Introduction

Print on demand platforms can be an easy way to get your first eCommerce business up and running. Today I show you how.

This is Bill Strand and you are listening to the Reptile Entrepreneur Podcast. The purpose of this entire podcast project is to help you start a business of any sort in the reptile industry. That can be as a content creator, a product manufacturer, or a breeder. And it can include anything else your creative mind can come up with! But for it to graduate from a hobby into a business or a sustainable lifestyle there must be a way for your fans or customers to pay you for your efforts.

This, of course, requires there to be something that people want to buy and a means for people to transfer funds to you. Every listener will have a different offering. But the one common thing between you all is that you will have a persona. A presence that is symbolized by a logo. And we can use this logo to start you getting your first Digital income. It may not be enough to pay to mortgage. It may be enough for a goofy coffee once a week. But it can grow as much as you want it to. And that is what this is all about. I want you to have options to select from when choosing your life path. And what we are doing today will give you the digital option. So today, I will be going over setting up a digital Print On Demand storefront.

What is Print on Demand?

We are going to open up a Print-On-Demand store where you upload a graphical design of some sort and then your selected print service will print that logo on T-shirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads, pillows, and whatever else your chosen company offers. The key reason why this is perfect for you to start with is that a number of these companies allow you to set up a storefront on their website. So you do not need a website of your own. You can see how this is progressing. We started the year with establishing a social media outreach on Instagram. It is here you can build your audience. Then we talked about creating a logo. This is your graphic. And now we are going to set up a Paypal account and then set up a storefront. I have been talking about guiding you through setting up an eCommerce business and that we would spend the entire year putting it together. While that is true, the fact is that once you finish what we are going over in this episode you will have a legitimate eCommerce business up and running. And you can take these lessons and apply it to whatever your true product is, or else you can double own and make a business creating T-Shirts.

The advantage of using Print-on-Demand company is that you put no money upfront. In fact, there is no money required from you at all. They provide a storefront to you so you can sell their shirts printed with your design. They take the orders and fulfill the product and deal with returns and customer service. How can you beat that deal? Of course, the more services they perform the higher the percentage of the sales they take. They have a set price that they are providing the product at and then you decide what your mark-up will be and set the retail price in their system. The key is that you do not host the storefront, operate the printing presses, keep any inventory of blank or printed products, take orders or perform customer service. So all you do is sell the product and bring value to your brand.

How it all fits in

So, here is your business model we are setting up. And, yes, you can do as much in addition as possible. But here is foundation for your e-commerce business.

First, you have your Instagram account that you have established who your target audience is. These are your customers. You are offering and highlighting a product on your account. If it is a physical product you are showing its use. If it is a service you are showing how it can help you. If you are a content creator or educator, then this outreach is your product and your job is to make it as substantial of an outreach as you can. All of this effort adds value to your brand name. For me it is Chameleon Academy or Dragon Strand or, even, just Bill Strand. All the work you put in is credited towards whatever brand you have selected. And, once you attach a logo to that brand you have something for people to identify you by. And, the better they feel about what you are doing and the more they appreciate your work the more they feel good to let the world know they enjoy being part of your fan base. So, the most powerful sales outreach is doing your best to serve your audience while wearing your logo. It is also the easiest for introverts and people who don’t like sales. You obviously can do as much sales as you like for the products, but when you wear the product, every time you get in front of the camera you are selling.

Pre-Requisite: Logo or design

Before you set up a shop you have the pre-requisite that you have something that can be printed on a T-Shirt or other item. This may be the most challenging part for you. But it is unavoidable. You need something graphical that represents your online entity. And this can be anything from a full color logo bursting from the page to a simple text font with your business name. Obviously the more attractive it is the more likely someone will want a T-Shirt showing it. But, remember, that logo is more than just a graphic. It represents you and your outreach. So a simple logo, or even just text, can be immensely powerful depending on what it means. And that meaning is 100% in your hands.

