Hey, guys.
It's me, Sarah, the video editor here at Wholesale Ted, and in today's video we're going to be
talking about how to build a million dollar store with print on demand.
Yes, we have had tons of requests of people asking us to talk about print-on-demand, which
is kind of like another form of drop shipping, but it doesn't use AliExpress.
Just a quick explanation for my viewers out there that don't know much about print-on-demand.
How it works is you take a piece of artwork like this, and you then install an app like
Printful into your Shopify store, which will take the artwork and put it onto different
items like t-shirts.
Then when a customer comes to your store and orders a t-shirt, Printful will print that
individual t-shirt, and ship it out directly to your customer, which is why it's called
print-on-demand, and arguably could be called a form of drop shipping.
So to help me with this video today, I have one of the top experts in the world at print-on-demand,
[Michael 00:00:53].
Michael built a store that in just one year did over a million dollars with just print-on-demand
products.
So I'm just going to switch over to the interview that I did with Michael, where he shared with
me some of the top performing products that he sold in his store, explained why they sold
so well, and also gave some tips on how you guys can pick your own winning items.
Thanks for coming on to Wholesale Ted, Michael.
So let's just jump straight into it.
All righty.
Let's take a look at this t-shirt here.
I believe you told me that this was the first winning item the store had.
It's a pretty looking awesome t-shirt, I must say.
So my question for you, Michael, is a two part question.
Firstly, do you [inaudible 00:01:34] ... Sorry.
How much roughly do you think that money this t-shirt made each month, and secondly, and
why do you think it sold so well?
I think our viewers would love some insider tips on how they can choose their own winning
print-on-demand products like this one.
Yeah.
First of all, thanks for having me on.
This design, or this t-shirt right here is actually one of our first designs in the store,
and basically we got sales right away.
It did around five figures a month on this one, and the reason why it did so well, or
we got sales right away, is because we actually tapped into a very passionate niche, and we
also did our research beforehand to find our interest.
So, if we look into the Audience Insights tool, we can see that let's say the gothic
fashion niche is around to 2 to 2.5 million active people in that niche.
We can also expand into the sugar skull niche, which is similar, and that is around 2 to
2.5 million, as well.
So when we have a good product, and we put it in front of a passionate audience, we can
get engagement right away.
Sometimes we can get sales, as well.
These indicators actually help us, tell us what we should do next.
During this whole process, we're running Facebook advertising, so everything is being tracked.
All the activities that our customer are performing on our store, it is being tracked, so when
we scale with designs like this and other designs, it makes it so much easier.
Cool.
Awesome.
Thank you.
There's some great tips.
I love that niche, by the way.
So I've got another question.
I know that clearly, as your store made over a million dollars, that you're an absolute
ninja at creating profitable Facebook ad campaigns and scaling them.
Can you please share with us some of the ... Sorry ... the process of how once you find a winning
product, like that t-shirt, that you scale up your Facebook ads to make those massive
profits?
Yeah, so when we're talking about Facebook ads, there are actually different ways for
scaling.
We can scale vertically by increasing the budget, we can either scale horizontally by
testing more interest, create lookalike audiences, or split test different conversion events.
So with this one in particular, we did both vertical and horizontal, and also we added
a funnel in backend.
Now this is important, because with a funnel, we can increase our average order value, and
that will increase our margin for us to spend more on ads, also have more profit, and that
is why the funnel was so important in this case.
Cool.
Yes.
Thank you so much, Michael.
Actually, I want to just like quickly shift gears here, and move on to the next product
that your store successfully sold, and this is this nifty pillowcase here.
So this design is a bit different from the t-shirt, but it's still similar.
It uses a similar color scheme, and it's also targeting that same niche.
So here's my question for you.
Where do you find awesome designs and artwork like this that you use for this pillowcase?
Yeah, so there are actually different ways to do research.
We can go to different top performing Shopify stores to look for design ideas and also different
marketplaces, but one thing is we shouldn't copy any design pixel by pixel.
We need to be creative and create something that's ours.
Another thing to keep note is any designs that we do buy should have commercial license
for us to use it, and some places to go to will be Shutterstock.com or iStockphotos.com.
You can actually buy commercial license for that to use on your design.
If you were to hire your own designer, you have to communicate that with your designer,
as well.
Make sure they're creating designs from scratch, or they have commercial license to use it.
This is very important because we don't want it to bite us in the butt down the road, or
get any take down notice down the road, as well, so just do our due diligence to do our
research and create nice, awesome designs on what's already selling out there.
Awesome, thank you.
Yes, I completely and utterly agree.
It is so important to make sure that you use artwork that you have the rights to use so
that you do not get sued.
So let's move on to the third winning product, these shoes.
I can see that they have the same design as the pillowcase, but you just transplanted
them, sorry, onto the shoes.
So my question for you, Michael, is actually a two part question.
Firstly, when most people think of print-on-demand, they usually think about selling things like
t-shirts and hoodie, but obviously this store successfully expanded into other types of
items, you know, shoes, and pillowcases.
Are there any other types of print-on-demand items that you've successfully sold?
The second part of my question: What type of item do you think is the most under utilized,
one that most people don't think to sell, but they should, because it sells super well,
like pillowcases?
Yes, that's actually a very good question, because the print-on-demand industry has grown
significantly in the past year and there's actually more products out we actually can
print on.
I do have some samples right here.
So you can see my screen.
I have a glassware right now that we [inaudible 00:07:04] print on.
