheet, I'm gonna have everything that I'm covering today. So if you want access to that and be able to have all of this information on the go, then make sure you go ahead and comment down below. Once I see that you went ahead and commented, I'll reply back with a link to the sheet. So let's go ahead and jump straight into it and let's start with the first mistake that people make. Not knowing where to start or getting started the wrong way. Look, I know there's tons of different suppliers, there's tons of different providers, there's tons of different products and it can all be very overwhelming. Information overload is a real thing on print on demand. There's a ton of options. You can literally print on almost anything from a t-shirt to a mouse pad to a shower curtain. Now, in order to get past a step or a mistake is simply to just get started and sign up. If you sign up, you're already gonna be ahead of most other people who are just thinking about doing it. Remember, a lot of people think about starting these businesses but they never actually take the first steps in getting started. And signing up is the absolute first step that you need to take in order to actually get started with your business. Now, my recommendation for you when it comes to starting off with print on demand is to sign up with AutoDS. Now, AutoDS is typically known for drop shipping but we now support print on demand. And let me tell you that we have a ton of different products with some really good prices. Now, if you do wanna get started with print on demand with AutoDS, you can sign up for the trial period for just $1. So you can test out the waters and see how you like everything. The first thing you're gonna see is this page, the marketplace. Now, on the marketplace, you're gonna see tons of different products for drop shipping but that's not what we're gonna be focusing on right now. We're actually gonna switch on over here to print on demand. Now, you can start to see all of the different types of products that you can print on. So as you can see, there's tons of t-shirts and hoodies. These are gonna be the most popular products when it comes to POD. Quick note for those that don't know, POD stands for print on demand. These two terms are gonna be interchangeable so just watch out for both. But continuing scrolling through here, you can see there's tons of long sleeves, different types of t-shirts like this tie-dye one over here. You're gonna start to get different types of garments. So now you have this bomber jacket which you can customize, which is really cool. Keep going through, you have these crisscross tank tops. These are pretty unique and this is when it starts to get really cool. So you can do things like double fleece cloaks. These can keep you warm whenever you're cold and as you can see, they can be customized throughout the entire product. It's too hot for that right now. Now, for that one, I think I paid about $75 or $80 and that's a pretty short one. And as you see here, you can actually source them between 33 to $40. So you can almost double your profits with these but keep going down. Let me show you a few other products that you can print on. You have these women's beach shorts. You have leggings, crop top hoodies and these aren't just limited to garments or things you can wear. You can also do tumblers. So these tumblers are running about $18. Now, when it comes to tumblers, one thing that I'm gonna tell you is you can sell these for some pretty good money. These on Etsy easily go for about 30 to $35. Now let's go ahead and customize one of these really fast so you can see how easy it really is. So let's just go ahead and choose one of these up here. This hoodie we're gonna source between $16 to $20 and we're easily gonna be able to sell this for about $59.99. So I'm just gonna stick to the typical extra large in a black color because I just like black. Now let's go ahead and edit product. This is what we're gonna see. So now all you have to do is uplift your design. You can either do this on the front or you can also go ahead and upload it in the back. Keep in mind that if you do print on both sides, the price is gonna go up slightly. For this we're just gonna do it on the front. Let's go ahead and upload design. Let's go ahead and choose this one right here. And that's what it's gonna look like. So if this is too big for us, if you want the design to be a little bit smaller, maybe you just have a little bit of text, you can easily just go ahead and drag it through the corner and make it smaller and reposition it. But personally, I like big designs. I like oversized designs. So I try to print some as big as possible. And then all you have to do from here is simply either preview it to see what it looks like or you can save it. Preview isn't too important to me because you can already see what it's gonna look like here. But here you can see it without the graphs, without the square. You can see how the hoodie's gonna look like pretty much printed. Now in order to add this to our store, in order to add this to our shop so we can start selling it, all we have to do is click on save. From there, our product is gonna go to our draft section where we can make any necessary edits to either the title, the description, or