I brought you an episode about logos with an interview with Adeline Robinson who designs logos. You can also get logos done at any price point from artists on fiverr.com for less than $100 to professional work at $1000 at 99designs.com. I have paid anything from $400 to $800 to making one myself. Which direction you go depends on what your graphic design capabilities are. If you have artistic ability then you have an unfair advantage over the rest of us and I encourage you to run with it. Make five designs and load up your store with options! But to start, you only need one. And, let’s be clear. There is no life long commitment here. You can always rebrand. So pick something to start with. Honestly, I had no idea what to do for a logo for Reptile Entrepreneur. Dragon Strand? Lots I could do with that! Chameleon Academy? Oh, possibilities were endless. But Reptile Entrepreneur? Complete brain freeze. So I played around with the words Reptile Entrepreneur, got a color and font I liked…and then just a little shift in position lined up some letters and I put a distinctive stripe down the two letters. Very subtle, but those in the know recognize it as the back stripe pattern of an Amazon basin Emerald Tree boa. So, it was simple, attractive enough and the very cool special part of it would be most appreciated by only a small percentage of my audience. But, it was enough to get me going and I kind of like it. So, the important thing is to just start. You can fix the plane while you are flying it.

Finding a Print on demand platform.

Your next task, after getting a logo, is to select a Print on Demand service. Enough of these have sprouted up that the choices can be confusing! Which one to go with? Well, here is some help in that direction. There are two main approaches to the Print on Demand service. The biggest difference is if you want the service to give you a storefront or if you want the service to be part of your existing commerce website. We are going to focus on the storefront because I am going to assume that you do not yet have an e-commerce website. 

Storefront

The rise of print on demand companies, I’ll call them PODs from here on out, offering their own personalized storefronts is an incredible opportunity for you to get started with no money up front. This service allows you to set-up an account, design products, and then you have a link that you can send customers to. The company takes care of all the money transactions with the customer, ships, and deals with customer service. They then give you a percentage of you sales to you as your profit. It isn’t much, but, then again, you aren’t doing much so it is a fair trade off! I currently use both Spreadshirt and Teepublic. There is one major consideration to take into account if you are a serious content creator. There are a handful of these print on demand companies that are approved by YouTube. Once you get 10,000 subscribers on YouTube you are allowed a merchandise shelf where your merchandise is shown when people view you videos. You can check out my Chameleon Academy account on Youtube to see how this works. But it isn’t just any company that is allowed to be there. You can search for “Getting started with merch for YouTube” and you’ll have a lot to chew on. The most well known are Spreadshirt and Spring, which used to be TeeSpring.

My YouTube merch shelf is through Spreadshirt so you can go to my YouTube channel and see how that works.

Now, if you go to my chameleonacademy.com website you will see a merch store which I decided to go with another storefront provider, Teepublic. In my line of work here on the Reptile Entrepreneur I am trying out as many variations as possible so I can be the most effective in helping you find the right path forward. At this time both services seem good. I am leaning towards Teepublic because I like their mug design better. But I will continue to do tests on the products so I can offer the best quality to the people who purchase my merch.

Payments, Privacy, and Credit Cards

Now, under this approach, the POD company is handling all the payments. So that means they need a way of paying you. So, you will have to give them a payment method and fill out a W4 because they will have to report your income to the IRS. And, if this is the first time you are doing this, it may make you nervous to give your social security number to some T-Shirt company. And, you are correct to be cautious. But this is something that is required of them so you need to either decide to play the game or not go this route. Believe me, there are many things we do on the internet that are dangerous and giving up some control of our finances.  Giving private identity information is one thing. But simply taking credit cards opens you up to huge risk. That is an important topic. Perhaps it is not for right now. But you will have to give them a way to pay you. And they offer different methods. Spreadshirt allows you to enter in your banking information or use a Paypal account. TeePublic will pay to either a Paypal or Payoneer account. So check to see which method your selected service would use. 

And so this goes a little further down the rabbit hole. Paypal is the common thread here. So a Paypal account makes this all easier. Paypal has gotten big enough that they have tremendous power. They are very convenient but realize that they are now controlling over your funds and it is wonderful as long as things are going your way. But as soon as someone wants free product and tells their credit card company this was a fraudulent charge after they receive the product you get to see how unjust the system can be. Who do you think pays when someone says they had a fraudulent charge on their card? It isn’t the credit card company with 30 billion in annual profit or Paypal with 11 billion in annual profit. Nope, it is you. You are out the product that you shipped (no, you are not getting it back), you are out the shipping charge because you are giving back the entire charge, and, if you work with Paypal, you are charged $20 chargeback fee because neither the credit card company nor Paypal want to foot the bill for their excellent customer service to their customer base. Yep, if you are an honest small business, you are the one shouldering the cost. Now, Square doesn’t do the $20 chargeback fee so you can consider using them for your e-commerce business payment processor. At least they don’t, as of yet, hit you with a punitive charge for being the smallest kid in the room that can be kicked around. But as soon as we leave cash we now have to take on risk.

