It is really important to me to grow my passive income, and print on demand is something that is helping me to grow my passive income. You see, I love selling items! I love sourcing items to sell and also packaging them up to go to their buyer. However, I don’t want to invest a lot of money into holding stock like premium sign supplies, and I am quickly running out of space in our unit for more e-commerce items. Added to that the fact that I really want to grow my passive income, print-on-demand is something that I have loved exploring.
What is print on demand?
Print on demand, sometimes called POD, is where you can sell your own custom designs on different types of products.
Instead of ordering lots of items in various colours and sizes and holding on to stock (with a big financial outlay) these items are printed on demand from third-party providers.
The ‘on demand’ bit means that when an item sells it triggers an order from your supplier, who take care of everything else for you.
There are lots of items that can be sold using POD. They include:
- T-Shirt
- Hoodies
- Face masks or face coverings
- Mugs or cups
- Bags
- Stationery
- Smart phone covers
- Stickers
- Prints
And many more.
Here are some of the print on demand items that I sell in my Etsy store.
Why is print on demand so popular?
POD is becoming more and more popular for a variety of reasons.
The first is the low start up costs, which I will cover below. You can start a print on demand business for almost no money at all.
POD is a fairly low-risk business to get started with – as long as you create the designs yourself (which you do not need to have any experience to do) or pay for commercial artwork and designs.
Another benefit of print on demand is that you can create a passive income from print on demand. That means that you create your product once, source a print on demand partner, list your items once and your print on demand partner takes care of everything else for you – the printing and shipping.
A print on demand company can scale quickly and react to popular trends that are emerging. If you were making the products themselves then you would have to design them, order them in and store them before dispatching them to customers.
Start up costs
One of the great things about start a POD shop is that the start up costs are really low. You don’t need to us those roll stickers!
If you are able to design all of the products yourself (which you can do for free in Canva) then you won’t have to pay any costs for designing.
Since you don’t need to have the products on hand to ship out yourself, the only initial outlay will be the store front that you choose to have – whether you sell on Etsy or Shopify.
In fact, Shopify actually have a 14 day trial!
Get started
I know what you are thinking – where do you get started? How do you create designs? How do you choose a supplier? Where do you list your items for sale?
The good news is that I have covered all of these topics and more with my print on demand series:
