How to Start a Successful E-commerce Business w/ Printful (DO THIS!)
printful put together what they call the printful checklist that's what we're gonna look at today in this video now it is what it sounds like it's a checklist of things for us to do to be successful running an e-commerce business where printful fulfills our print-on-demand orders it's actually really thorough and what impressed me most about it is that it basically indexes a lot of really useful resources that they put together for us in one central location you're gonna see what i mean as we go through it because i'm going to show you some of these resources as we read through the checklist but this is something that everybody should know about because most likely there's at least a few things you may have missed even if your ecommerce business is already successful so let's get started let's look through this checklist and see what we learned [Music] let's get straight to it i'll put a link in the description if you want to follow along with me also if you're not selling on printful yet and you want to use that link that would be appreciated it does help support the channel alright so they split this up into seven sections the sections are research creating products branding store setup printful setup legal and marketing and yes it is pretty thorough so let's read through this starting with research so it says start with learning about your target audience and finding out all the technical requirements for product design all right so first things first find your niche select a specific customer group to market your products to you can use your personal interests and hobbies as a source of inspiration explore your niche on reddit facebook or quora to see what people are looking for all right and that's good advice guys like this is really operating under the assumption that you are starting a store not just like integrating printful with amazon or ebay or etsy where you can really upload anything and you know people finding your products will be a function of if you're selling something related to the keywords they search for so think more along the lines of we're starting maybe a shopify store and we really want to niche down okay do a competitor analysis see what products are already out there and how saturated your niche is free online tools like answer the public or ubersuggest will help you find information about people's search phrases and give you an idea of what's trending so again they're linking you to some tools that you can use to drill down into your keyword research and get some additional insights maybe like long tail keywords as well that you can target with your specific products by the way i love that approach on amazon there is a free chrome extension called amz suggestion expander recommend everybody go grab it again completely free and when you start doing a keyword search on amazon it expands the search out and you start seeing the keywords before keywords after more long tail keywords et cetera so stuff like that's really good advice because it lets you see what people are searching for related to the seed query you type in study our print file guidelines click on a product in our catalog and scroll down to the file guidelines tab follow these guidelines and you'll be on your way to a product both you and your customers will be happy with follow our acceptable content guidelines to make sure your product design is respectful of others and the law so if you want to read their guidelines go ahead click the link and you can read through all of the policies related to intellectual property illegal content hateful content and some other notes learn about our printing techniques our main production technique is direct to garment dtg printing but we also offer all over printing sublimation engraving uv printing and by the way uv printing it's funny they say that because i'm actually going to do a video on that uh probably next week and embroidery head over to printful lessons to learn more about your printing options so again it's kind of like they're indexing all these resources they've put together for us on the printful website that's why i really wanted to show you guys this and by the way again link in the description you can look through this on your own time because there's a lot of stuff we're skipping over we're gonna focus on just the checklist but all these other resources you can go and check out on your own time all right section two creating products now let's get to the creative part creating cool designs and by the way you can check this off as you go you know you can click this and it'll give you a little progress bar so creating your design there are three ways to go about it when you create designs you can create the designs from scratch on our free mockup generator this is an all-in one tool where you can create your product designs print files and mock-ups to for your store front in one go the mock-up generator features sample graphics text fonts emojis illustrations etc so yeah they do have a mock-up generator that's really useful and they've got some free graphics in there that you can use two you can upload your own artwork and that's typically what i do guys i'll design in photoshop you can use like photopia which is like a free version of photoshop create your designs and then just upload them in printful and what's cool is they'll create a separate folder for each of your stores on printful so if i want to push something to my ebay store because it was selling really well on my amazon store i can go to the ebay store click add new product and then when i select my designs i just click into the folder for my uploads from my amazon store so it's really nice i mean you guys know i love to double triple quadruple down on what's working so that's typically my approach three use printful's graphic design services for a fee their talented team can make decisions for or designs for you adjust design files and much more create products for future use save time by combining your designs with the product sizes and colors you want and save them as a product template so you can go to dashboard and then product templates to learn more order and then the last one order discounted samples so if you guys didn't know this printful allows you a certain number of sample orders