It is finally time you've gone through each and every episode in our Wix and Printful series and you are now equipped with the tools and resources and knowledge needed to go ahead and launch your print-on-demand store. My only question is, are you ready?
If you're ready to join me, we are going to go through a launch checklist in today's video to make sure that your store is completely prepared on all fronts to go ahead and press that publish button so you can officially announce and launch your first print-on-demand store. So let's go ahead and jump into today's content and go through this checklist together.
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Print-On-Demand Launch Checklist
I know I know you're ready to launch, but before we do that, can I ask you a quick favor? Can you go ahead down in the bottom right of this video and hit that subscribe button and turn those bell notifications on so you don't miss any videos like these on Wix Training Academy and you'll instantly plug into 31,000 plus like-minded entrepreneurs.
I think it's also important for me to let you know that yes, we are launching the print-on-demand store in today's video, but this is not the last video in the series. I have three more additional videos where I'll be covering how to actually draw traffic to your print-on-demand store. So we're going to go through three separate videos on marketing techniques. So let's dive into our checklist now. But don't leave me after this video. Stay tuned for our following videos as well.
And as always I'm equipped with my blue light glasses to protect this 2020 vision just like the year we're in and I can't believe it, but we are already here ready to launch your print-on-demand store, which is extremely exciting. So with this video, Printful has actually created a complete checklist, which I'm going to throw a link to in the description below that you can follow and actually check off each of these individual items.
You have now arrived at the point where we've discovered how to actually build your online store in Wix. You understand what Printful is, how it works with dropshipping, it’s all about you learn how to pick products and which products sell best, how to design your products. We did an unboxing and it product reviews. You now have a feel for what the products are like and that they're great quality and we've touched on the financial aspect of your business, product pricing strategy, setting up shipping, how that works within Printful and choosing your payment processor.
You have now hit all of the topics you need to hit to officially go live with your print-on-demand store, but there is one last aspect of this and that is going through the checklist that Printful has graciously provided you and going through it thoroughly to ensure that you've checked off all of these items before you officially click publish on your online store. So that's what we're going to go through in this video.
It's going to be nice, short and sweet. I'm going to explain each aspect of it. And then your job at the end of this is to press, publish and go live with it. So that way in tomorrow's video we can start covering the first aspect of free marketing techniques. And then we'll have two final videos in this series to touch on the last two aspects of different marketing techniques that you can use to increase the traffic to your store and start generating sales like crazy. So that way you can become a wild success. And I want to hear about it.
So the essentials to go through, again, the link to this will be in the description below and you can actually come through here and check off each of these items and Printful will mark that you checked it off. So it makes it really easy to go through. First and foremost, you want to make sure your print files meet principles guidelines. So when you're designing your products, you want to make sure your DPI is the correct size using the Printful mockup generator like we showed you, and making sure the file guidelines are accurate. We've already done this. We did this in our previous video, so we're good there.
Number two, you have to add products. Well, hopefully you already done this, but in order to do so, when you remember, you got to go to your store, add products, and this is where you'll choose what type of products you're going to add. We went through all different niches that you can go into the top trending products of 2019 what they looked like and maybe some products that you might want to add in addition to those, and you should have already done this. So we've added products.
Then we have to set the fulfillment preferences so you can be imported to Printful and fulfilled automatically, or they can be imported as drafts. That means you'll have to manually confirm each of these orders to proceed with fulfillment. If you just want to set your online store on autopilot like it's already set, what you'll do is you'll just go as is and Printful will receive your orders and you won't have to automatically. You want to have to manually approve each and every order before Printful actually fulfills it, it'll just get the order and then they'll fulfill it.
However, if you've got the type of online store that you're like at, I want to check the order and make sure that everything looks right before Printful fulfills it. You can actually set the fulfillment preferences on Printful so that way you manually check it each time. But again, if you'd want a store that just runs on autopilot, you don't have to have that setting checked and it can just automatically be fulfilled after purchase is ordered. So we'll set that.