This is actually engraving, and it's print-on-demand.
I don't know if you can see the text here, but that is glassware we can actually print-on-demand,
and there's also shot glasses, as well.
And these are great during Father's Day.
So those are two examples, and I do have other ones that ... So these actually, I just want
to mention, these are from PrintTech.
They're really great.
Another example is ShineOn.
They make jewelry as print-on-demand, and the quality is actually very good.
It comes with these boxes, so the whole unboxing experience for your customer is really nice,
and you can actually put a discount code inside these box for them to come back to your store.
Then with ShineOn, they're from the USA, New Jersey, so the shipping time is really good.
So your retention rate for your customer to come back to your store will be really high
if you sell product that are high value and they're from the United States.
So here are just some examples, and people don't normally think about these products
when they think about print-on-demand.
So, we have some bracelets over here.
This is a charm bracelet.
We can even sell other charms onto this bracelet, so these actually sold really well for me.
That just gives you an idea of how you can expand outwards from just selling t-shirts.
Yeah, no, that's crazy.
Almost no one thinks of selling things like shot glasses and wine glasses, so that's a
fantastic insight there.
So now that we've seen some of your winning products from your store, I'd love to hear
even more of your insight, this time into the process that you go through when testing
different Facebook ads for products, because I'm sure that you've created products in your
store before, and you thought that they would be winners, and you've run Facebook ads for
them, only to find out that the products didn't covert well at all, and I think that for many
people when they do this, when they put a product into their store and they run an ad
for it, only for that product to not sell and convert, it can incredibly frustrating,
and they give up.
However, I know that you don't.
You, instead, just add new products and keep running ads, and of course eventually you
do find one that connects and converts with the buyer base, and in this industry, of course,
we call that process testing products.
So can you please explain for my viewers here the process that you go through to test products,
which ultimately helps you identify winning items that then go on to make the massive
profits for your store?
Right, so there's actually a few different ways for testing.
One way is actually just to ask your customer what they want.
So what you can do is create an engagement ad on Facebook with four different product
on that one image.
Label it A, B, C, and D, and ask your customer, "Hey, which product do you want?"
Once you monitor the comments and find out what is working, then you can take that product
and put it into its own campaign, and start scaling that product.
So that is one method of testing, and it's really easy to do, and you can actually utilize
the same concept by sending it out to your mailing list and ask them what they like.
So that's a very cheap way to test.
Now, another way, which is more advanced, is basically a giveaway model to a collection
page.
Now, I really like this model because you can essentially do a tripwire concept where
you're giving away, for example, a tote bag, and your customer is covering the shipping
for you if they do pick it up, but the whole idea is for them to click on that ad, come
to your store to a collection page with that image they already pre-sold on to a whole
bunch of different products.
So that image can be on leggings, t-shirts, mugs, and as they come to your store, maybe
they'll buy leggings more than the other products.
Then you know, "Hey, that leggings actually perform pretty well."
Now I'm going to take that product and put it as my main front end product and start
scaling.
So those are just two really good ways for you to perform during the test phase.
Nice.
I love that advance tip.
I'm totally going to make use of that.
Thank you, again, Michael.
I'm sure a lot of my viewers really appreciated.
It's always nice to see that even advanced drop shippers and people who make all this
money still have to test products.
So, of course, giving up too early is definitely a mistake that I see people who are new to
drop shipping and new to print-on-demand make.
I'm wondering, though, could you give us three other big mistakes that you see new stores
make, and any tips for avoiding these mistakes?
So there are actually a couple thing that can come into mind when I'm thinking about
mistakes that people make.
The first is people stop testing after they find a winner.
So what that means is they might find that a t-shirt is performing really well, and they
only scale t-shirts, or that campaign only, but they never actually take that design and
put it onto, let's say, a leggings, for this example.
You don't know what you're demographic actually want, so without testing you're actually leaving
a lot of money on the table, so my advice for people who are listening is once you have
a winner, definitely test other products to find out if maybe other product will take
off even more.
So that's number one.
Number two is actually scaling too early, and when we're talking about Facebook ads,
there's this thing called the ... Sorry.
That's okay.
I know what you mean.
So when we're talking about Facebook ads, there's this thing called the learning phase,
and if we scale too early, Facebook will actually kill the optimization, and that is when you
hear a lot of people say, "When I start scaling my campaign, and it dies off."
And that's because Facebook needs more data before you can even touch that campaign, so
just wait until the initial learning phase is over before you touch that campaign.
Now, number three is not having a funnel in place.
Now, having a funnel, like I mentioned earlier, is very important, because you can actually
increase the average order value, have more margin.
This allows you to spend more on ads, and also bid higher on your campaign.
So, always have a funnel in place once you find out if something is working.
Cool.
Awesome.
Thank you so much, Michael.
Those tips were fantastic, and I can see this interview has gone on a bit longer than I
promised, so we will cool it here.
So there you guys go.
I hope you enjoyed seeing real life examples of winning print-on-demand products, and I've
also got some exciting news.
We are running a live webinar with Michael.
In this webinar, Michael is going to be giving a deeper insider look into how he built his
automated print-on-demand store that went on to do over a million dollars in a single
year, and if that sounds like something that you would like to learn more about, you should
be sure to register in the link in the video description below.
Please note, you do need to register as this will not be streamed live on YouTube.
And of course as always, we have our free e-book, which teaches you the six steps that
six figure stores follow to make over $10,000 every month with drop shipping, and you can
find a link to that e-book also in the video description below.
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