Starting out with Print on Demand

Hey everyone,

I'm Matthew and I'm currently in the process of creating a set of market place shops that will help me with my print-on-demand business.

I live in London, and am currently sheltering from the Covid virus. It's been a tough year for a lot of people, but I'd like to document my own personal development since the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic last year. 

I took redundancy from old workplace last April. For a month I binged on Netflix. In my mind I had decided not to continue with my career. Until then I was a solutions architect, having begun an IT career back in 1998. To be perfectly honest I was no longer enjoying it, so the chance to leave my company with a bit of cash was quite appealing. I'm kind of nearing the time when I would ideally want to stop the professional working anyway (although about 5 years early!) so thought this might be the best opportunity I get to go out on my own terms.

For the first month I binged on Netflix, in my flat, all day. Sometimes I peered over my balcony and rather sadly could see a frequent amount of ambulances driving past. It was clear to me that this was not a sustainable future for me, but it took a while before I chanced upon an idea.

This idea was to make use of my surroundings and my photography skills to build up a collection of urban photographs that I could sell. Initially I thought about ordering a batch of greeting cards with my photography already printed onto them. Looking at the prices though, and knowing that I no longer had a regular stream of income, this was soon discounted.

Finally I chanced upon a rather well matured process of print-on-demand, whereby you do not take on any financial commitment or risk at all, if you don't want to. This was perfect.

I had actually also set up a domain name and website on Shopify called Billingtonpix.com. During last summer Shopify was offering a free 3 month trial period for the basic account, which is about 30 USD a month after that. So I spent a large time developing my site and uploading photographs. I used an integrated app to host them where they would fulfil any orders automatically. So there was no inventory at all other than online.

This was great - only one small problem. Where was the traffic to my site? I connected the site up to Google Merchant account and coded in the scripts to ensure that all the necessary structured data was there. My background in coding was good use for this task as it wasn't that easy. But still no traffic.

So I tried my hand at Facebook advertising. I had some limited experience with this, having worked alongside the digital marketing team in my last job. I wasn't too knowledgeable about the detail though and although I have worked with audiences before, I found it quite complex. (nb, later I found a great YouTube account called Cupcake Trainings where I found a lot of useful advice, including how to capture audience pixels for re-targeting purposes).

Talking of YouTube this proved invaluable for developing my print-on-demand further than just on my website. To date I have set up a number of marketplace shops on RedBubble, Etsy, Zazzle and Society6. And it is on these sites (or some of them) where I have made a small amount of money.

The one HUGE advantage of these marketplace shops is that they bring traffic to your products. To date I have made some sales on Redbubble and Etsy, although none so far on Zazzle or Society6 (which are newer for me).

What I want to do with this blog is just to document my process - if it develops into something a bit bigger. At the moment I don't know. Traffic to my website is virtually non-existent, and I receive about 15 visits a day on average to my RedBubble account. My Etsy account I have neglected a bit and I've been losing my products from it (you have to pay them about 40p I think to list each product for about 3 months). I've lost interest with Etsy to be honest - I only sold 2 products and it takes a lot of effort for just a single product each time.

The great thing about Redbubble, Zazzle and Society6 is that you can automatically upload your digital image to multiple products simultaneously. This is great. That said, I've been having a few issues doing this with Zazzle so for now am just uploading one product at a time, although I am using a template to speed things up.

So this is a whistle-stop overview of where I have come in the last 9 months. Progress is slow, it has to be said, but looking at my analytics, my visitor numbers on Redbubble are growing - slowly, but they are growing. On Zazzle, for some reason I am getting no visits right now and have been reading up on what I can perhaps do to rectify this.

Anyway, first day of my blog - and my first post. I'm not sure how often I'll post for now, but let me know what you think - are you just starting out with print on demand, and are you doing well with the visitor numbers and sales? I'd love to know!