What's going on Wix nation, MPS here from Wix Training Academy and today we get to embark on the journey we just discovered one week ago, which is Wix and Printful - 10 steps to creating your print-on-demand store.
And today we get to kick off video lesson one, Printful 101 learn about the print-on-demand industry. In this particular video lesson, we're going to go through an overview of what the print-on-demand industry looks like compared to going through a normal wholesale or bulk order route. We're going to explore what Printful is and how to get involved in registered for that and then we're going to explore some of the products and services you can utilize on that particular print on demand platform.
So without further ado, I don't know about you, but I'm ready to jump into the meat of this.
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I know you're sitting there ready and standing by wondering what's coming next because you're excited to build your print-on-demand store. I'm here to tell you that I'm excited, Printful is excited and this is just a friendly reminder that this series is sponsored by our friends over at Printful who are doing incredible things.
So let's jump in and explore what Printful is all about. But more importantly, what the print-on-demand industry looks like. Don't forget to click that subscribe button in the bottom right of this video and turn those bell notifications on so you don't miss a single video in this series. You're not going to want to miss it.
A Printful Overview
So what's the objective by the end of this video particularly? Well, number one, I want you to have a complete understanding of the print-on-demand industry and what it is, what it means, what it entails, and how I'm going to get you to that point is number one, we're going to go through a pod overview or a print on demand overview. You'll often hear me refer to it as pod pod. I'm speaking about print-on-demand, and we're going to go into a detailed look into what pod is and how you can capitalize as a small business e-commerce owner.
And then secondly, we're going to go through Printful introduction, a breakdown on who Printful is and how they can benefit you. And so you can create the best print-on-demand store possible. So without further ado, let's explore the first part of that, which is what's pod and dropshipping better known as print-on-demand.
POD and Dropshipping
So to break it down, a print-on-demand stands for an order fulfillment method where items are printed as soon as an order is made often without minimums. Now I just read that as a textbook definition, but let me break it down for you a bit. So essentially what happens in, you'll see this in the second bullet as well, which is printing and shipping is taken of on behalf of the customer selling goods.
How this works is you go ahead as the customer of Printful and you build an online store. In this case you're building a print-on-demand store. So you have to worry about the whole building of the store and the marketing of the store. However, everything that happens after that customer on your store clicks the purchase button is handled by Printful. So let's take an example.
Back in high school I started a clothing brand called inform of veto, which meant fit for life. I was doing a fitness apparel line and I was struggling to figure out how I was going to actually make the apparel and make the shirts right and that's when I did a bunch of research on print-on-demand where the fulfillment is taken care of. So what happened was whenever someone would place an order on inform of Vita, I actually used Printful back then believe it or not.
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And what would happen is they would click order and then Printful and I would receive that order. The difference is when I received that order, I just got a notification that said I just made money. This is when Printful kicked into play. What happened is when they received the order, they actually went ahead, printed the shirt with the design on it, packaged it up, fulfilled it and shipped it to the customer directly. So my hands were completely clean and hands-free during that entire process. That's what print-on-demand is. You worry about building the store and creating the marketing, the print-on-demand company, we'll worry about printing the item, packaging the item, and shipping the item straight to the customer in a timely manner.
So it saves time and it allows for instance, set up rather than having to worry through worry about jumping through different channels and worrying about who your manufacturer is going to be, or who your wholesaler is going to be. Nope, nope, nope you've stayed all that time. All that stress about worrying with that.
In fact, I even have a slide here, wholesale versus print-on-demand because I often hear, so print-on-demand seems really great, but there's gotta be some cons to it. And what's the difference of wholesale versus pronoun demand, whereas wholesale is you're actually going to a wholesale or getting discounts in ordering and higher quantities. Maybe that's local, maybe you find a wholesaler in China, whatever that may be. But you're probably sitting here wondering, well, what are the differences? What one should I choose?
Well. I'm going to leave that decision completely up to you, but what I'd like to present you are some very known pros and cons to both and I'd like to start with print-on-demand.
So first and foremost, the pros behind print-on-demand are pretty awesome. Number one, it's payment upon order, which means you pay the print-on-demand company. In this case Printful only when an order is made on your website. Number two, you don't have to stock inventory. There's no need to actually buy the inventory in hold it in house. Why? Because Printful is the company that holds onto the inventory. They're the ones that fulfill the orders. Three, you always have products in stock. How often do you go to an online store and you go and figure out that the product you've been waiting for is out of stock? There's nothing worse, but guess what? Your customers that come to your store won't have to worry about that with print-on-demand. Why, because they've always got products in stock.
