Transcription
If you're wanting to start an online business or a side hustle in 2025, print on demand is a great opportunity, especially if you want to sell on Etsy or just want to have your own brand without holding any inventory. Then this could be a perfect option for you.
So, in today's video, I'm going to show you how I go about my design research and how I upload products from my Printify account directly onto my Etsy shop for sale. And if you're new to my channel, hi, I'm Mac. I am a print on demand seller and have been since 2020, and I post lots of videos talking about e-commerce, passive income, and different ways to make money online on my channel. So if any of that interests you, I would love to have you as a part of our community here on YouTube.
So, of course, we are selling on Etsy, so we're actually going to do a little bit of design research on Etsy before going right into this. I'm going to show you with the example of St. Patrick's Day. St. Patrick's Day is coming up in a few months, and believe it or not, people actually start searching for products before holidays. So I'm filming this in the beginning of January, but now is the time that you want to be posting St. Patrick's Day and even like Easter listings, or at least thinking about them on your shop. And depending on the time that you're watching this video, another holiday could be coming up, but in this case, it's St. Patrick's Day. So I'm going to show you my research process, but you can obviously swap out whatever it is you're searching for, whether it's a trend or a holiday or your niche for your store, and do exactly this process.
So I'm just going to go to the Etsy search bar and I'm going to type in "St. Patrick's Day" and I'm going to do "shirt" because I'm going to design either a shirt or a sweatshirt, and I can use the same design for either of those products. Then I'm going to go to "All Filters" and I'm going to go down to where it says "Star Seller." So that's going to filter out some sellers that are doing really well on Etsy, but we're not done yet. We're going to go up to our search bar here in the URL and we're going to delete where it says "star" and we're going to type "best." Etsy doesn't let you filter bestsellers by their own filters anymore, so that's like a little hack on how you can do that.
So now this is showing me the best sellers for the search term "St. Patrick's Day shirt." So one of the first things I see here is this one here. It shows that they have 58 sales, and if I use my eRank Chrome extension, this is showing me that it might not have that many sales for this year yet, but they have sold some of them and they're making revenue on it, and it's considered a bestseller on Etsy. So this is a design style that I'm taking note of. Also, this design style with the large alphabet letters with patterns behind them, it seems to be something that's very, very popular all over Etsy through different niches. Like if you search "mama" or you search "nurse," which are two really large searches on Etsy, you'll see that this design style is very universal. So that's definitely something I want to keep in mind.
So I'm actually going to right-click, copy image, and then I'm going to go to Canva and I'm just going to paste that here, and I'll show you why I'm doing that in just a moment. And then I'm going to go right back over to Etsy and continue my search. I also came across this shirt which seemed to be selling really well for a popular saying. I had to look this up, but it's like a "cheers" in the Irish St. Patrick's Day theme, and I see that this is selling exceptionally well. So I'm going to do the same thing, copy image, and then I'm going to paste that into my Canva artboard as well. And essentially, what I'm doing here is I'm finding different design styles or sayings that I can combine into my own design. So I know that I like this lettering, and I know that I like this word, so I would combine these two designs and make a design of my own. So I'm going to show you that process, but first, I'm going to find two others that I want to do the same with.
Okay, so here's my artboard. I have two different shirts that I want to combine design trends. So this one here, it says "Everyone loves an Irish girl," but I like the design style of that. So I want to take this word and create the design style of that, and I'm going to show you in just a moment what I mean by that. And then I'm going to do the same thing here where I'm going to use this word and I'm going to take the design style of this.
So here's the first design that I'm working with here. What I did is I actually got these cute letters from Creative Fabrica. That's how they created this type of design where it says like "lucky," "blessed" with these cute little letterings. So I just used a Creative Fabrica download, which I'll show you. It looks something like this. Creative Fabrica is an amazing online library for different sellers, and if you're doing print on demand, I really recommend it. But see, I just grabbed this one here, and then this is eligible for commercial and POD usage. So I just used that and then imported the letters directly into my Canva artboard. So see, I literally uploaded them as images, and boom, we have a design. I do have that link below for if you want to check that out. But essentially, you can see what I did here is I just took this design style with this word because I know that both of these are selling, and I'm adding something new and valuable to the market for St. Patrick's Day. And if I even wanted to add a shamrock to this one, because I know that this has a shamrock, I absolutely could. Even change the colors to match.
