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Wix and Printful | How To Choose Products To Sell For Your Print On Demand Store | Video Lesson #3

Writer's picture: Michael Strauch (MPS)Michael Strauch (MPS)

Greetings Wix nation, are you ready to discover what products to sell in your print-on-demand store? Join me in video lesson three of our Wix and Printful series – Products101, choosing the best products to sell in your print-on-demand store.


In today's video lesson, you'll discover three topics. First and foremost, how to pick a niche. Secondly, how to create brand positioning and resonate with customers. And third, and finally actually physically adding products to your print-on-demand store. If this sounds exciting to you and you're ready to dive in, let's do it.


But just one second. I know you want to jump into the material, but if you're brand new here, I would ask you one thing. If you can click that subscribe button in the bottom right of this video and turn those bell notifications on so you don't miss any videos in this series along with any of my other videos here on Wix Training Academy that would be fantastic. All right, let's jump in.


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Choosing the Products To Sell For Your Print-On-Demand Store

And we slide into our Wix and Printful series Products 101 - Choose What to Sell, and just a friendly reminder that this series is sponsored by Printful.


So we've got one main objective for today's video and that is to give you clarity on what products will resonate with your brand. And we're going to do that in two ways. First we're going to talk about picking your niche and then discuss brand positioning, discussing mainly the importance of establishing an edge and branding yourself in that niche.


And then we're going to actually talk about Printful product creation and walking through how to add products through Printful so you can post them on your print-on-demand store.



Picking a Niche

So first and foremost, picking a niche. When I was younger and I told my parents, you know, I was born to be an entrepreneur, my father sat down with me, an entrepreneur. My mother sat down with me who assists in that entrepreneurial lifestyle and they said the riches are in the niches. Why did they say that? Well, if you pick a niche, it allows you, as Printful says down here to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a little fish in a big pond. And that has a deeper meaning to it.


But they had me answer these three questions. Do you have a passion for the niche you're about to enter? Do you actually have passion and interest in what you're about to enter? Is there a problem you are solving with your particular product and or service? But in this case, with print-on-demand, we're speaking of products. Entrepreneurs by nature are problem solvers. They find a problem, create a solution, and charge money for that solution. In cases, that's how our minds operate. So your product has to fill the void of a problem, which means it's got to be a solution.


And then third, and finally, what does the volume of competition look like for that particular niche? So if you answer these three questions, you can begin to gain some clarity on what niche you should go into. In fact, I've even compiled a list, a few example niches here. So here's a few real world examples of some niches that may be of interest to you or to get that creative part of your mind spinning.

I've highlighted three of my personal favorites. We've got lifestyle, so like lifestyle, apparel, lifestyle products, business and entrepreneurship, so creating business products, entrepreneurship, motivation, t-shirts. Those are some examples. Workout gear. There's a whole culture behind workout and there's several subcultures from that. You have CrossFit, you've got powerlifters, you've got running clubs, you've got all these different sub niches within a niche, you've got Parenthood, the new parents, single parents stay at home parents. These are all niches and sub niches, specialty coffee, these are different niches.


You've got pet accessories. The pet culture is huge. Newlyweds, baby care, craft, beer, rap and hip hop music. There's so many sub niches within music. There's sub niches within rap and hip hop. You've got men's grooming. These are all examples of different niches you might be interested in pursuing or at least gets your mind spinning. If you can start on one broad niche such as lifestyle or babies or pets, you can start to sub niche down from that and start getting a little bit more specific about, okay, so pets, are we wanting to go into pet accessories, pet clothing, pet food?


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And then once you get there, are you looking to do, you know like gluten free, pet fruit, food, vegan, pet food? Are you looking to do dog leashes? Are you looking to do dog collars, dog clothes? And then you can continue to just get further and further down. The thing you need to take into account is you don't want to go so far that there's not a big enough market at all to actually sell your products and be successful.


But you want to get far enough that you can be a big fish in a small pond, which essentially means you can be a big business and dominate the market of that smaller market. And that's what your goal is. And you want to become an expert in that niche. So after we've determined what our niche is going to be, I wanted to give you the top 10 trending products at the end of 2019 according to Printful.