if we want to change the pricing. It's that easy. All right, so now that you saw how easy it is to actually get started, let's go ahead and continue with some of the other mistakes that people typically make. So this next mistake is one that's actually very common. It stops most people from even getting started in the first place. And that's having the idea of oversaturation. Everyone talks about oversaturation. In every single online business, whether it's dropshipping, print on demand, flipping, whatever it is you're doing online, everyone else has tried, or everyone else is going to try. Oversaturation at this point is inevitable. Every single business at this point is pretty much oversaturated. How many restaurants do you not see going down the street? But you still go to a specific one because you like it, because they provide the best food, because they provide the best service. How many different online stores are there? And you still shop from specific ones because you like their customer service, because you like their products, because you like their style. Oversaturation at this point is a myth. And as long as you can come up with some good quality products, with some good designs or some unique designs, then you have the ability to stand out, especially when you're selling on a platform like Etsy or eBay. They make it so much easier to be able to get sales because they're bringing the traffic to you. So get the idea or the myth of oversaturation out of your head because honestly, like I said, every single online business at this point is gonna be oversaturated. But that does not mean that you can't make money off it. Whether it's a couple hundred bucks a month or a few thousand bucks a month, you can still make money in an oversaturated market. Yeah, that's what I like to hear. Okay, this next one is absolutely crucial and I personally have experience with it and it has actually been detrimental to my store. And that's selling copyright material. Stop selling copyright material or don't even get started selling copyright material. I know it can be a very, very lucrative business, selling characters and selling brands that people already know can make you a lot of money, but it can also get you in a lot of trouble. My Etsy shop, my first Etsy shop was shut down because I was selling copyright materials. I was selling a lot of video game and anime inspired merchandise and eventually I got too many copyright strikes and my whole store was shut down. That really sucked. It sucked having to start over and come up with everything from the beginning, come up with new designs, come up with new products, come up with essentially a whole new store and a whole new business. Looking back at it, I wish I had started with original designs rather than copyright designs, but hey, you live and you learn, right? Now, if you're not good at designing, that doesn't mean that you still can't get into print on demand. It's pretty easy to design without having any knowledge of any design software. For one, you can use certain services. Just to name a couple, there's Vexels. So Vexels I absolutely love because they have some really good designs. As you can see, they have a little bit of everything and they have literally thousands of designs. You're never gonna run out of designs for your print on demand business. Now, another cool thing about Vexels is the fact that it actually offers custom designs. So if you have a request, if you have an idea for something that you want, you can send it to them and they'll send you back a totally custom design. Aside from Vexels, there's also Placeit. Now, Placeit also has tons of different designs, but they also have mockups. I think the designs over at Vexels are better, but you do get the ability to customize some of these. So you can change some of the text, you can change some of the different images on them, like this one right here where it says plastics. You can change that text where it says plastics. You can also change the heart in the background, change the different colors. You can customize a little bit. Now, fair warning about Placeit and Vexels, they do offer some free designs, but the majority of them, the better ones, are gonna be paid. So you're gonna have to have a subscription to be able to use their services. But if you don't wanna pay for anything, then you can simply just get started with Canva. Canva does have their paid subscription, but using their free subscription, you can get everything that you need to get started with your designs. Now, when it comes to designing, always keep a few things in mind. For one, stick to stuff you know. Don't try to go into cars when you don't know anything about cars. If you know a lot about pets, then you have maybe some funny pet slogans that you've thought about, maybe some funny pet puns. You can start a print-on-demand business focusing on pets or on dogs or cats as pets. And just focus your brand around that particular niche. Don't try to go into a topic that you have no idea about. Also, if you're actually good at drawing, you can draw out your designs, then you can go ahead and scan them to your computer and then upload them to Adobe DS to put them on a shirt. This is actually very unique and this is something that