Usually I have a lot of good things to say about print on demand. I love it. I love
sharing about it but in this one I'm gonna do the opposite. I'm gonna talk about
10 things I hate about P.O.D. - print on demand. Let's go!!
Thanks for joining me on this video. My name is Juna with Detour Shirts. I've been designing and
selling t-shirts on print on demand since 2005 and I want to talk about some of the things on
print on demand. In this specific video i'm going to talk about the 10 things I hate about print on
demand. I know hate is a really strong word and it's more like I dislike it but hate sounds a lot
better. It's a throwback to the movie 10 things I hate about you with Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger,
Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Good movie from 1999. If you haven't watched it give it a watch.. that's
what this is about 10 things i hate about print on demand these things of course they don't stop
me from doing print on demand there are annoyances and i wish they would change but print on demand
is pretty great and that's why i continue to do print on demand but i wanted to show you
the 10 things that i really don't like about it so i actually had a tough time coming up with
10 things that i really didn't like about print on demand so i went to my facebook group and i
got a lot of help there so a lot of these came from my facebook group if you're looking for a
group for print on demand go to that i'll leave a link in the description there so these are not in
any particular order and some of these probably won't change in the future i hope some of them
can change but for the most part it's the price of doing business with print on demand so let's just
go down the list and start with number one so the first thing that i hate about print on demand is
that you have no control on whether or not you get kicked off of the platform or if things shut down
very little control about that i see this on my facebook group all the time that i was kicked
off for no reason off of redbubble or i don't know why i'm not on merch by amazon anymore and
personally that hasn't happened to me but at the start of corona there was a time when
amazon just totally shut down so one of the scary things about print on demand is your business if
that's your business model could shut down at any moment and you don't really have any control over
it so if you have a lot of money coming in from redbubble all of a sudden it could just stop or
if you're cutting counting on merch by amazon and they decide we're not selling anything this month
it could totally stop so that's what's really scary about print on demand you may want to have
a backup plan i that's why i started youtube and other things like that affiliate sales and
things you shouldn't just rely on your print on demand income because of this reason right here
a print on demand sites can shut down or kick you off at any time so this is the first thing
that i hate about print on demand so the second thing that i hate about print on demand is that
there's no real good way to contact customers and i'm talking about print-on-demand shops like
redbubble and merch by amazon and t public where they do everything for you which is nice that they
do everything for you but the downside of that that they do the customer service and all of
this is that you don't have a way to contact your customers so you can't upsell them you can't send
them newsletters and things like that of course if you do your own shopify print on demand etsy
print on demand with a third party print-on-demand site you do have that so this number two is only
for the all-in-one print-on-demand shops like merch by amazon t public redbubble you know
those ones if you're gonna create your own list and things like that with shopify woocommerce or
things where you're selling print-on-demand stuff this one doesn't really apply to that but one nice
thing about doing it that way is you could send email marketing if there's a new product you can
let people know one way to get around this is to have a big following on social media right
so if you can build up your fan base on social media you can send things that way and let
your customers know your fans know about that but this is uh tough uh to get marketing out at least
to the existing customers and try and let them know about it and you have no idea who bought
it and where and things like that so this is the second thing that i hate about print on demand is
that you have no way to contact your customers so the third thing that i hate about print on demand
is that sometimes you don't show up in searches so this can be a problem if you're trying to sell
stuff in and want organic traffic and no matter how good you do your seo no matter how good you
do your titles and tags sometimes you just don't show up on merch by amazon when you people do the
searches you're way back page 5 page 10 and you don't show up same thing on redbubble or wherever
this can be very hard for you to make a sale if you don't show up in searches and sometimes you
don't really have that much control over it you can put in the right things and it just doesn't
show up so that's one thing that's hard about print on demand is that you're dealing with a
bigger company and so many people are doing the same things and just you get lost sometimes so
that really makes it hard to make a sale if you can't be found that's one of the main things uh
you know findability and things like that that help you get a sale so this is the third thing
that i hate about print on demand and that's findability sometimes you just don't show up
in searches so the fourth thing that i hate about print on demand is that it is not a steady income
so unlike a nine to five where you're getting paid by the hour or salary you know exactly what you're
going to get paid each month print on demand is not like this so this kind of is like number one
where it could just shut down at any time or find abilities these are all kind of connected
um you could get paid you know really well in december but then come january you're going to
get half of what you made in december and things like that so yours income is going to go up and
down up and down depending on what kinds of things you have for sale what kinds of things people buy
you know maybe you're doing more valentine's day and get a lot of sales during that time or maybe
you're doing more summer shirts whatever it is it's inconsistent almost everyone gets paid a
different thing every month i know i do i've done it for years q4 you get a lot more than the rest
of the year and you know that that's kind of hard especially because uh you don't pay your mortgage
that way your mortgage is the same thing every time most of your bills are the same thing every
time and if you're lower than what you expect to um pay on something that can be really hard
so this is the fourth thing i hate about print on demand and that is it's not as steady income it's
inconsistent every month so the fifth thing that i hate about print on demand is that the profit per
sale is pretty low so of course they do a lot of the work and because they do a lot of the work the
merch by amazon's the redbubble the t publix they do the shipping and the printing and all of that
you get a lot less per sale so there could be a 20 shirt and you're only gonna get five dollars out
of that twenty dollar shirt so like twenty five percent uh and some places you actually get less
i know some places you get four dollars or two dollars or one dollar you might get even less than
that so the price per sale is very low and that's not something that you really have a control over
