Hey everyone! Welcome back to another video. In today's video, I'm going to be explaining why I don't
use Printful, Printify, or Etsy for my print-on-demand t-shirt business. Now, for those of you who don't know, I've been a print-on-demand t-shirt seller for just about 10 years now, and what a lot of people don't realize is that I don't use Printful, Printify, or Etsy to run my business. In this video, I'm going to be explaining and showing you onscreen
recording why I don't use these platforms and a lot of things that people don't share
about these platforms that you really should know if you're just starting out in this business. So if you are just getting
into print-on-demand, please watch this video first. I think it's going to save you a lot of headaches down the road. So when it comes to
starting a print-on-demand

t-Shirt business. The core of that business is having a print-on-demand fulfillment service. Now, most tutorials out there that are going to teach you how to start the business are going to show you to use Printful or they're going to show you to use Printify. Now, although both of these are great print-on-demand fulfillment services, what most people don't realize is there are two very different ways to do print on demand. When it comes to print on demand, there is active print on demand and passive print on demand. This is something that very few people are sharing about the print-on-demand business, but both Printful and Printify are both in the active print-on-demand business model. Now for those of you who this is the first time you're hearing about active print on demand versus passive print on demand, active print on demand is where you create your own website, you bring your own traffic and your own buyers.

This is typically with social media marketing, or it's done with paid advertising, and then every order that you receive, you pay for that order upfront, and then you receive your full amount of money with the profit afterwards. And lastly, you handle all of the customer service. This is more of building a full-fledged clothing company, but using print on demand to fulfill those orders. Now, when you look at the other way of doing print on demand, which is passive print on demand, this is where you are creating your t-shirt designs and uploading them to big print on demand marketplace websites. They are bringing all of the traffic and buyers for you. The customer who buys your product is paying for the whole order upfront, and you are just getting a split of the profit afterwards, and the big print on demand websites, they're handling all of the customer service for you. This way of doing print on demand, the passive print on demand way, is the way

that I think a lot of new print-on-demand sellers are actually looking for. So with that being clarified, the reason that I don't use Printify, I don't use Printful is because both of these are for active print-on-demand. Now with that being said, I don't want to just leave you hanging in this video. I actually want to give you a solution here. So if you don't want to go down this active print-on-demand route and you actually want to try the passive print-on-demand route, I'll quickly show you a couple websites that you can use that are passive print-on-demand. I'll even upload a design with you to show you how easy this really is. And then I will put a link in the description to another video here on YouTube that is a full passive print-on-demand tutorial taking you from idea that you want to start, all the way to getting your first sales. So with that being said, let's switch back over

to the computer and let
me show you some of this. So let's start out on Amazon. What a lot of people don't realize is that Amazon is actually
the largest print-on-demand platform out there. If you search for a type of t-shirt, so this is gardening t-shirt. This is just a great niche
right now for print-on-demand. And you scroll down here,
all of these are going to be print-on-demand designs. So when you click on
any of these, you'll see that it looks like just any
other product on Amazon, but it has a little label right here that says Amazon Merch on Demand. Now, whenever a listing has
this little label right here, it means that the person
selling this only uploaded this design and Amazon is doing
everything else for them. So when someone finds this T-shirt and they pick what kind of
item they want it printed on, they pick what color, then
they select what size.

they can add this to their cart, and they can purchase
it just like any other product on Amazon. What's going to happen behind the scenes when
this order is placed is Amazon is going to receive the order. They're going to go
pick out whatever color and size shirt you ordered, and they're going to print
this exact design on it, ship it out to the customer, and handle all the customer service. The creator of this
listing is then just going to get their split of the profit, which on a t-shirt like this
is going to be roughly $5. Now, something that's really
cool about Amazon is on some of these listings, it's
going to tell you how many of that exact listing has
sold in the last month. For this specific design, that is 50 plus bought in the past month. If you're saying an average of $5 profit, that's about $250 in profit per month from just a single design.

Now, that's just on this listing, but on some other niches, when
you're scrolling through here for print on demand
shirts, you'll see 1,000 plus in the past month. So a single design can make you thousands of dollars in profit every single month. Now, the reason that all
of this works is because Amazon falls into the passive
print on demand category, meaning that Amazon is
bringing their own customers. Just Amazon alone gets
about 750 million people to their marketplace every month. Now, all of them are not
looking to buy t-shirts, but I can tell you a substantial
amount of them actually do. So just to give you an idea on this, if you are interested in selling on Amazon as a print on demand seller, just look up Amazon Merch on Demand. Once you find this page right here, this is actually their application
page to become a seller. Just hit the sign up button right here. Again, this is totally free to do.

So Amazon is just the first example of one of these passive print-on-demand websites. There's actually several more. I've been selling on a lot
of them over the years, and there's a couple that
really stand out over the rest. Just to show you what those are, the second one that I would really recommend to you is called Redbubble. And Redbubble is a little
bit different than Amazon in that Redbubble is specific
to print on demand. So they're not going
to sell just every item that Amazon sells,
rather they're just going to sell print-on-demand items. So if you were to type
in gardening t-shirt, these are just all going to be results specifically done with print-on-demand. So when you click on one
of these, you're going to see what that looks like. And again, you can pick
all of these settings here, you can add it to your cart,
and you can purchase it. The same style here with
passive print-on-demand.