a lot of people like. Hand-drawn designs are a huge hit. Now, let me give you a quick tip. Slogans can also be copyright. The same way that a character can be copyright, a saying or a slogan can also be copyright. But don't worry too much about this because if you simply just Google Slogan Copyright Checker, you can go ahead and use any one of these different ones to check and see if the wording or if the slogan that you're trying to use on your design is actually copyright or not. Take this the same you would with copyright characters or different brands. If the owner of a slogan or a saying sees that you're selling it on your merchandise, then they can open up a copyright claim against you and eventually if you keep it up, then they can shut down your whole store. See, and this is... Let me stop right here for a second and let me say that if you're enjoying this video, if you're enjoying everything that I have to offer, if you're finding this information helpful, please make sure you smash that like button. Also, make sure you hit that subscribe and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future print-on-demand videos. Now this next mistake is one that a lot of people make if not the majority of people and that's just giving up too easy. People give up way too easy. They give up when they don't get a sale in their first week. Sometimes you're not gonna get a sale in your first month. While I don't believe in oversaturation, I do believe in a competitive market and print-on-demand is a competitive market where you need to stand out. So don't just try uploading one or two products. If you just upload one or two, chances are your sales are probably gonna be zero. If you're selling on Etsy or if you're selling on eBay, try to go for 20, 30, 40, 50 products. The more you can upload, the more you can see what works and what doesn't. And then from there, you can start niching down or getting rid of products that aren't selling and replacing them with new products. Another thing that you can do is if you have your store all over the place, if you're selling t-shirts, if you're selling mouse pads, if you're selling shower curtains, if you're selling mugs, if you're selling everything, try niching down to either just t-shirts or just mugs, accessories or home accessories or maybe office accessories if you do wanna sell like mouse pads and things like that. But try niching down even further than you already are. So don't just niche down with your designs, also niche down with your products. And that brings me to my next point, not niching down or being too generic with your niches. When you're trying to attract different customers for your print on demand business, you want to attract specific customers that are gonna like your products. So you can niche down and you can sell, let's say car t-shirts. Anybody can sell car t-shirts. Anybody can come up with a car design but it takes somebody that actually knows about cars to niche down even further than that. Let's say going into tuning, maybe racing, you can start making some designs based around boosted cars, cars with turbo or superchargers. But remember, don't mention brands like Ford or Nissan because that's copyright. The sixth mistake that people make is not uploading to multiple websites. Don't stick to only one website. If you wanna get in front of the eyes of more people, try uploading to multiple websites. So instead of just Etsy, go to Etsy, eBay and maybe even Shopify with your own website. Although that can be a little bit more complicated. Now my personal recommendation is to always start with Etsy. Etsy is the place for print on demand and to sell these different types of products. This is where people go specifically to look for things like t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads and all that stuff that you can print using print on demand. But the easiest way that you can implement my tip on uploading to multiple websites is by using AutoDS. So first you need to open up your Etsy store and then you need to open up your eBay store. Then connect both of them to your AutoDS account. And once that's connected, you can upload to both marketplaces simultaneously. So you remember what we did earlier where we designed our hoodie and we uploaded it to our draft section? Well, you can upload it to your draft section and then from there after you make your edits, you can have it uploaded to both marketplaces at the same time. This saves you a ton of time on having to upload your products and upload the descriptions, the photos, the variations, everything. But if you do wanna start with one marketplace to just test the waters, then I highly suggest you start with Etsy. Okay, so the next mistake that people make is confusing both passive and active print on demand websites. Now, what exactly is passive and active print on demand? Well, passive is gonna mean just that, passive. There's gonna be less work to it because the platform is gonna do most of the work for you. So when I talk about passive, I'm talking about platforms like Etsy or eBay where you simply just upload your product, set the price, set the description, all that stuff, and you pretty much just leave it. You don't have to run any ads. You don't have to do anything else. The