That said, without a method for digital payment there would be no way we could build businesses like we have so it is just part of how things work.

That is all a lot of deep considerations that we don’t have to get into right now. Creating a Paypal account to receive funds from a POD platform is a very low risk use of Paypal. 

But it is an important discussion we need to have on a later podcast when we get deeper into eCommerce websites. Allowing control over our income to various third parties is something that must be taken on with full understanding of what power we are giving to them. Once again, not something that we need to worry about with this application. So, just know that it will be a bigger discussion later this year.

Website Plugin Strategy

If you do have a website, there are excellent PODs that will provide you a plugin for woo commerce or Shopify. If you are not a website designer just yet here is a brief introduction to what I just said.

The most popular website building platform in the world is called WordPress. That is because it is free and, even though many people love to hate it, it has opened up web design to anyone. WordPress gives you a blogging site and then you add capabilities on to it using plugins that increase the functionality of your site. The most popular eCommerce plugin in is called WooCommerce. And companies can create plugins of their own that will interact with Woocommerce.

Putting together a website with WordPress is kind of like putting a car together by yourself. You have to make sure all the parts fit together and if something isn’t working you get to troubleshoot the Frankenstein of plugins you threw together. 

If that is too much and you are willing to pay someone else to make sure things work then you can get a Shopify website which gives you a eComerce website, but handles much of the making sure things work themselves. You pay in monthly fees, but if you consider how much time you spend and customer aggravation you received when things don’t work you start to value someone else making sure it all works. 

Did you know that if you have more than one spf text file in your DNS list that the emails sent from your website will be recorded as sent by your website, but rejected by the receiving servers? You can combine multiple spfs into one text line, but you cannot have more than one.

How in the world does anyone know that? Well, after a couple weeks of troubleshooting and googling and customers being pissed and trying out five other things, you learn valuable tidbits like this. That is the beauty of having a WordPress site. They work great until they don’t and then everyone shrugs their shoulders. I love WordPress and learning about web design and how the digital world works. It really is very cool. But having to learn about that world while my main source of income is acting up is not the way I want to do it. So, yes, I am sure you see that this will be a huge topic on this podcast later on. In fact, I have dedicated the entire fourth quarter to talking about creating an eCommerce website where we will talk about WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, Wix, and the host of other options that are immensely confusing to anyone trying to find their way in this digital jungle. But, I should get back to our Print on Demand application. But, now you have an idea of what some of those words mean. You don’t need to know more at this point. Like I said, we will get to that soon enough!

So, assuming you have your own eCommerce website already, your customer can check out like a normal product on your e-commerce website and will pay you directly for the product. I use the company Printful for this. And, if you would like to see how it works, go to my reptile entrepreneur.com website home page and you can click on the Merchandise graphic to go to the woo commerce shop on my website. 

The significance of this is that I am handling the collection of money. Printful or other provider like Printify, etc…will have a plugin that you install on your website. And Printful has a plugin for  Woocomerce,Shopify, and other as well so it works on most common platforms.

You create your products on the Printful website and it will sync up with your website and show them on your website. People select which ones they want, check out and pay you. Printful is notified that a purchase has been made and they collect the shipping address from the transaction, prints up the product, and ships it out to the customer. Printful will then bill you for the cost of the product. The difference is your profit. To set up an account at one of these providers you are required to give them a billing method which, with Printful, can be credit card or Paypal. 

Examples of Print On Demand stores

Now, just a note, you don’t have to pick one. You can have as many of these POD services as you like. I have three right now, mainly for the purpose of demonstrating how they work.

So, right now you can see how the Printful plugin works by going to the ReptileEntrepreneur.com website home page. There is a merch store that you can click on and you can buy a number of Reptile Entrepreneur accessories. You will check out on my website and it all happens behind the scenes.

If you would like to see how the storefront works, you can visit my Teepublic merchandise store by going to the chameleonacademy.com website. On the home page there is a link to my merchandise store. If you click that it actually takes you off my website and to the TeePublic website where you can do the transaction. Very convenient. But if you are nervous about sending a customer off your website then you are thinking the right way. This is convenient, but deliberately sending your customer off your site is not good marketing or sales funnel strategy! If you have nothing else for them to do or buy it is no problem. It is okay, and even preferable to use a service like this when you are beginning because you don’t have an eCommerce website yet! So this is a huge benefit. When you get a website and you want to retain your customer then you can look into other options.