10 Trending Products

So there was multiple products as you can imagine, that flew out the doors this holiday season. But the top 10 to get your mind spinning once you found your niche about some products you can sell were mugs, hoodies and sweatshirts, wall art. You can see this wall art to the right building empire. This is an example of something Printful can create. I actually got my wall art, this exact one from intuitive, I'll throw a link to them in the description as low as well.


Jewelry, t-shirts, bags such as backpacks, tote bags, beanies, leggings, bean bags, which is pretty cool. And then baby one pieces who doesn't love babies and pets, right? And so baby, one piece is we're at the top of the list. So these were the top 10 trending print on demand products that were out the doors according to Printful the end of this 2019 throughout the holiday season.


So here's some ideas to get your mind spinning about some products you can now create once you've determined what your niche is. And then most importantly above everything else, once you've got your niche and you've started identifying maybe some products you can create within that niche is you have to position your brand and determine how you're going to resonate with your customer base.



Brand Positioning

Here on the screen I've got kind of a sample positioning chart. I use two determinants in this positioning chart, I use price and quality. Now you can use whatever variables you would like. I use pricing quality because they're easy to comprehend. But maybe you're in a particular niche and you want to do, you know, competitor analysis, you know or a healthy dog food versus unhealthy dog food for example, and where to position yourself. So now what this chart allows you to do, and I really encourage you to create a positioning chart because it helps establish your mindset and really get clear on where you'd like to position yourself as.


You've got four quadrants, you can see them here. You've got in the upper left quadrant, high price, low quality. You've got in the lower left quadrant, low quality, low price. In the lower right quadrant, you've got low price, high quality, and then in the upper right quadrant, you've got high price and high quality. Now what you should do is you should plot out where you believe your competitors lie. In this positioning chart, again, you may not have the same variables like price and quality as I used in this example. It could be different variables, but choose what those variables are that will help best determine what your competitors are doing and where you can stand out.


So you'll plot. Say for example, we're in sports apparel, you've got Nike, you've got Under Armor, you've got Adidas, right? So you've got Nike and they would likely fall somewhere in the quadrant of higher price, high quality. They've got a very quality material, but their prices are often pretty high. They can charge that because there's a market and a demand for, whereas you've got Under Armor who in some products in some cases would probably fit more toward the middle, maybe more towards the higher quality show on the right side of the quadrant, but maybe a little lower on the quadrant, more towards the mid to lower price.


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Then you've got something like Puma where I would say Puma sits a little more toward the middle or left on the quality scale, but they're also a little bit lower price. Now this isn't bashing brands. This is simply doing a competitor analysis and I encourage you to do it with your business as well because once you plot your competitors, what you need to determine is where do you want to be plotted on this positioning chart? Do you want to be known as the company that's got high prices but extremely high quality, more of a luxury type feel? Or do you want to be the company that's on the other side of it and you've got, you know, not the most quality products, but you're getting it for a really low price. So you're going for that low price provider.


That's what you have to determine what you would like your company to be like and how you want your products to be perceived. And that's how you'll determine where you'll resonate with your customers. And that will also determine who your customer base is and what market you're really shooting for within your niche. Because there are differences between luxury products and lower end products at a lower price. So this is an important aspect of choosing your next step and getting ready to add your products.



Adding Products in Printful


Now that we've understood how to choose a niche and the brand positioning, and you've got some ideas that some niches and top products you can go with, let's talk about how to actually add those products in Printful. So now we're going to direct our attention off of the PowerPoint and onto Printful website. You can see I've now got my blue light glasses on, got to protect the eyes and protect the vision, right? I recommend you get some.


So now that we're on Printful, if you don't already have a Printful account registered, you need to do so. And you can do that by clicking a link in the description below. And yes, that is my affiliate link. Nothing in the process of signing up changes for you. It's completely free to do. However, if you have already registered with the link down below and you've now got your Printful account, you need to log in.


So we're going to show you how to add products to your print-on-demand store in just a second. But before we do that, I wanted to show you all of the products that Printful offers so that way you can start to determine, okay, now I've got my niche. Now I know where I'd like to position my brand and my niche. What kind of products should I begin to add?


