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Selling custom products with print on demand is an easy way to launch an online store or create a new passive income stream.
Print on demand is a service that allows you to easily sell custom products without having to worry about production, managing inventory, or shipping. Print on demand providers only manufacture a product when an order is placed, which means you only pay product costs when you make a sale—with no upfront costs to worry about. Plus, since all production and order fulfillment is outsourced to the print on demand provider, you save ample time and money to dedicate to other aspects of your brand.
Learn more about the benefits of print on demand for your brand, and how to start a print on demand business by using Squarespace’s Custom Merch feature.
How does print on demand work?
The answer is in the name: Instead of paying up front to stock and ship your products on your own, a third party handles all of those steps for you each time an order is placed. In other words, when a customer orders a product, the print on demand provider prints that product.
Historically, print on demand is also a common term in book publishing, but it’s since expanded to refer to a vast array of product types (e.g., shirts, hats, bags) that anyone can customize and sell across industries. Because of the versatility and diversity of these types of print on demand products, it’s easier than ever to get into ecommerce or add an ecommerce component to your existing brand in a low-risk, low-effort way.
Learn more about the print on demand process
Why choose print on demand?
Compared to going down more traditional ecommerce routes, there are several key benefits to selling print on demand products.
No upfront costs on production or inventory management
Unlike traditional selling methods where you might need to pay large sums right away in order to stock hundreds of products at a time, print on demand has no upfront production costs to sellers. You pay for the cost of production for each product only when a customer orders it. Plus, since you don’t have to manage any product inventory, you save money—not to mention valuable space and time—that you might have otherwise needed to spend on renting, organizing, and maintaining a storage space.
Streamlined and environmentally friendly production process
Traditional product production methods typically require a minimum order quantity (MOQ) before a manufacturer will agree to print and ship your inventory to you. For example, if you wanted to sell custom t-shirts with that more traditional method, you might have to commit to ordering at least 200 shirts, even if you’re not sure you’ll be able to sell even 50 of them. That method can get complicated with products like t-shirts, which have multiple sizing options, because you’d also have to estimate which sizes might be most popular with your audience (i.e., stock more medium and large sizes than others). Stock methods like that run the risk of accumulating overstock that might go to waste and affect your bottom line, or the risk of selling out of certain products or variants too quickly, which could lead to backorders or loss of customers.
Print on demand, on the other hand, provides an elegant solution to all of those traditional production hiccups: Since a product is only manufactured when a customer has purchased it, there’s no product waste. With print on demand, you also don’t have to worry about estimating which sizes to stock or meeting an MOQ at all.
Outsourced order fulfillment
If you stock your own inventory, you also need to dedicate time and resources toward fulfilling orders. But with print on demand, you save all of that time: The print on demand provider packages and ships each order for you right after printing, ensuring that orders get to your customers even when you’re busy with the rest of your to-do list or taking time off. Like with manufacturing costs, you’re only charged for shipping and fulfillment costs when each order is placed—typically paying much lower fees than if you’d been handling fulfillment yourself.
More opportunities to achieve a variety of business goals
Print on demand selling helps you dream bigger when it comes to who you can reach and what you can accomplish with your brand: You can use print on demand to break into ecommerce, scale an existing store, or try a new brand awareness tactic.
For example, say you’re a lifestyle brand with a growing following on social media. You’re already busy monetizing your video content, but you’re also looking for an easy way to develop an additional income stream and expand your reach. With print on demand, it’d be easy to create your own branded product line and sell it through your website and social media channels—with minimal extra time commitment after the initial set-up.
Getting started with print on demand
By using Squarespace’s Custom Merch feature, you can set up your own print on demand business in a low-risk, free-to-start, and hands-off way. The Squarespace feature is made possible through a partnership with leading print on demand provider Printful, seamlessly tying together the strengths of both brands.
Let’s take a look at the five-step Custom Merch process through the lens of a specific use case: Say you’re a podcast host. How could you leverage print on demand for your show? You might want to create some extra revenue and branding opportunities, but you don’t have a lot of time or resources to stock products and fulfill orders. That’s where Custom Merch comes in.