And if you checkout my Chameleon Academy YouTube channel you can see how the merchandise shelf comes in below my videos. This goes to my Spreadshirt shop.

And, yes, I did this to be able to show you how the different methods work! So you can consider all my outreach efforts as working examples of what I am sharing here!

Setting up your account

Once you decide on which POD you want to start with you make an account with them. This is where you give them your payment information. Once they have that you can actually be paid. But the design is very straight forward. Each of these services will guide you through and make it simple. You will load up your image and they will allow you to place it somewhere on the T-shirt or mug or other accessory. You choose the colors and it is done. Honestly, once you have your design, you can have a fully functioning eCommerce store up and running on a Saturday morning. I know it might be intimidating at first, but they really do make it easy to go through all the steps. I have links on the show notes page if you want to check into any one of these POD platforms. Just go there and click the sign up button. There is zero risk or financial outlay so there is no deep thought that has to go into whether to try it out or not.

And, you can upload as many designs as you want and offer them on as many accessories as you want. So, yes, you could make this into a full business. Of course, the success of that depends both on how attractive your designs are and how good you are at marketing.

Marketing

So, let’s talk marketing. My main purpose for this episode is to get you started with e-commerce. And I am actually not coming at this from the perceptive that selling T-Shirts will be your main source of income. This is just a block being put in place to get you started. Though you are free to and encouraged to go way beyond and make it something big. 

But for a starting point, let’s go back to that Instagram account we put together. Hopefully you have been feeding it and seeing some growth. Instagram can be a tough place these days but it is still the best platform for this. Although both TikTok and Instagram give you one outside link in your profile and that is where you can put your merchandise shop link. And then you wear your merchandise and show off during live sessions. I wear my Shirts during videos I make and during live sessions and in stories. I drink the coffee mug during my live sessions. These are passive ways that you can let people know that the merchandise exists. And if your POD platform ever has a sale or you have a new design you can make a post about that. And this is a way that you can start working with getting an income from a eCommerce platform. 

Good Use of the BioLink!

As you grow and add on a YouTube channel and other digital properties you can change that bio link to a link aggregator like LinkTree. LinkTree is an example of a platform that you can send people to that will have all the links of everything you have so when you want to send people off Instagram or TikTok you can always use one link to your link aggregator page instead of juggling ten different links.  Now, a link aggregator is a great substitute for a website for now. But as soon as you get a website set up you are much better off creating a landing page on that website with all the links. Link aggregators are incredibly convenient, but they are soaking up all the web traffic credit. Once you have your own website you want Google to recognize all the traffic going to your website so they know your website is a great place to be. If you send all your traffic to a link aggregator then Google know that aggregator is a great place to be! So, it is is a convenient and useful middle step, but we want to end up with all the digital credit we deserve! But this is all for another day. Right now, get a logo, set up your payment processor, and select a Print On Demand platform. Set up your logo on a Shirt for sale and put the link of your store on your Instagram bio. Buy a shirt from your store yourself and start wearing it on your Social Media posts!

Conclusion

If you would like links to any of the Print On Demand Platforms I have used and talked about then you can go to the show notes on reptilenetrepreneur.com for season 2 episode 25 and you can get the links

So, we are taking a big step here into building our eCommerce business. This may be your first digital income. And when you get that first sale, I mean besides your purchase and your mother and all her friends, I mean the first stranger that buys your shirt, it is a feeling of so many future possibilities opening up that weren’t there before. That is a lot from a sale which put $3 in your account. Many of you will smile and say, that is cool, but for some of you this will hit like a freight train. You realize that it is possible to have a complete different income  and career than you may have considered before. The possibilities become endless. Sure it is a very small step forward, but this step in a direction you never considered before may lead to a life you never considered before.

We will continue to make those steps in future episodes of this podcast. We will expand our marketing outreach. We will explore different ways that your digital presence can produce other sources of income. If nothing else we will be planting seeds all along the way of things that could be. What grows from them is yet to be seen. But I can tell you that me discovering my first podcast took me off an exit from the freeway I was on and took me into an incredible world that I have been exploring ever since. I can tell you, there is no going back. And I am inviting you to come along.

Take care of yourself…take care of our reptile community, and let’s see what we can build.