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In addition to that, it's easy to diversify your product range. You can easily add new products seamlessly without any worry, without having to order more quantities, without having to actually order the product in and hold it in inventory. And lastly, if you don't sell a single product, guess what? There's no loss on your end. You don't pay any money and you don't have any overhead in inventory, nothing. It's all on Printful at that case.
However, there are some cons that need to be addressed. Number one, you are paying a higher cost per every item fulfilled. Why? Because you've got a company taking the item, printing it, packaging it, and shipping it without you ever having to touch or worry about it. So there is a premium to that. In addition to that, the products need to be made prior to shipping. So the difference here is that with wholesale you'll already have the products in house and you can just ship them out, right as an order is processed. With print on demand, the item actually has to be printed, packaged, and then shipped. So that is a con, it does slow that aspect in process down just by a bit.
And then to flip this, let's move over to wholesale. So what are the pros to wholesale? It is a lower cost per item. So you do pay less per every item that is sold on your online store. That's a pro. In addition to that, like we just talked about, the products are available immediately. If someone clicks and order something on your store, you can instantly take that product off of your shelf in your inventory storage and ship it out without having to go through the process printing it cause it's already done.
However, there's some hefty cons associated with wholesaling. Number one, there's an upfront investment required. What is this investment? It's the investment in your initial inventory. If you don't have any inventory, you have nothing to sell, therefore you don't have any products. So that's a problem. You need that initial upfront investment and depending on how much you're looking to invest in as far as how many products you're looking to bring on, that initial investment could be pretty hefty.
In addition to that, you need to store the inventory, which means you need a warehouse or somewhere to actually store the physical inventory so you can manage it onsite on location. You also need to restock constantly, just like Printful, how they always have products in stock and you don't have to worry about that out of stock sign being on your online store. You do have that worry when you're managing physical inventory and you have to manually count that and track it and you also have a limited product range. It's not easy to just say, "Oh yeah, I want to go experiment and add a new product to my store and see how it does" Why? Because you'll actually have to physically order that product in. You'll have to test it out and you don't want to do that on your own dime and worry about that product not selling, which leads us to the last con, the leftover stock. There's a lot of risk there.
If you physically order that inventory and you have it, you own it. If you don't sell it, that's on you. You now have to figure out what you're doing with this leftover inventory, which is seriously just money laying around because you had an upfront initial investment to invest in that inventory. So when looking at the pros and cons versus wholesale to print on demand, I'll let you decide which one is better for you and your business. But I wanted to present a very clear and honest standpoint.
What is Printful
So now that we know what print-on-demand is, now that we understand the differences between the two real options, which are wholesale and print-on-demand, let's explore what Printful is. Printful is a print-on-demand company, extremely high customer satisfaction rate and tools to help you expedite the growth of your print on demand store.
Now, I just had to throw some of these numbers in that Printful provided because it's pretty staggering to me. 9.59 million orders have been fulfilled through Printful. In addition to that, $343 million have been sold by customers or Printful. That could be you. You can be adding to that $343 million. In addition to that, Printful cares about the products that they produced for you on behalf of you. So they've invested $27 million into high quality printing equipment and they have 800 plus members on their team across the entire globe with an extremely large product offering that I'm going to walk you through in just a second.
And finally they also offer some additional e-commerce and print-on-demand services that will help aid the growth of your print-on-demand store. Now I know I'm sitting here making Printful sound incredible and it's because I have personally used them and they are an extremely amazing company to work with.
Starting with Printful
So I'm sure you're now wondering how do you get started with Printful, right? Because if you don't have Printful, the rest of this series is useless to you in the fact that we're going through explaining Wix and Printful and how to make the two click together.
So you're going to want to make sure you register for a Printful account. How to do that link right down in the description below is an affiliate link. Yes, that is for me and yes, it is an affiliate link. However, it changes nothing in your signup process. It's free to register an account on Printful. If you use the link below, I will be credited and I would appreciate that. If you enjoy this series in this content especially, it's even more appreciated, but that's how you get started. Just simply click the link in the description below. It'll take you to the landing page and you just got to go ahead and register your account completely free, and that will be your first step in taking your next initiatives towards your print-on-demand store. That's how you get started.