This was the other design that I came up with as well. Both text-based, pretty simple designs. I just did the word here and then added some shamrocks on it to give that overall feel of what this design is portraying, and then what this design says. So that's the way that I do my, you know, design research for combining trends.
So now I'm going to go ahead and download both of my designs here, and then we're going to go and upload them onto Printify. So on Printify, if you're not aware, it's free to use until you actually get an order. So you can upload a bunch of different listings onto your Etsy shop and you don't have to pay anything until you get an order on your Printify account, which is amazing. And Printify has so many different types of products to work with. There's t-shirts, there's sweatshirts, all different things, blankets. And especially for apparel, sweatshirts and t-shirts, you know, are pretty much the go-to. You can always get a little bit more creative, but I'm going to show you on a t-shirt for this example.
So I'm going to select t-shirts, and then you'll see all the different options that they have. There's so many. The two that I really like to sell are going to be the Gildan 5000. It's a very classic print on demand shirt. It's good every time, it's very cheap and affordable, especially if you have a Printify Premium membership like I do. It's literally $6, and then you can charge, you know, almost double that, especially if you are paying for the shipping, and you can make a better profit. It's almost $2 cheaper than the normal price. And then also, another great option and loved by so many sellers and Etsy buyers is the Bella Canvas tee. It's a little bit more expensive than the Gildan because the quality is just a tad better, and that's a bestseller as well. So I'm going to go with that one.
So when you get to this page, Printify actually gives you a few options. "Printify Choice" is going to give you, like, top-rated sellers. You don't have to actually pick your exact provider, but what some people don't realize with Printify is they work with a lot of different fulfillment centers. So Printify is like the hub of a ton of different providers. You can see here, regardless of where you're located or where your customers that you're selling to are located, there's a provider for that so that you can get the fastest shipping possible to them. So you can pick your own supplier if you want to, or use whatever Printify recommends for you. My personal favorites for t-shirts are always going to be Monster Digital and SwiftPOD. I find that they have really fast shipping, they're reliable, and their color options are good. And I actually do usually go with SwiftPOD because of all the color options. So I'm going to go ahead and click "Start Designing."
And then here's my artboard where I can upload my design. So all I did was just drag and drop that design that I just created right into my artboard, and you can see here that my design popped right up and is ready to go. And then I'm just going to size it how big I want it and where I want it to be placed. That looks good. Okay. And then I can select my variants. So variants are a fancy way of saying the colors and sizes for your products that you want to offer. So on Etsy, you can offer, you know, different colors and sizes for someone to choose, like when they're checking out on the cart, they can select "size small with blue" or "size medium with gray." It just depends. So you're in control of what colors and sizes you want to offer on your store. And then I'm going to do like a gray color as well, and then I'm also going to do black. And I want to offer a green, of course, for St. Patrick's Day. So I'm going to pick which one of these looks best with the color of the shirt. I think "Leaf" is pretty, is pretty good there. And then we can offer an maybe a darker green as well.
And then I'm going to go to "Preview," and it's going to show me what that looks like on all the different colors of shirts that I'm choosing. So I'm choosing military green, white, gray, black, and then two another green as well. And something to keep in mind when you are doing this is on Etsy, it's great to offer a ton of different colors and variants for your customers, but I personally don't like to overwhelm people. I find that when you have up to like 10 different colors, it just gets confusing, and I prefer to only offer up to five colors per listing. I'd rather create a whole like separate listing than have a listing that has so many colors that people just can't decide. And you only get 10 photos for your mockup to show the products. I just don't love offering too too many colors. That's just a little tip and something that I've learned along the way.