per month the more successful you are using printful the more sample orders they give you i don't know what the max is it's probably like three or four i don't think i've ever used all of my sample orders in a month but uh with the sample orders guys by the way even a new account can do this you just go into the top right corner it says new order it's a big red button click that it'll say do you want to do a standard order or a sample order click sample order you get 20 off and you get free shipping now the number of products you can add to a sample order also goes up the more successful you are so they kind of incentivize you to be successful because that's how they make their money because printful is free all right section 3 branding when you've decided on your products and target audience the next step is branding so part one choose a memorable store name a strong brand name will help people remember you keep it short simple and easy to pronounce we recommend leaving out words like uh or the to make your name catchier you can try business name generator tools like name licks wordoid datamater and namestation all right i don't know any of those that's kind of cool though so if you need help coming up with the name for your shop what are you what are you naming keywords to include ryan shirts all right i typed in ryan and shirts let's see what these what this comes up with oh okay they're drilling down into domain names so they're trying to show us uh domain names that are available for sale so show t-shirts source t-shirts tv shirts all right cool buy a domain for some e-commerce platforms uh sorry i skipped one sorry your brand name is going to also be your domain name okay so they put that right underneath i just missed it and that's actually really good advice guys before you name your store your company whatever it's typically good advice to go and check if the domain is available now typically i just go to godaddy.com all of these services that i just showed you godaddy does the exact same thing for you so if you type in something that's taken they'll also suggest similar things that are available similar similar domains speaking of domains buy a domain for some ecommerce platforms buying a domain is a requirement it's fast easy and doesn't have to be expensive the good news is having a custom domain will give your store more credibility and make it easier to find by the way guys make sure you subscribe i've got a crazy tutorial dropping next week that i've been working on for honestly two weeks where i'm integrating wix with printful so wix is a way to create a website and you know we got the custom domain tied in we got everything tied in i'm going to make this thing like as good as it can be basically so subscribe you're not going to want to miss that all right create a logo and by the way i did like basically the whole checklist for the the wix store create a logo you can create a new logo from scratch using our logo maker if you like you can also hire a graphic designer for this also canva has really good logo creating it's one of my favorite places to go to if i need a logo four store setup you're almost there time to decide where you'll sell your products and take care of all the technical details all right so choose an ecommerce platform or marketplace an ecommerce platform is a single seller website where the store owner sells only their products a marketplace is a website where products from multiple vendors are compiled into one well-organized catalog think of etsy ebay or amazon by the way take advantage of all three of those where you can pick products from a variety of different vendors here's a list of integrations we offer and a youtube playlist with tutorials on how they work find the platform that's best for you set it up and connect to printful guys what's cool is you know printful doesn't charge you to set up on etsy ebay and amazon so go ahead and take advantage of all three no drawback to doing that and as i explained earlier the way they organize your files actually makes it really easy if you have something working on one of the websites well make sure you've got it posted to the other two choose a payment processor for your storefront you need to accept you need this to accept payments for your customer from your customers check out the info provided by your ecommerce platform and have a look at our blog post to learn more about payment processing now in my personal experience stripe is typically one of if not the easiest to work with um so they have a whole article by the way about payment gateways payment processing transaction fees payment methods etc what was the i can't think of it bitpay you can also use like bitpay and accept crypto pretty easily so you know it's really cool time to be alive and be running an online store to say the least set up a shipping option for your store the shipping setup is different for every platform so follow the guidelines provided by the one you've chosen for your store shipping pricing shipping pricing strategies however are up to you remember that customers always appreciate it if you offer them free shipping so typically like with printful you can go in and look at the shipping that's available to your store i think by default they're all available and printful used to do dynamic now they do flat rate shipping and it depends on like what product you're selling and how many you're selling but you know when they say like shipping strategies you can do things like price you can offer free shipping but price in the cost of shipping from printful uh or you can like charge five dollars shipping even though it's only gonna cost you 3.99 and make an additional dollar you know you can do things like that i liked it more when it was dynamic shipping honestly because i was making a little bit more money on the on the back end with the dynamic shipping publish a return policy for your storefront read printful's return policy and adapt to your store so you can set customer expectations from the get go you know what's cool guys look at this they have free policy templates on printful including a return policy template so go ahead click that link and it is right here for you could do a whole video on that honestly add customs last one add customs disclaimer if selling internationally so add a customs disclaimer