Here’s how to start a print on demand business for your brand with Custom Merch:
1. Choose your products.
After connecting Custom Merch to your Squarespace account, you get access to Printful’s catalog of high-quality, popular print on demand products. Browse and select the types of products that you know your audience would appreciate, e.g., shirts, mugs, and stickers.
2. Add your designs.
Use Printful’s interface to add your logo or customized designs to your selected products. It’s as simple as uploading your design and arranging it where you want it to go on each product. You can also experiment with Printful’s own design tools to add clip art, text, or their in-house designs to your products. For example, our hypothetical podcast host might want to create some designs that feature in-jokes from their show, as well as designs that include the podcast name or logo.
Printful also offers multiple types of printing—such as embroidery or direct-to-garment (DTG) printing for textile products like shirts or hats—so you can offer products with a variety of textures and styles.
3. Set your pricing.
When you select a product to sell, Printful shows you how much that item will cost you to produce it. To make a profit, set your product price higher than the cost of production. With most products, it’s typical to aim for at least a 50% profit margin. For example, if a print on demand t-shirt costs $10 to produce, then you might want to set its list price to at least $20.
4. List your products.
With Custom Merch, our hypothetical podcast host could easily add an online store to their existing podcast website. That way, listeners who visit their site for episode archives, transcripts, and related updates will also find a new way to show their support and engage with the podcast’s brand.
Custom Merch automatically syncs your selected Printful products directly with your Squarespace Commerce account. That means you can set up your own online store without any fuss.
Here’s how to launch your own print on demand online store in three simple steps:
Choose an easy-to-customize ecommerce website template.
Select the store page where you’d like to list your Custom Merch products, and watch your products automatically sync to that page.
Link a payment processor, and start selling!
Once you’ve launched your store, if you need to edit any of your products on Printful, those changes will automatically sync to your shop on Squarespace.
5. Let Custom Merch handle the rest.
Once you’ve synced Custom Merch with your Squarespace account, Printful will automatically be notified anytime you make a sale through your online store. At that point, their in-house team will print your custom design on the type of product that was sold and ship that order directly to the customer who purchased it. That means you don’t have to take a break from your busy schedule to bring in more income.
Marketing your Custom Merch products
Although Custom Merch removes a lot of the traditional obstacles to selling products, it helps to plan and implement a marketing strategy for how you’ll get the word out about your new products. Let’s use that lifestyle brand and podcast host as examples of content creators who’d benefit from using print on demand to sell products—how might they promote their new branded product lines?
Here are some ideas for how they—and you—can market Custom Merch products.
Incorporate UGC into your social media strategy.
UGC, or user-generated content, is a common and often rewarding tactic on social media. Similar to word-of-mouth marketing, UGC is any type of content that your audience creates about your brand. That could include: videos, photos, reviews, discussion threads, or any other type of social post where your brand is mentioned or tagged. Think: unboxing videos or meme reaction posts.
An easy way to incorporate UGC into your social media marketing strategy is to encourage your customers to snap and share photos of their purchases. For example, that hypothetical lifestyle brand could announce a product giveaway as an incentive for their audience to share UGC: They’d tell their audience that the first 50 followers to post about their favorite branded purchase will be entered into a raffle to win an exclusive custom engraved set of earrings for free. Giveaways like this are common on social media, and encourage creativity and community engagement while simultaneously driving brand awareness and sales.
Produce your own marketing content with Squarespace tools
You don’t have to be a pro to create professional-looking images and videos for your marketing. The Marketing Kit in Squarespace’s iOS app helps you create slick videos for your products by pulling products and branding directly from your Squarespace website onto easy-to-customize video, GIF, and image templates.
From there, you can post your videos across any of your social channels to get the word out about your products in a dynamic, engaging way. For example, that podcast host could pull imagery from their site about specific episodes and relevant customized products to create narrative video content that speaks to their audience.
Feeling inspired? You can start selling your own print on demand products with Custom Merch on any Squarespace Business or Commerce subscription plan—or simply test out designing your products today on any Squarespace plan at no additional cost.