So once this looks good, everything's lined up, I have my color, what I'm going to do is hit "Save Product," and it's going to bring me to the next step to upload this onto my Etsy shop. So Printify will give you a ton of different mockups to choose from. They'll give you a size chart, which is amazing. I always like to select that when it's available because it's great to give a size chart for your customers on Etsy. This is what it looks like, and it helps you with not having unhappy customers if you give them a size chart to me to measure before they make a purchase. And then you can select which mockups you want to integrate right over to your Etsy shop. So you have up to 10 that you can upload. So I like to make sure that I give a pretty good show of what the flat lay looks like. This is an example of a flat lay, and then it's always good to show the product on someone with someone wearing the product. So here's an example here, like it just shows how the product looks, and that's something that you should want to show.
But sometimes these mockups aren't exactly what you'll be looking for, especially if you're selling for a specific niche or in this case, a holiday. So Printify actually just made the best integration ever. I'm actually so excited about this. If you follow my channel or you know anything about me, you know that I am obsessed with Placeit mockups. I've used Placeit mockups since my very first print on demand store in 2020, and Printify just added them to their platform, which is so cool because you used to actually have to go to Placeit, which is still fine, but you used to have to like go here, create a mockup, download it, go back over to Etsy, upload your mockup. But Printify just integrated with them, so you can do that directly when you're doing the upload process, which like, thank you Printify, thank you Placeit. I'm actually really, really excited about this.
So you will have to log in. I'm already logged in here, but I'm going to give you an example of how this works. You don't have to do this, it's just optional, and it's actually something that is really beneficial. So I'm going to show you what it would look like if you did choose to do this. So it already is showing my design on all the variants of products, right? And here I can choose the color of the shirt that I want the mockup for, and then I can do "filter out by gender, age, ethnicity," all different things. I'm going to do the black shirt and I'm going to search for "t-shirt," and then I'm going to get a bunch of different t-shirt mockups. So see how this mockup is a lot more flattering than like this flat lay, you know? It just looks a little bit better and tends to sell better on Etsy when you can kind of make like a connection and it doesn't look as blah. And it also helps you stand out when you have mockups that aren't as, you know, just plain. It doesn't mean they're bad, but they're just a little bit more plain. And photos are everything on Etsy.
So I'm just going to go through here and pick out some mockups that I want to use. So I'm just going to choose this one to show you. I can hit "Edit" and move it around if I'd like to get it to the exact way that I want it, and then I can hit "Select Mockup," and it'll upload it with my products. See how it just popped up over here for me? And then I can do that and filter out for women if I want a woman wearing the shirt. And then if I want to change out the color, so maybe this one I want to do in "Leaf," select mockup, and it'll go over. And of course, you can do this accordingly to who you feel your target audience is, because again, mockup photos are something that you want to kind of match with who exactly you're trying to sell the product to.
Okay, so I have my mockups, and then I'm going to hit "Save Selection" and continue on with my listing. So this is where you can input all of your information for a successful listing. It's where you're going to put your title, your description, and then change the price for your products. I like to edit my title and my description later on in Etsy after I do a little bit of SEO research, but I'm going to show you how I go about with the pricing situation for my print on demand products, because that can be something that really confuses people. So I want to show you how I would go about doing that.
So if you're not familiar with Etsy, it shows here that after October 1st, they made it known that any time a seller is charging more than $6 for shipping, meaning that the customer would have to pay over $6 for shipping, that they're not prioritizing those listings in search. And obviously, if we're selling on Etsy, we want to stand out against competition and we want Etsy to prioritize our search. So two things that you can do is: number one, don't charge your customer for shipping. You can offer free shipping. We know that everyone loves free shipping on Etsy, and in my five years of experience, I've learned that when I give free shipping on listings, they do just sell better. I know that it doesn't look as sexy of a price when you're scrolling, but it does have that free shipping badge, and people get annoyed when, I mean, I'm sure you've experienced this before, where you go to check out and you thought an item was a certain price, and then you see the tax, the shipping, and you abandon your cart. So I prefer to offer free shipping. That's just my word of advice for you. I prefer that over a free shipping guarantee. I do think that, well, I know that it cuts into my profit, right? But I have found to prefer to offer free shipping and then work on order volume versus order profit quantity, if that makes sense.
