Hey everyone,
welcome back to another print-on-demand video.
In today's video, I'm going to share with you
7 pros and 7 cons
of starting a print-on-demand t-shirt business.
Now, for those of you returning to the channel,
then you already know
that I've been selling print-on-demand t-shirts
for well over 7 years now.
For those of you who are new to the channel,
then you will soon learn
that I keep it real with you guys and I only tell the truth.
So in this video,
I'm going to give you seven real pros and seven real cons
about the print-on-demand t-shirt business business model.
Without further ado,
let's go ahead and get right into this video.
If you find yourself liking this video or enjoying it,
please give it a thumbs up.
I really would appreciate that.
So let's start out
with the pros of the print-on-demand business model.
The first pro here is the best one,
and that is that print-on-demand t-shirt business
is 100% free.
There are no upfront costs and there are no ongoing costs.
You can have success with this business
without spending a single dollar.
There are not many other business models out there
that can say that.
The second pro for print-on-demand
is that it is strictly passive income.
As the seller, there is no printing, there is no shipping,
no customer service, no refunds or exchanges.
All of that is handled for you
by the print-on-demand websites.
The third pro is that it is very easy to start.
The learning curve for those of you starting out
with a print-on-demand t-shirt business
is very small when compared to other online businesses.
You won't have to learn technical skills
or advertising or all of those things.
The trick to print-on-demand is simply hard work.
The fourth pro for print-on-demand is that if you need to,
you can do this business model
entirely from a smartphone or a tablet.
For some of the other online businesses,
you need to have a computer to do it.
For print-on-demand,
everything could be done from your phone.
The fifth pro for print-on-demand
is that it can be done worldwide.
So no matter where you are in the world,
you can be a print-on-demand seller.
What's kind of cool about print-on-demand
is that you can upload your designs
to print-on-demand websites,
and then customers who are buying those designs,
they have no idea where the person
who uploaded that design is actually located in
or where they uploaded from.
The print-on-demand websites
have different fulfillment centers around the world.
So you could be uploading in one country
and then someone could buy that design in another country
and the print-on-demand website
will simply print that shirt and ship it
from the fulfillment center closest to the customer.
The sixth pro for starting
a print-on-demand t-shirt business
is that you do not need a business entity.
If you're someone who's starting out in print-on-demand,
you can just start print-on-demand
by creating an account on these websites with an email.
That's really all you need to do to get started.
And then as you start accruing profit
and making money on these sites,
all you do is take that profit that you made during the year
and just add it into your personal taxes.
You can simply list this as other income
and then you pay tax on it normally
as you would with any other income.
And lastly, the seventh pro
to starting a print-on-demand t-shirt business
is that it is not oversaturated.
I get this question a lot in the comments
asking if print-on-demand has too much competition
and simply it does not.
Print-on-demand or custom t-shirts alone
do roughly $5 billion in sales per year,
and that number's growing about 10% per year.
When you're doing billions of dollars in sales
and you're growing by 10%,
that is a lot of growth
and a lot of sales happening overall.
There are literally endless sub niches
that you can still go into for print-on-demand
where there is very little or no competition at all.
If you know how to find these,
it's literally endless opportunity.
Now, it doesn't take long for me to explain to you
how to find these sub niches,
but I'd like to keep it out of this video
to keep this video on track.
I'll link up another video
that'll show you how to find those sub niches.
So those are the seven pros for print-on-demand
and they are pretty strong pros.
There's pretty much everything you could ask for
in this business model,
but there are also cons to print-on-demand.
So as promised, I'll always keep it real with you guys.
So I'm going to share the seven real cons
to print-on-demand.
Let's go ahead and get started.
The first con to print-on-demand
is something that's really difficult
if you're trying to build a brand,
that is that with print-on-demand,
you cannot collect customer emails.
For any of you out there who have built a brand in the past,
you know that collecting customer emails
means that you can build a customer list
and you can stay in touch with them
and they can make purchases down the road
by you putting your new products in front of them.
With print-on-demand, the print-on-demand websites
keep all of the customer information.
You don't get to collect it yourself.
The second con to a print-on-demand t-shirt business
is that it is definitely
not a get rich quick business model.
There are some business models out there
where if you do it right,
you can stand to make quite a bit of money
in a short amount of time.
This is not one of them.
In print-on-demand,
it's really a slow growth until you make a lot of money.
But once you start making that money, it's consistent.
That slow growth in the beginning,
you're probably going to notice
a couple sales start to trickle in
and show you that this business model is working.
But until you really create a ton of designs
and get them uploaded to the big print-on-demand websites,
you're not going to start making crazy money very quickly.
The third con to print-on-demand is that the popular designs
on any big print-on-demand website
are typically going to get ripped off.
Now, more than anything
this is just frustrating because your top seller
or your biggest money maker
may be copied by other people
and they start to eat into your sales.
However, all you have to do as a seller
is report that to the print-on-demand website
and they will remove the copycats.
They can see who uploaded at what time,
so they will see that you uploaded your design first
and then the other ones after you will be removed.
This is just something that
if you really wanna stay on top of this
to optimize your earnings
for your print-on-demand business,
it's simply something that's going to eat into your time.
The fourth con to a print-on-demand t-shirt business
is that you're only paid a split of the profit.
Now, the margins on these shirts get pretty small,
so you can expect to make just a couple dollars per sale
and that profit goes straight to you,
but it's only a couple dollars per sale.
So in order to make a lot of money with print-on-demand,
you need to have a lot of sales.
The fifth con for a print-on-demand t-shirt business
is that as the seller, we have no quality control.
Now, some of the print-on-demand websites,
they focus a lot of time and effort
into making sure they're only sending out
the best prints to customers.
But some of these other websites
are just trying to stay on top of orders
so they're just printing shirts and shipping them out.
Granted, these websites take care
of all of the returns, refunds, exchanges for you,
so if there is a misprint,
they will take care of it for you.
The sixth con for print-on-demand
is that in order to get into that big earnings
or earning a lot of money per month,
you're going to have to use paid tools.
I really haven't found a way around it.
It's just the most efficient way to find good niches
or those low competition ones
and to create your designs efficiently.
So personally, over all the years of doing this business,
I only pay for two tools.
One of them is a design tool
that costs me about $12 per month
and the other one is a research tool
that helps me check and find for low competition niches
and make sure that the slogans are not copyrighted.
That one's about $8 per month.
So all in, if you're going to pay for tools,
it's going to be about $20 per month.
Although that's optional, I have found that
if you want to take this business seriously,
those are the tools that you're really going to need.
And then lastly, the seventh real con
to a print-on-demand t-shirt business
is that you're going to find yourself
spending time creating designs that people want
rather than designs that you want to be making.
So you may be really passionate about this, this, and this,
but you're going to find out that you're creating designs
about other things
that you might not really be super passionate about,
but that's what the tools are saying are low competition
and are going to sell well.
So you kind of walk this line
of spending your time creating designs you really enjoy
or creating designs
that you know are going to make you money.
It's just something to be aware of
that you're probably only going to hear
from someone who's been doing this for a long time.
So guys, those are the pros and the cons.
If you do want to get into print-on-demand,
I have the link of the full tutorial that I have
for a print-on-demand t-shirt business.
It's full length and it's updated.
It has everything that I'm currently doing.
It includes the tools I was talking about before
and even a free one that I use as well.
So it's totally free here on YouTube.
I hope you take advantage of it and you enjoy it.
If you have any questions,
just let me know down in the comments.
If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up
and I'll see you all in the next video.