So Printful actually offers quite a bit of products, everything from t-shirts and a list of different t-shirts such as tank tops, three quarter sleeves, long sleeves hoodies, sweatshirts, they've got sweat pants, joggers, legging shorts they've got a variety in women's clothing and clothing. Such as baby bibs, baby body suits, swimwear hats from Beanie's, dad hats, snapbacks, trucker hats, mesh hats, visors, bucket hats, you name it. And then they've even got some awesome, cool accessories such as tote bags, lap strap, laptop bags, draw strings, backpacks iPhone cases, Samsung cases, jewelry, flip-flops, socks, and these are all products that you can put your designs on and your branding on.


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Then if you move down, they've got home and living, see, you've got coffee mugs, blankets, stickers, pillows, wall art, like we discussed beach towels, bean bags, which I think is really fricking cool to be as part of my French. And a whole bunch of variety. And then they've also got collections of products. So beach wear, street wear, swimwear, eco-friendly gifts, so you can actually choose and create a collection or assortment of products with your design and branding on. So hopefully this will get your creative juices flowing in terms of what type of physical products you actually want to sell.


But once you've determined what that looks like, what you need to do is you need to go to Printful and you get access to your dashboard and then you need to scroll down to this stores tab on the left click stores and it'll take you right here to this store page.


Now you've already integrated your Wix website. You can see I've done it three times on three different occasions, but you'll have it once because you integrated with Wix in your previous are in our previous video lesson. What you're going to do is you're going to see product sync and you're going to click add and when you click add, it's going to give you the ability to start adding a product to your print-on-demand store. And this is why I wanted to give you some example of the different products that Printful offers because if you don't go in with some clarity on what you'd like to build as far as products go, maybe you are going to specialize in t-shirts. Maybe you're going to specialize in beanies. Maybe you're going to specialize in an assortment such as streetwear, and you're going to do lifestyle clothing.


You need to go in with some clarity on that. So that way when you go to this product editor, you know where to go and where to start. Looking in the example that we used in video lesson two, I was building a t-shirt store, so I'm going to follow suit with that and start adding a t-shirt. What I'm going to be building is an entrepreneurial lifestyle t-shirt company. So with entrepreneurial motivation, entrepreneurial quotes stuff like that.


So to start this, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go over to t-shirts on the left and I'm going to click t-shirts once that populates. You'll see even on top of that, you have a variety of the type of t-shirt you would like to put your design on in your branding, on an offer on your online store. So you've got everything from like a premium tee shirt with a Bella putt, Bella canvas.


You can do an all over print men's crew neck. You can go with a basic soft style t-shirts. You can go with a tri blend and these are all different materials that you're choosing from right now. And if you don't know which one do you like to go with, the beautiful thing is, is you can choose one, slap your design on, slap your branding on, and you can actually order a sample through Printful and you get a discount for samples, which is pretty awesome.


So you can really feel the quality of the product before you commit to, yes, this is what I want on my online store. So I really like to try shirt our tri blend. Also, my dad's company actually just had to order products through Printful try blend material as well cause he loves that material for his upcoming event that he always hosts every quarter.


And they put all their designs on, they ordered a sample and they loved the tribal. And so I'm going to choose the tribal end shirt. You would then click the shirt. Once you've got your shirt clicked on, you've got a few different options here. You can choose the colors that you're going to offer this shirting and you, yes, you can select multiple colors, you can see, I can select all the different colors I want to offer this shirt in. You can unselect a color and it'll unselect that from your variety. You can choose the sizes you'd like to offer.


So if you want to offer everything from extra small all the way up to triple XL, you can do that. Maybe you don't want to go all the way up to triple XL and you just want to go up to Xcel. That's fine too. And you choose what sizes you'd like to offer. And then once you've determined what your colors are, what your printing technique is. So printing, this is actual physical screen printing onto the product, whereas embroidery is actually embroidered onto the product and there is a difference in that. And you can choose whether your product is stocked in the U.S. Europe or the U.S. and Europe. So these are different options.


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But once you've determined what style you're going with, and I'm going to go with just the regular printing style for this, well you could do is you can come down here and you can upload a file. If you've got your design built out from like Photoshop and you've got it in a PNG or a JPEG version or maybe a, you know, you've got an icon that you're looking to upload. But if you didn't already have a premade design, which by the way Printful does offer creative design services to help you create product designs. It is for an additional fee, but you can utilize this if you'd like to utilize that. You can totally do.