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Printful Products
Now what I would like to do is walk you through a brief showcase of some of the Printful products that they offer, and essentially what these are. These are products that you can now list on your online store. After you register with Printful, all you got to do is put your own branding on them and your own designs.
So we've got things from engraved, jewelry, hoodies, sweatshirts, blankets, sweat pants and joggers, including leggings, a tee shirts and tank tops. These are your go-to's, laptop cases, hats, beanies, stickers, stickers are going wild right now. You should see my laptop. They're loaded. We've got coffee mugs. I think Printful is even sending me a coffee mug and I'm pretty excited to start sipping my morning coffee out of it. We've got backpacks, jackets, throw pillows. Wait, but we're not done yet. We've got Fanny pack, sports bras, phone cases, leggings. Does this sound like something I'm going crazy about? I think it does because I'm excited in the list goes on and on and on and I can read you all the products that they offer, but better yet I just encourage you to head over to Printful and check them out for yourself.
Essentially what I want to get to you is that they offer a large variety of products, which means you can offer a large variety of products. Let's get back to the action. Not only does Printful offer a large selection of products for you to offer, but they also have some incredible services. So here are the services that Printful offers you as an account holder and a customer with them.
Printful Services
Number one, obviously their order fulfillment, they're print-on-demand. This is the bread and butter. This is their actual, you get an order on your store, they take it, they process it, they ship it, that's their print-on-demand, warehousing and fulfillment. They will actually offer you a place to store your physical inventory and they'll fulfill it for you. So if you did want to do like a hybrid between that wholesale and print-on-demand route branding for white label, if you want to use their products, you get to put your branding on their products and have them shipped out.
And then in addition to that, they've got bulk order discounts. If you've got a team, an organization, a business that's ordering short shirts, shorts, pants, coffee mugs you know, chotskies, whatever that might be for your next event or your team, you can order it and get up to 30% off on Printful. So you save some dough. And in addition to that, they've got store setup services with a technical support team that will be right alongside you that entire way.
They've also got this other side of the token, which is ‘creative services’. So not only do they stop at print-on-demand and helping you, ship your product, fulfill your product, but they want to help you on the front side of that too. They want to help you create a product that will sell. So they've got graphic design services to help design, product designs and logos and stuff for your products. They've got e-commerce photography. Maybe you have no idea where to pull models from to where your clothing or you know, showcase what you've got product wise. They do and they will help you in the e-commerce photography, provides you with models and showcases and staging to best photograph your products so that way they'll sell.
In addition to that, they'll go one step further. They've got video production, so not only will they help you on the photo front, but maybe you want to create a little video for your product. They've got this as an option, a creative service to help you increase the likelihood of getting someone to purchase a product on your online store.
Conclusion
Guys, Printful is popping over there. They are doing some incredible things and now that you've got a strong understanding of the backbone of what the print-on-demand industry is and how it operates and how it compares to the traditional warehousing route. You now have the tools and the ball in your court to make the initial initiative to move forward on Printful or choose a different route altogether. But this series is specific to creating a print on demand store.
So if you've decided you're going with the print-on-demand route, this was video lesson one and we've got nine more hot video lessons coming up. In fact, here's a preview of the series schedule. We just cross video lesson one off the list and video lesson two tomorrow we will be going into creating your Wix store because this is Wix and Printful.
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You need the store designed, hosted domain, all that good stuff within Wix to make this happen for Printful, you know that the key to a great online store is having great design, great user functionality, great user experience and that's what we're going through tomorrow. And then you can see the rest of the video lessons that will be displayed throughout this entire video series and we will end it and conclude on 30th so you'll have a full month loaded with incredible e-commerce content print-on-demand content so that wide by the end of this month on January 30th you can then go ahead and say, you now have the tools and the knowledge equipped within you to launch your very own print-on-demand store.
If you're with me, if you're enjoying this, click that subscribe button, turn those bell notifications on in the bottom right of this video and hit like and comment down below how excited you are for this. Now that we've delved into video lesson one, and if you have any questions, drop them below. I will be in the comments. I will also have some people from Printful in the comments as well so we can help tackle any of the questions or comments you may have.
Thank you guys so much for watching. I'll catch it tomorrow on video lesson number two.