sometimes so you'll have to just make a ton of sales to make that up so if you make five dollars
a sale in order to get five thousand dollars a month you're gonna need a thousand sales right a
thousand t-shirts now you can increase your profit per sale if you're doing printful with shopify or
printful with etsy and charge a higher amount you just have to figure out what that is and
some people make you know six or seven dollars per sale which is a better but it's not a
10 profit per sale or 12 or 20 so that makes it really hard to run ads and things like that so
this is the fifth thing that i hate about print on demand and that is a low profit per sale so
the sixth thing that i hate about print on demand is that the quality of your products could be low
so you could have low quality things and there's a lot of youtubers out there that are buying the
things and so you can see the quality so you can see that but you really don't have control of what
t-shirt redbubble is gonna sell or what t-shirt merch by amazon is gonna say or what hoodie and
things they're gonna sell what they think is the best thing or the most profitable thing
and you know quality could be good or could be bad on there so so this is something that we really
don't have control over because they print it they buy it and do all that stuff and so you may get
returned on something that's low quality or bad quality that print quality and that can can affect
your overall income and things like that so just be aware of what kind of quality different things
have watch those youtube videos there's not really much you can do about it besides not sell that
product maybe you just really don't want to sell that product and you can turn that product off
but besides that there's nothing more that you can do so this is one thing that i hate about print on
demand i really dislike about print on the man is that sometimes you could be selling low quality
products so the seventh thing that i hate about print on demand is that it's very slow to ramp
up i hear this a lot in the facebook groups a lot of comments that i'm just getting started and i'm
not getting any sales i i'm stuck on tier 10 or something like that and yes we were all on tier
10 if you're on merch by amazon we all started on tier 10 and it does take a long time to ramp
up because you only have 10 slots and it takes time to figure out what sells on each print on
demand site because all of them are different so it really just takes time to learn if you're
looking for a quick turnaround of you know a get rich quick kind of business this is not it print
on demand is not it it takes a long time uh if you see a lot of people that are making a great intel
they probably spent a lot of time in it and it's not something that you can ramp up really
fast and so this is number seven uh thing that i don't like about print on demand and that is
how long it takes to ramp up so the thing i hate about print on demand number eight is that there's
lots of competition back in 2017 there wasn't as much competition because you know merch by amazon
just got it started there was lots of competition elsewhere but now that merch by amazon has been on
the scene for over five years now uh it there's the competition is huge there's so many people
competing for the same target for the same keywords for the same topics for the same niches
so it just is really hard to get your design up there on page one just because of the competition
out there and the competition is getting better it's not just bad designs there's some really
good artists out here now um doing print-on-demand stuff because they heard how good it is so you're
competing with some top talent sometimes and it's just tough to get your stuff seen so this is the
eighth thing that i hate about print on demand and that is the ton of competition that's out there so
the number nine thing that i hate about print on demand is that there can be glitches on the site
and that can affect your income so one example of that is uh merch by amazon had a glitch recently
where they're putting a price on a t-shirt for 10.59 i saw it on one of my things that i recently
uploaded and what that means is you get zero dollars on a sale like that and that was a glitch
i don't know if they fixed it yet but uh the lowest price that you can go on merchant amazon
for a t-shirt is 13 so this is way below uh that price and you get zero profit for thirteen dollars
so of course you get zero profit for a 1059 shirt um i hope they fix that and but that's just one
of the glitches right it could be glitches about tags it could be glitches about whatever if there
are any glitches on the print-on-demand site it could affect the way you make sales or get income
or profit or whatever it is so just be careful when you're doing that there's nothing really
you can do because things get glitchy sometimes and it happens but definitely one of the things
that i hate about print on demand is that there's could be glitches on any site so the last thing
uh number ten and this would be my number one i didn't say there i said they're not in any order
but i saved the worse for last and this if this is the one that i hope that can be fixed this is the
one that's a pain to most people on print on the man and that is copycats there's so many copycats
and i'm talking about the pixel for pixel copycats where they just take the design off a merch by
amazon your design and sell it as their own they don't do any design work it's not like they're
trying to make a better version of your thing they're just copying your thing pixel for pixel
you see it on etsy you see it on merch by amazon you see it on redbubble you see it everywhere
because it's so easy to do and people are lazy and they want you know free money right basically
that's what it is they're just taking your stuff and seeing if they're gonna sell it and so
i hope the print on demand companies can fix this this is a pain for everybody involved
especially people that are trying really hard and take hours and hours to design something and then
just get that stolen and people just undercut you because they didn't take time they don't need to
make any money they'll they'll sell it for pennies right as long as they get some kind of sale
they made their money because they didn't have to spend time making those designs so
copycats need to get taken care of they need to be taken out these pixel 4 pixel ones
they sell things in bundles too they just grab all kinds of things uh you know popular designs
out there and put them in a bundle for 100 and sell them for five bucks because they didn't do
anything and copy cats are the worst this is the one thing that i hope can get fixed this is the
the number one thing in this list is number 10 but overall this is the number one things that i hate
about print on demand so here they are all 10 of them that i talked about in this video
but like i said the worst one is number 10 copycats i think everybody in print on the man
will agree that copycats are the worst and they need to be stopped so let me know in
the comments if i missed anything if there's something else that you hate about print on
the demand leave that in the comments and if there's enough i probably could make a number to
10 more things i hate about print under man so now that you know about the 10 things i hate
about print on demand why not want something a little more positive maybe these top websites for
print on demand that i use or what to do before you start print on demand check out these videos
right here and as always guys keep creating and keep learning i'll see on the next one