So you can go to design and you can upload your files, you can add your own texts, you can add clip art. And then once you choose your design, which I'm going to go to my files and I'm going to upload, I accept, I am going to go to my, Wix Training Academy folder and I'm just going to pull the current working logo we've got for Wix Training Academy. I'm going to upload it. And then I'm going to click on the file and click choose to continue. And what you'll see here is that my file is now added to the shirt. It happens to be very small, but you can see, I can enlarge it, make it bigger. And the DPI, this shows that the amount of like pixels is too small.


So my file size is a little too small to generate solid print files that actually look quality on the t-shirt. So you need to check the file types. You can see right here it shows print quality is four, it's only 45 DPI. So you need to figure out the best file size and DPI needed for your particular item that you choose your product that you choose. And then you can manipulate the design that you either upload, you can make it bigger, you can make it smaller, you can move it around to a certain quadrant and you have flexibility over where that design goes on this t-shirt in this example. And you can just continue to either move forward. You can see my DPI is too small. So if that's the case, what I need to do is I need to upload a different file because that particular one is too small.

So I know I do have a larger logo down here. So what I can do is I can come in here and if I find it right here, WTA logo, this one should be bigger and it's going to upload like it just did. And then I'm going to choose and we can see the quality on this one is good. The DPI is 300 DPI. So if I kept it this size, I can leave it smack dab on the shirt there. And once the print quality is good, only then we'll print full, allow you to proceed to mockups. So now you can flip into, in between colors by clicking these icons right here to see what your design looks like on each color version of the product you chose.


Now I can proceed the mockups. So now the mockups will be pushed to my online store. And this is like the product images that will be listed on your Wix store, right? So these are your mockup images and you can choose what one is your main image. You can choose the mockup style, whether it's like a women's mockup, a men's t-shirt, whether it's just the picture, the t-shirt, or they've even got like couples mockups or just a flat lifestyle mockup, which is pretty cool that they give you variety without having to use their design services for just offering the mockup. Your main product image on your website.


And what you'll have to do once you've determined the mockup you want listed on the site is you'll have to determine if you want it in a PNG file or JPEG file. It really doesn't matter. The plus behind the JPEG is that a smaller file, it'll load faster on the store. Whereas PNG is a transparent background and it looks a little crisper but it's a bulkier file as well. So it does decrease low time a little bit. So you have to choose which of these and then you would proceed to the description.


So this is where you actually give your product a title and actually lay out the description. And we talked about descriptions in video lesson one I bought our video lesson two. And so this will allow you to choose what that looks like and it'll all translate over to Wix stores. And once you've got your title, a catchy title, catchy description, you proceed to pricing. And this is where you determine what you want to sell this item for. It'll show you the price that Printful charges you to actually utilize their service of printing it, packaging it, fulfilling it, and shipping it. That's what this cost is.


And then you can choose what you want the retail price to be to the customer. And then it'll show you here what your profit will be based off of your retail price and what Printful chooses. And you can see right now your profit would be $6 and 55 cents per short. And that's pretty cool how you can manage the pricing right here. And you can alter this as much as you want. If I wanted to change this to $24 you'll see my profit goes up by a few cents, right? So you get to see and manipulate these numbers.


And then you can choose your categories right here which category your product falls into. Maybe mine is new arrivals, and then you can click submit to store. And what's going to happen is this is integrated with your Wix account. So it's going to sink and it is now added in Wix and that is how you add a product in Printful.



Conclusion


In our next episode of video, lesson number four, we're going to talk about Design101 and how to design the best product look and feel possible. You enjoyed today's episode of Wix and Printful Products101 choosing the best products to sell. I would kindly ask that you give us a thumbs up right down below, comment in the description, what your thoughts were on today's episode, and make sure you hit that subscribe button in the bottom right of this video and turn those bell notifications on. So you never miss a single upload here on Wix Training Academy.


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My name is MPS from Wix Training Academy and I hope you'll join us in tomorrow's episode of video lesson number four Design101.

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lazyrnaya20071985
May 23, 2024

This is certainly useful information for all entrepreneurs. To attract the interest of customers and increase sales, you always need to think about creating new attractive price offers and quotes. I advise you to read the blog https://www.warrington-worldwide.co.uk/2024/05/02/what-is-the-difference-between-cpq-and-clm/ about the difference between cpq and clm software and think about using such software for your business. This way you can optimize the process of creating price proposals to attract the interest of your customers.

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