and place a test order we already talked about that earlier but you can place a test order and in this case actually this is a test order not a sample order so you can go through your website place a real order just like a customer would and by the way if you're going to do this it would probably be a good idea to go into the top right of your web browser and open an incognito window when you open an incognito window guys if you're like logged into your website's admin backend it may influence and change kind of how the front end works hopefully i didn't lose anybody there just trust me go incognito place a sample order this way it'll be like you're a real customer and make sure everything's working and then what's cool is you can go into printful afterwards and you can go to your order by the way when you get an order printful will email you saying like it may take like 5 10 15 minutes but you'll get an email saying hey we recognized you got an order that we're supposed to fulfill so they let you know you can either wait for that email or just right after you place your your order go into printful go to orders and then cancel it okay well actually i guess you would have to wait for the email because they have to see the order for you to be able to cancel but yeah you can go ahead and cancel your test order and you won't be billed all right part five printful setup here's what you need to do on printful side add a billing method on printful okay so you need this your orders can be processed right away you just go to the billing section in printful um i also did like a full printful review for 2021 if you guys missed that one it's very helpful if you're just getting started i'll link to it right here in the youtube cards we go in depth into this stuff one big recommendation i have is to use the printful wallet and set it to bill in increments of whatever you think works i do 50 no i do 100 right now so that way like it doesn't hit my credit card so many times that it like closes um that it blocks printful from charging me again because it thinks it's fraud or something all right select a shipping method on printful let us know what shipping method you want for your orders you can do this by going to so i didn't actually even know this um because i just used the standard shipping pretty much and because i'm like selling on the big ecommerce websites where i don't offer the overnight shipping option because i don't want customers thinking that everything is prime and that they're going to get it really soon when printful still has the buffer from when they receive the order to when they produce it um so you know i just keep it simple the the flat rate um standard shipping but you can go to dashboard stores and then what they didn't put in here is you actually have to go to settings and then shipping and you can see the shipping profiles but it would matter more if you're selling on like shopify or wix or somewhere else set up fulfillment preferences on printful your orders can be either imported to printful and fulfilled automatically or imported as drafts importing drafts means you'll have to manually confirm each order to continue with fulfillment guys by default it should just fulfill automatically i recommend that again you're gonna get an email every time they see an order so i don't know why you'd complicate things and do manual um just kind of when you get the emails if you don't think something's right just go ahead and click and go into the order section of printful and you can confirm all the details all right then push products to the store there are two ways you can sync products to your ecommerce platform and push them to your storefront you can use the push the product push generator available with most most printful integrations go to stores and then add that's the way i do it honestly for like all of my products second you can do manual sync first add a product to your storefront front then go to your printful dashboard stores and sync and hit refresh data so typically when i do that it's uh because something broke and it's typically happened with my ebay store for some reason i don't know why it's probably happened like three or four times um and it's actually caused me problems where now some of the old products aren't recognized so if they sell i have to go in and like manually show the product that it was supposed to to sync to so i have to re-establish the sync basically it's not the biggest deal um i i don't do it manually ahead of time i just wait till something sells and then i'll create it hopefully that makes a little bit of sense again check out the the printful tutorial for 2021. it might have more information on that no one looks forward to section six it's all about the legal side of running your business so we'll skip through it pretty quickly but they help you with registering your business they have a big beginner guide on how to do that uh consulting a tax professional talking about value-added tax vat for the european union et cetera they say we can't offer legal advice on taxes but they do point into some resources like printful's tax policies as well and they make sure that you submit your legal and tax information to printful also if you haven't done that they'll probably pester you with emails especially during tax season to make sure they have everything they need from you all right and section seven of seven marketing guys don't skip over marketing um a lot of like entrepreneurs serial entrepreneurs create amazing products they do all the heavy lifting and then they fail at marketing and then nobody finds out about the fact that they've got this awesome product or product line so do not skip marketing all right let's check it out now it's time to roll up your sleeves and do some marketing magic to get your first order and keep them coming in be your own pr specialist public relations specialist spread the word about your brand with your friends family co-workers and other people you meet of course yes use word of mouth and hope that people will also then promote it for you make your online store easy on the eyes you only have one chance to make a good first impression guys let's read that back because it's seriously important you only have one chance to make a good first impression make sure if you have a your own online store