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Then you need to set up your payment method on Printful, we explained payment processors and what payment processors to choose through Wix, and that's so your consumers can actually purchase on your online store. However you want to be able to get paid and you're going to have to pay Printful, right? So what you need to make sure you have to do is go to your billing section. As you can see, Printful provides a link. If you click billing, you would click billing here and then it's going to take you to the different billing methods that Printful offers. This is so you can actually pay Printful for the service that they're providing. And you would add a billing method and you can see they offer a variety of different billing methods they offer just about every credit card you can imagine. And they also accept PayPal if you'd like to choose PayPal. So you'll go in there and you'll set your billing information.
And then once you do that, you'll come back to our checklist here and you'll check this off of the list because you've then set up your billing information, then set up a payment processor on your storefront. We just did this in the last video, depending on what you chose, whether you chose which payment processor, Stripe, PayPal that is what you set up in Wix.
So you can actually accept payments through Wix when someone purchases on your online store. And remember, you need a premium business e-commerce plan through which to accept payments. So we have done that. Those are your five critical essential steps that need to be done before you can click publish.
So if you've done those, you're already perfect, ready to launch. However, if you'd like to go through some extra next steps, which I personally recommend, I say we go through these once you go through your essentials, the next one on the list is managed shipping settings. So review the shipping options by going to stores at, at shipping. So this is from Printful. So you want to make sure that your shipping settings are all set via Printful and that you are very well aware as we talked about in pricing strategy, what your cost is for shipping to Printful.
So that way if you want to set it up and Wix to your end consumer and charge them a shipping costs or build it into the product, you can. And we cover that in the last video. So we're going to check that off the list. Next, adding a customs disclaimer. So if you're shipping products internationally, you might want to add a disclaimer on your products, maybe on your product page in Wix or actually in your product description on the particular products that maybe you're adding certain fees because sometimes customs charges custom fees to actually go and ship international. So you want to do this to make sure you manage customer expectations. If you're not shipping internationally, then this doesn't really become much of an issue at all but if you are thinking about adding a customs disclaimer and then check that off the list next.
If you haven't done this already after adding your products, I strongly suggest you do show order some samples. So if you want to figure out exactly what your products are going to look like and what the packaging will look like, then go through Printful, go to your Printful dashboard, new order sample order. We covered this two videos ago in order your first sample so you can actually get a physical look at exactly what the products are going to be like and you even get a discount from ordering samples. You get 20% off when you order a sample. So you don't have to worry about paying the full price for you internally to order a sample of your products. But you're going to want to do this to test the quality. Sure. To do so. Then once you do, you'll check that off of the list.
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Then we covered this in the last video place a test order. In the last video you got all of the financial pieces set up, including the payment processor processes. So now you know that you can accept the payments, go through, pretend you are a customer on your online store, go to your website and actually go through and try purchasing a product, make sure that it works well and that it's working properly for your end consumer. And then make sure that Printful receives the order and then that they ship it to you. Technically this money is going straight back into your bank account, right? Because other than Printful shipping it to you, you'll be paying for the product, but you want to make sure you spend that money on testing to make sure the order process is seamless so that way there's no trouble to your consumer when they go through your online store when you launch.
So make sure you place a test order on your actual online store, your published domain. Then always make sure you check your tax obligations. Again, Printful mentioned this and I'm going to do the same. Consult a tax specialist to make sure there's no additional taxes or special regional taxes that you need to put through Wix to ensure that you're in tax to ensure that you're properly following tax code in your country or your particular region. You don't want to get into any tax trouble. So make sure you consult a tax specialist and check your tax obligations. And then we'll check that off the list.
And then lastly, Printful has some extra features to boost your brand, which I think are pretty cool and I would recommend going through these as well to just top it off. Put a cherry on top of the take there and then publish your print-on-demand store.
Number one, you have the ability to upload a custom branding sticker, completely free sticker logo on all of your packages. If you'd like to do this, what you can do is you can click this store's link right here and then this is going to take you to stores. And then if you go to edit on your store, you can go through here and then you'll see. And then you'll see here on the left hand side, when you're in your stores editing, you can see packing slip over on the left sidebar here. And then you can actually upload a branding sticker that will come on all packages from you.