So I'm going to toggle on "Free Shipping," and it's telling me that yes, I'm going to have to pay for the cost. And then right down here, this is where I would do the price for my product. So I can see each size and color variant, and I can see the price at retail price, which means the price that you'd be selling it on at on Etsy, and then the profit, meaning what you would make after production cost plus shipping plus Etsy fee. So Printify breaks all this down for you, which is so helpful because honestly, like, if you don't understand how much you're profiting, print on demand can become something that confuses the heck out of you. So whatever your production price plus your shipping price is, so in this case, our production cost is around $11.40 plus our shipping cost was around $4.75. So if I round that to $12 and $5, we're at $17 give or take for our t-shirt production cost, which means we have to charge more than $17 to our Etsy customers so that we make a profit. When we buy that product from Printify, because we're going to buy that product from Printify when someone buys it on our store, and that money is not going to go directly from your Etsy customer to Printify. You're the middleman. So you need to take your customer's money that they paid you and then pay Printify and keep your profit in between.
So as I said, we need to charge more than $17 to make a profit. Now, on top of that, we have our Etsy fee, which is around $3, well, $2.68, but I'm just generously rounding here, rounding up so that we don't miss out on any extra coins here. But so then, $17, $18, $19, $20. So we need to charge realistically more than $20 for us to make a profit. So for this t-shirt, right, we're seeing, okay, what can we charge for that to make a profit that a customer will still purchase at? So I'm going to price this at $26, because that's showing me that I'm making around a $7 profit, and I don't feel that that's a super high price.
Something that I want to talk about with pricing really quick. I know this video is not about pricing, but I find this to be something that people get really tripped up on. Is your price at the end of the day does not matter as much as you might think. What really matters is your design research, and that you're adding a valuable product to the marketplace that somebody is going to be looking for for that niche or trend or holiday, whatever it is that you're designing for. Let's think about for a moment something that you've wanted really bad, a t-shirt, right? Maybe a sweatshirt. You see in a store, even if it's marked up, you're more likely to buy it if it was something you were in the market for. People will always pay for what they want if they find value in it. So they're not so concerned about the price. Now, does that mean that not to price competitively? No, it just means don't emphasize on your price nearly as much as you emphasize the research for the design and product that you're selling. And I don't want to talk too much about that. I'm going to make a separate video, and then I have other videos I can have you reference in the description if you want to learn more about that. But basically, what I'm trying to tell you is don't sit here for 35 minutes and think, "Okay, but then I'm only making $7." But okay, then I'm charging $30. Like, charge what you feel is a decent amount of profit for this item. Ideally, with print on demand products, because you know we have Printify shipping and printing it for us, our profit margin is not going to be as high as somebody who holds inventory and creates the products on their own. So you want to aim for any between a 15 to a 30% profit margin. Honestly, with print on demand products, it's going to be more towards 15 to 20%. That looks good. But just keep that in mind with this on here. And Printify does have a beautiful profit calculator that you can move over to right here.
Okay, once we have our price done, I'm going to go down to "Publish Settings" and I'm going to select "Hide in Store." What that does is it's going to make it so that when we upload this onto our Etsy shop, that it goes to our drafts and doesn't go live already for our customers to purchase, because then it's like live and we didn't finish the listing. If you do finish the listing in here, you can go ahead, but we haven't done our title yet. So I'm going to make sure it says "Hide in Store," and then I'm going to hit "Publish." And this is going to go directly over to my Etsy shop.
So after a few minutes, as you can see in my Etsy drafts, that this did just pop up, ready for me to start finishing my listing. So the first thing I wanted to talk about was my title. Now, with SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. What you want to do is create a title that makes sense for the product that you're selling, and also is something that has highly searched for keywords, but they're relevant to your product. So I like to use different Chrome extensions to help me. Some of them I use are eRank and Everbee. And essentially, what they'll do is tell me what the search volume is for a specific term, also how much competition is going to be with that search term.