None of these are actually printed yet. So when Redbubble receives the
order, the customer's paying for the full order. Redbubble
is going to print it, ship it out, handle the customer service, and we just get a split of the profit. But I do want to show you just one more of these passive print-on-demand websites, just to show you that there
are a lot out here to use. This one is called TeePublic. TeePublic was actually
purchased by Redbubble a couple years ago. So it is the same layout as Redbubble. Now, TeePublic is a smaller
website compared to Redbubble. To put it into perspective here, TeePublic gets about a million people to their website every month. Redbubble gets about 10 million people to their website every month. But remember, both of these
are print-on-demand specific. So although Amazon gets a ton
of traffic, they're coming in to buy all different things on Amazon.

When people come to Redbubble or TeePublic, they are coming in specifically to buy something print on demand. So this is where things start to get really cool with passive print on demand. So if we go back over here and we go to Printify or we go to Printful, if you want to use one of these, yes, you're going to be using the active print on demand route. But what most people don't realize is that you actually have to set up a Shopify store as well. So although Printify and Printful, they are free to use, you do have to pay for Shopify. Now, the first month on Shopify is a dollar, but after that, you're going to be paying $39 per month at a minimum just to have your print on demand store live. Now, beyond having to pay for it, you have to build your store, you have to customize it, you have to make it look good so

that people trust your store enough to make a purchase. On the other hand, here with passive print on demand, all you have to do is upload your design and create the listing, because everything else is actually on the big print on demand website. So you don't have to build the website yourself, you are just adding your designs to their marketplace. So for those of you who are considering passive print on demand, you can absolutely get started today. Again, I would recommend that tutorial down in the description. That's just going to be the best thing I have to offer you from start to finish. But just in this video real quick to show you how easy it is to upload a design and literally just get started from scratch, when you come to one of these websites, just click create an account, fill out your first name, last name, put in your email address and a password, and click create my account.

On TeePublic specifically, it'll have you verify your email address, but once you've done that,
then you can log into your account, and you can start
uploading designs right away. So once you've created your account, the button here will change from create an account to upload art. Just click on this. Depending on how many files
you have ready to upload, you can do just a single file upload and upload just one at a
time, or multi-file upload and upload a whole
handful of them at a time. I'll just show you how to do it with one. Just click this PNG icon right here and select your artwork off your computer. Just give this a second to load here, and it'll upload your file. It'll then show you what
your design file looks like. You can scroll down here,
you can give it a title, and for your title, you can just name it what is on your design. So this design says,

Gardening because therapy is expensive. I'm just going to copy this, and then you can put it down here as your description as well. Nice and easy. Over on your main tags here, we'll just type in gardening. And then in your supporting tags, just click in here. TeePublic will even recommend these for you. So this is also about garden, it's also about nature, flowers, floral, gardener, plants, and anything else that is relevant to this design, you can add into your supporting tags here. Scroll down a little bit here. Does this design contain mature content? Just hit no here. Yes, you are allowed to create designs for print on demand that have mature content in them. No, I don't recommend doing it. It could just potentially lead to issues down the road. So I would just click no here, keep scrolling down. It's going to give you options that actually look similar

to Printful or Printify.
Where you can say, what kind of items do you want
this to be offered on? What color do you want those items to be shown in by default? And you can just select
what you want here. And then if you're good
with all of these items, it costs you nothing extra to offer them on all
these different items. You can then keep scrolling down, and you can actually pick
what colors are offered for these products as well. So just scroll through
here, hover over all these, make sure that you can actually read your design on all of these. If anything looks too close to
read, like a green on green, just uncheck that, and then keep scrolling through,
make sure everything looks good, and then scroll
down a little bit further. You can even offer your
design on other items beyond apparel with just one click here. So stickers, phone cases,
mugs, et cetera, all the way.

through, you can turn those on. It doesn't cost you anything extra to offer your design on
these other products. I actually personally don't turn these on. I leave it just to apparel. If you watch that full tutorial,
you'll get an explanation of why I've learned to
do this over the years. So that's why mine are all turned off, and just apparel is turned on. Just click I have read
and agree to the terms and conditions, and then click publish. And just like that, in a
matter of minutes here, you have a listing live on
a print-on-demand website that is getting organic traffic. So by doing print on demand with this passive print-on-
demand route, all you have to do is come up with good ideas and upload them to these big
print-on-demand marketplaces. This, in my experience,
is what a lot of people who are getting into print on demand are actually looking for. They don't want to go down the
active print-on-demand route.

where they then have to
start advertising campaigns to bring people into their store. For those of you who are
interested in learning more about passive print on demand and
how to do everything step by step, that full free tutorial is
linked down in the description. So guys, I hope this
video has been helpful and saves you a lot of headaches. If you enjoyed it, please
just give it a thumbs up, and I'll be seeing you
guys all in the next video.

Why I Don't Use Printful, Printify, or Etsy for Print On Demand

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