only thing you're really gonna have to do is take care of customer service. Etsy and eBay both bring customers to you because it's a marketplace. People go there already to shop. Now, active would be something like your own website like Shopify, where you actively have to market it. You actively have to be, well, active with it. For the most part, unless your SEO is on point, you're gonna have to bring in traffic yourself. So you're gonna have to be doing things like running Facebook ads, running TikTok ads, making content, going on blogs, however it is that you're gonna market your products, you're gonna have to do it consistently. Otherwise, people aren't gonna know that your shop is there. And that's why I say that print on demand on Shopify or on your own website is a little bit more complicated than it would be on a platform like Etsy or eBay. Now, this next mistake isn't one that's necessarily gonna get your store shut down, but it is one that can potentially deter customers. So they'll look at your design and they'll think, nah, and they'll go on to something else. And that's not focusing on the contrast or the blending of colors. If you're selling a black t-shirt, don't put a black design on it. Put something that's gonna contrast off of the shirt itself. A lot of the times when somebody is choosing the different colors for their products on print on demand, so let's say you have a shirt, you have the option for a few different colors. What happens in this case is people are just gonna choose every possible color option. And in those different color options, sometimes some of those color options are not gonna blend in well with the design itself. While this isn't necessarily fully detrimental, it can deter a few different customers. So just make sure you keep an eye out for it. Okay, so this next mistake is one that can be very detrimental and it'll deter pretty much any customer from purchasing your product, no matter the color of the product and no matter the product itself. And that is uploading bad quality designs. You always wanna make sure that the designs that you upload are high quality. Do not upload a small picture because when it's blown up, whenever it's put on a big piece, like let's say a t-shirt or something even bigger, like let's say shower curtains, the image itself is gonna be extremely blurry or pixelated and we don't want that. Let me show you an example. So right now I'm gonna show you two different examples of two different images. One that's a high resolution and one that's a low resolution. Also the high resolution is a PNG while the low resolution is a JPG or a JPEG. Do I look like I know what a JPEG is? This is something that you always need to keep in mind because if you upload a JPEG image, you're gonna have a white background on your design. If you upload a PNG image that doesn't have a background, then you're not gonna have any extra white spots or a white background that's printed. So right here we have a high quality image. It's at 300 DPI and I believe it was about 16 inches by maybe 20. Now one way that you can easily check to see if this design is gonna print right or not is simply to just zoom in. If you zoom in and you notice that the quality is not losing and it's still pretty sharp even as you're zooming in closely, then it should be good to print. Try to imagine how big it's gonna print as you're zooming in. So let's see right here. The face of this pug is pretty big. It's about this big on a T-shirt. It would be about that big. So it's already over the size that we wanna print and it's still clear. So we're fine. If you wanna see more or less how it's gonna be like on an actual shirt, let's think about this way, right? Yeah, I think that looks about right. And it's again, high quality. So there's no blurry, there's no pixelation. It's good to go. Now let's look at this one. So first off, as you can tell, it's already smaller on the get go. When I opened it, it was a lot smaller because it's a lower resolution image. This one is about five or six inches by about 72 DPI. Now, fair warning for the most part, this is probably what you're gonna end up finding if you simply just Google your image and download it from Google Images. As you can see, there is a white background. We don't want that white background because if we have a black shirt or a black hoodie, then there's gonna be a white box on it and we don't want that. It's gonna look bad. So that's why I say stick to a PNG. Of course, when you're designing the image, you always have to make sure that there's no background to begin with. So if the image doesn't have a background, but then it's saved as a JPEG, then a white background will automatically be put on it. So let's go ahead and zoom into this a little bit and let's see how it's gonna look. Zooming in 214%, you can see that it's already getting blurry. It's not gonna look good. Zoom in to more or less what you think the size is gonna be. And you can see that this is not a quality image. It's not a good design. It's got pixelation everywhere. It's not smooth on the edges. It's got very rough edges. Zoom in even further, it looks even worse. So this would not be suitable to print. Now, this is pretty much the easiest and most bare basic way to be able