So honestly, for your title, your very first thing that you put in your title is what is be called your long-tail keyword, and which is also going to be what's considered an exact match keyword, meaning that the product is as you say. So what I would use for my exact match keyword in this case would either be the phrase that's on the t-shirt or "St. Patrick's Day t-shirt." So I'm going to do "St. Patrick's Day t-shirt," followed by some other keywords. So for the t-shirt that I was referencing in the beginning on the eRank Chrome extension, as I said, we see it's making sales. So I'm going to look at the words that are in here. So it says "women's lucky shirt," "St. Patrick's Day shirt," "cute St. Patrick's Day," "funny Irish shirt." So I can take some of the terms from this listing and put them in my title because I know that these types of keywords are working for this listing. So if I wanted to check the phrase that I'm using on there, I would just type it in and hit search, and then we could see if there's a search volume for that specific word.
So I can see that there's not a super high search volume for this product, but when I scroll down, it actually does have a pretty high key score on here because there's not as ton of competition as there would be for another search term like "St. Patrick's Day." So what I'm going to do is take "sláinte Irish," I'm sorry if I'm saying that wrong, "Irish shirt." Now, I'm not going to keep repeating the same phrases in my title, so like "t-shirt," I'm not going to repeat, but I can put "shirt" or I can put "tee shirt" and do different spellings because that actually does help you in your SEO. And then I'm just going to continue this process and come up with the title for my shirt.
Okay, so here's the title that I came up with: "St. Patrick's Day t-shirt, sláinte Irish shirt, lucky shamrock tee for women, cute St. Patrick's Day top, wom St. Patty's Day." So see how I've hit a few popular keyword searches, but I'm also not repeating myself too much so that Etsy can take a bunch of those different keywords to use in my SEO.
Then for my description, I can make this a little bit better by just adding some different keywords in here. Essentially, Printify gives you what is a template for what you should use in your description because it's telling you all different parts about this actual product. Something that you can do is copy and paste this into ChatGPT. So I'm going to say, "Can you just make this more structured description for an Etsy listing?" And then I'm going to paste that in, and then I'll just copy this directly over to my listing, and then I'll add in a few keywords or even copy and paste some of them from my title directly in there.
Next, I'm going to scroll down and make sure that everything looks good, and then I can add in some tags to also help with the SEO of my product. Again, I would just grab those from my eRank Chrome extension. So I would do the same exact thing that I've been doing, taking a look at these popular best-selling listings, using this, and then I can scroll down and it'll show me exactly which tags they're using. So I see here this one says "Clover shirt," "Irish shirt," "Irish sweatshirt." And then depending on which one you or click on, you can take certain keywords from there that they have. So they're using "four leaf clover," and you can actually copy these directly, see here, and paste them into your Etsy listing. But I recommend taking them from multiple listings, not just one. You don't want to just use the same exact listing and like take all the stuff from it, you want to do your own thing.
So I'm just going to preview my listing. So I have my title, all my colors, my price, and then my description here. And then, like I said, it's not going to put all the photos over immediately. You might have to refresh it. See, I just refreshed it here, and then I can pick which one of these I want for my first image. So maybe I want this one, and then followed by the white. And honestly, your mockup images should be something that you take a lot of time for. I have a separate video talking about that, so I will leave that linked for you. But essentially, this is what your listing should look like. So here's a beautiful, we have the design there, our title looks good, and this is what a customer would see if we went ahead and made this design live.
So regardless of what product or niche or holiday you're selling for, you can follow this exact process that I just showed you by creating products on your Printify account and listing them for sale on your Etsy shop. If you found this video helpful, please let me know by leaving a comment and a like. And if you have any questions, leave them below. I also want to say that everything I talked about in this video that I used will be linked below for you in the description. So if you want to check any of it out, again, Printify is free to sign up for, and that is there as well. And I do have a link for Etsy if you don't have your Etsy shop set up yet, you can get 40 of your first listings for free, meaning that you save that 20 cents a listing every time. So that will be below for you as well. Thank you so much for watching, and I hope to see you in the next video.