So when someone orders from your online store, they'll actually get a custom package with your branding slipper on it. It just gives that extra professional appeal and it gets people to get behind your brand and they're more likely to, you know, take that sticker and use it or keep it or share it with a friend.
And then you'll want to include your customer service email and phone number in here as well. And you can even add a custom packing slip message. So if we go back to our checklist here, we can see now that we've crossed off, uploaded custom branding sicker. Do you have to do that? No, you don't have to. If you don't want to create a custom branding sticker, none of these are required. They're just recommended for branding purposes to help you continue boosting your brand. So when people purchase, it gets the brand out there more.
Secondly, we talked about adding a message to your packing slip so you can actually add a custom message to each packing slip. Because when an order comes, there's a packing slip inside and it would be really cool if you had a personalized message on there that said something like either you know, a story about your company or maybe just a thank you for your purchase and something along the lines like that. And it's that same spot that you just uploaded, the custom branding sticker. So if you wanted to do that, you could and cross that off of the list. And that's again, completely optional.
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Communicate your return policy. This is pretty important print flaws, a unique return policy, so you want to make sure you keep in mind is return policy. I'll throw a link in the description below with Printful’s return policy so you can review that as well. But you want to communicate your stores, your unique return policy to your customers so that way there's no disputes, it's not misunderstood. That's very clear. So I would recommend doing this, but again it's optional and then you can check that off the list.
And then finally, if you've got products that you're not selling through Printful and you're not utilizing Printful’s, a print on demand service, Printful actually has a warehouse and fulfillment service that you can actually store your non Printful products out of Printful warehouse and they'll still fulfill and ship for you.
So you can explore that option by going through the checklist and clicking here. And if that's something you'd like to do, you can absolutely do that. And then you can cross that off the list. Otherwise we have officially gone through principles launch checklist that will set your store up for optimal success.
Launching Your Print-On-Demand Store
I think you're ready. It's time. It's time for you to officially launch your print-on-demand store. So you are now officially ready to publish your print-on-demand store. To make it official, what you need to do is you need to go to your Wix dashboard. You need to go over here to site actions, edit site. And what you're going to do is you're literally going to publish your print-on-demand store and let it go live.
You've now got everything set up, you've got your products added, you've got your products designed, you've got your payment processing set, you've got your hosting plan done, you've got your domain name, you've got everything properly set up and you've designed your website, your online store to be the best looking online store possible.
And now all you have to do is simply go up to this big blue button in the right corner and press publish. And then it's going to go ahead and it's going to publish and it's going to say congratulations and then you can click view site here and you will then see your published print-on-demand store and again if you haven't already, I would highly recommend you go through and create a test order, go through as if you were a customer on your online store, that you're picking a product here and that you like it, you click it, you add it to the cart to test the experience, you select your color, add it to the cart and then go through view cart and then actually go on and place an order to test and make sure the order process works seamlessly and that Printful receives the order as well.
And then you're done. You've got your print-on-demand store launched and the rest is up to marketing and actually generating people and traffic to come to your print-on-demand store, which we're going to cover in tomorrow's video.
Conclusion
There you have it. You have officially published your print-on-demand store. If you liked this video in this series all the way up to this moment, drop a like down below. I want you to comment in the description with the link to your published print-on-demand store. I want to see it. I would love to see what you've created and I'm excited to see you start generating results.
And then lastly, make sure to hit that subscribe button in the bottom right of this video here and turn those bell notifications on so you never miss any content. Just like this video here, along with our Wix and Printful series. And you'll plug into 31,000 plus like-minded entrepreneurs.
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And don't forget the series is not done. You've got your store published, you've got everything leading up to it, you did all the preparation, but now it's time to market your online store and actually generate traffic to it. So stick with us for tomorrow's video and then two final videos next week. And we are ending the series on January 30th that's right. It's been a complete month to kick off the new year to kick off your new print on demand store.
And I hope you've loved this series thus far, and I hope with these final three videos that cover marketing that you're going to begin to see some real improvement and real results with your print-on-demand store. I'm thrilled and excited to see what you've created and I know Printful is as well, so comment down below. Otherwise, I'll catch you in tomorrow's video as we kick off some free marketing techniques for you. Thanks for watching.