to check to see if a file is good to print. But if you wanna be technical with it and if you really wanna have high quality prints, then I highly suggest going for 300 DPI or a resolution of 300. And at least 12 by 12 inches when it comes to the design itself or 30 by 30 centimeters. And the last mistake that people make is not setting their pricing correctly. I understand that pricing can be probably one of the harder things to actually come up with but it's not that complicated when you start to mimic what most people are doing on these platforms. So as you can see, most of these are running for about 20 to $25. This one's running for 970 but it's actually not. This one's running for 1079 which again, it's probably not. And there we go, these are the more realistic ones. 1955, $25 down from 36. Wow, that's huge. That's what she said. Now, in order to get pricing this cheap on Etsy for a t-shirt, you're gonna have to be offering something that's not a shirt. Let's see what exactly starts at 970. My guess is it's probably gonna be something like a baby onesie and it's probably gonna be out of stock. Let's see. Okay, so the only one that actually runs for $9.70 is the athletic Heather. As you can see, everything else is 1670. So every other product that they have is gonna be 1670. They only have one item that's $9.70. Personally, from what I've seen, from my experience, a lot of the times the cheapest item is gonna be probably a baby onesie that's just thrown in there. And at the end of the day, it's gonna be sold out. They're not even gonna be offering it. It's just so people can click on it. It's essentially clickbait. In this case though, this person actually is selling an athletic Heather for $9.70. My thought behind it is they just need to have something to show that it's $9.70. And this is probably gonna be the least popular color option. So that's what they're going with. So my pricing strategy is this right here. So as you can see, they have a pretty high price of $36.75, but it's currently on sale for $25.72. It's 30% off. What I would do is I would have a sale every single month. Sometimes I'd offer 10%, sometimes I'd offer 15. On months like November and December, I could go up to 20 or 25% depending on the product, but this is a very common sales and marketing tactic on Etsy. You're gonna have overpriced items that are gonna be on sale. So people think, I need to get this right now before it goes back up to the regular price. While some people are gonna bring it up to the regular price and just leave it at that, other people, such as myself, will just run a completely different sale the next month. Now, in my case, what I did is I didn't actually price them at $36. I would actually price them at $25.00 and then I would put my discount on that. So I would do a $25.00 shirt and then on average, I would give maybe a 10 to 15% discount. So it would come out to $18 to $20.00. All right, so the business idea that you have all been waiting for, it's time for the bonus. Now this I've seen a few times and I've actually seen a lot of people get sales from this. It's not something that's commonly done for some reason. I don't know why a lot of people don't do this, but it's a great idea. I've done it myself during the holidays and people really get into it and that's selling kid-drawn t-shirts. The whole thought behind this business idea is to have customized prints from somebody's kids. So let's say Father's Day is coming up and mom and son want something special for dad, something different, not just a typical I love you mug or tie. In this case, what can be done is you can tell your customers to send you their designs. So you can have your customer draw up their design or have their kid draw up the design and then submit it in for print. Then what you're gonna do is you're simply gonna upload it to the AutoDS system and then you're gonna make a custom listing for your customer where they're gonna place the order and then the order's gonna be processed and shipped out to them. This can be extremely lucrative, especially during holidays like Christmas, Mother's Day and Father's Day and even birthdays. This is something that can actually mean a lot to a lot of people. So it has a lot of sentimental value and that's another reason why it's a very lucrative business because it can provide a lot of sentimental value to the wearer or to the receiver. Now those were the top 10 mistakes that you should be avoiding if you're getting into print on demand. Huge thank you to everyone for watching. Remember, if you want access to the cheat sheet with all of the information that are provided in this video, all you have to do is go ahead and comment down below, hashtag POD mistakes and let me know which one of these mistakes you were either making, you're not gonna make anymore or you're not gonna make because you watched this video. Let me know which one of these you're guilty of and once I see that you went ahead and commented, I'll reply back with a link to the sheet. Huge thank you to everyone for watching especially if you made it all the way to the end. As always, my name is Mario with AutoDS wishing you all nothing but success in your dropshipping and print on demand business and with that, catch you guys next time.