Want to learn hot marketing tips from a successful e-commerce entrepreneur? Meet Rich,
an e-commerce juggernaut who we’ve invited to tour our facility in
North Carolina to see how we do things on the production floor.
My name is Rich. I’ve been in apparel and printing business since 2014. We’ve
printed a lot of t-shirts and then when I got into e-commerce. So we started selling
t-shirts online, and that’s when I get into the whole econ space.
So fortunately enough, I get to check out Printful’s facility and man it’s
been pretty awesome. Aalso they allowed me to shoot some of my own content for my channel,
Hustle Ninja, so make sure ya’ll check that out too.
We have a background in printing so we’ve self-fulfilled a lot of items too.
We’ve done upwards of six figures a month for print-on-demand,
especially during 2021 and 2020, we did a whole bunch of back and forth.
It’s just hard to find work sometimes whenever you’re a small business. And this was an easy
way for us to find somebody to print and fulfill items for us. So we’ve done upwards
of 50 grand per month in sales and we’ve sent all of that work out to just print-on-demand.
It’s a pretty awesome way to outsource work.
So design-wise, any time when it comes to like top selling items, it’s always been something
that’s like based off of like Google Trends and something that’s really hot, but like something
that we’ve always like relied back on was always personalized items because that’s something that
you can compete in that like a lot of the big name stores don’t really do because it’s hard to do.
But whenever you go online and you have the ability to be able to edit things,
especially like I’m Printful, it has the design software where you can sit
there and go into each order and leave a blank space to change like a text, someone’s name,
Merry Christmas from the x, y, z family 2022. So personalized items is always going to be a win.
That’s something that we’ve always heavily relied on when it comes to selling online.
So for me, I’m just a marketplace seller. I sell on Amazon and I sell on
Etsy. Everything we do is search related. So pretty much for us, we always work backwards.
We see what’s already selling. We don’t really try to reinvent the wheel too much.
We look through sold listings, look at reviews, and we see what kind of product is actually hot.
Just like I mentioned earlier, we also news things like Google Trends, E Rank is a popular Etsy app
that we also use. You can get search-related data and see how heavy search volume people are looking
for products, and from there you can already get an idea of what people are looking for.
So once you have those keywords that’s really hot,
you can pretty much identify the products that you can create for that market. So if
you’re building your own store and you’re not selling anything, there’s so many variables to
it. And this is a whole other skill on top of just learning how to design a product itself.
You have to learn how to build a website. You have to learn how to build trust in a
website. Like a lot of people on a fresh new website is already missing the privacy
policy or the terms and conditions at the bottom. Those small little details
gives the buyer trust, so a whole bunch of little things can add up,
especially if you’re new to it. So it’s going to take a little bit of time to learn.
I would honestly recommend like going to like Etsy, giving it a shot. It already
has traffic there. People can come on here. It’s already a trusted platform. All you
really have to worry about is listing a product. And once you get a few sales,
it’s going to help boost your confidence back up to keep on learning in this whole
e-comm space, and then you can come back to building your own website.
All right. So Printful, like you know, just having background in apparel and printing,
I’ve seen the direct-to-garment, I’ve seen embroidery, I’ve seen the machines,
and know has done. But what I haven’t seen is just the whole quality control process,
honestly. It’s just it’s amazing to me and I don’t even know how much of it I can talk about,
but like just the whole QC process, the amount of steps that’s involved now,
is honestly mind-blowing. The technology here is just it’s pretty crazy.
So I would always recommend something like print for the because printing production fulfillment is
like so many variables when it comes to ecommerce. People think they need a creative product and need
to learn how to print or produce the product. They need to learn how to ship it as well.
You know, it can be discouraging for you to not even start. This is something that
can like prove your proof of concept, get a product out there, build a brand,
and then see if you can actually sell something. Don’t worry about like producing
something or fulfilling something. Leave it to a company that already has all of that down,
especially like the quality control portion. That’s like a whole nother thing you got to
put on top of your business. A better skill to honestly have is always going to be marketing
and sales. So if you can take all your time away from learning production, learning how to print,
and just like putting it towards marketing and sales, it’s going to take you a long.
Thank you, Rich, for joining us on our channel to share valuable tips from your
experience and to our customers and viewers. Thank you for watching and see you next time.