that it looks really good and oftentimes that means doing less it's easy to do too much do less when you install google analytics on your website which every website i think should do you can see the bounce rate you can see how long people stay on your homepage or whatever page you send them to before they leave you can probably reduce that by making things simpler this is stuff i talk about in my college web development course by the way talk about like making things easier you know easy to understand like simple call to actions guide them to making the decision you want them to make all right so a mobile friendly easy to use and visually consistent website will help you make a good first impression choose a theme that reflects your brand and tell your brand story on your about us page another side note if anybody uh isn't in college yet and you're looking for something to major in or look for a career guys like being a i'm just saying being a web developer especially like me like front end specialty front end web developer especially specialty like i'm not reliant on a theme i can go into like any theme and customize that thing however i need it so it's a nice little um granted you know you spend a lot of extra time doing stuff that maybe would be better spent doing other things but i can make any website look however i want it to look um set up your social media accounts a strong social media presence will drive traffic to your store and increase sales depending on your customer demographic facebook youtube and instagram are all great platforms to explore instagram is particularly useful for showing off your designs because it's meant for marketing visual appealing products feel free to use these production and behind the scenes photos and videos on your marketing campaigns to show how your products are made so check that out guys printful has got our back they put together all of these um marketing photos and videos that we can use ourselves to show how products that you that our customers purchase through our shops are made so it's really cool it's a nice way of looking professional um where we look professional even though we didn't have to record these videos edit them etc also check out my video on how to automate your social media presence from etsy i'm sure you can do the same with shopify or whoever's hosting your website's back-end i'll link to it right here i show you how to do that in zapier with zapier all you gotta do is swap etsy to actually i didn't even do it for etsy i just did rss so if your shopify store has an rss feed you can literally use exactly what i show you in that video that i just pointed to and customize it for whatever you want to use as your ecommerce platform work on getting your first review product reviews in e-commerce add invaluable social proof and help build brand trust then they have a blog post on how to get more reviews and manage the bad ones awesome that's great advice you definitely need of all things the first review is the most important so make sure you get that motivate customers to buy offering customers free returns worldwide shipping and discount codes are just some ways of driving more sales of course that's easy to say right but it's like we're walking this fine line between we don't want it's like we want to offer free shipping and a great price but we also don't want to lose money so we have to charge a certain amount and it's definitely a juggling act also you don't want to have too many returns because that's going to eat into your profit margins i get it nobody said this would be easy fortunately like as your stores scale and you start making more orders you can kind of refine your process figure out what works cut loose whatever's not working encourage user generated content or ugc i really like that so ugc is any type of content created by your customers from social media posts to testimonials and comments this provides extra social proof reassuring potential customers that it's a good idea to buy from you think about the last time you made an online purchase were there reviews on that product page did you scroll down and read them or did you at least look at the average review typically out of five stars really good advice also don't overlook the importance of potent i mean importance it just it really helps if you're running your own website to have this user generated content because from a search engine optimization perspective and like really we're talking about optimizing for google having constant like fresh like content on your constant fresh content on your website really helps see that your website's like being updated with new stuff which google's algorithm definitely favors rather than a stale old stagnant website with no feedback mechanism all right experiment with low budget advertising strategies like creating a referral program that can be good because you only really pay out the refer referrals if they make you money collaborating with influencers posting in communities where people talk about issues that your product can solve giveaways on social media platforms all the above great advice customize packing slips and shipping labels on printful guys you can do that in like five minutes and it's completely free to have that custom packing slip so make sure you do that check out my printful 2021 tutorial i'll also link to it in the description all right use free advertising tools ad exchanges like egg flow six ads very node ads you can have your ads placed online on stores similar to yours you return the favor and you get more free traffic to your store that's pretty cool like ad exchanges i've never even tried those and measure the success of your marketing strategies tools like google analytics that we talked about earlier session recording tools like hot jar or crazy egg and a b testing tools like vwo and optimizely are among some of the most popular you can honestly go down the rabbit hole of um i guess that's for measuring success but you can go down a really long rabbit hole of like website upgrades little um what do we call them like modules you can add a big one that i like is called provely and it basically lets visitors know when somebody recently purchased a product from your website um you can customize it but like basically it's like if someone comes to my shirt store it'll say oh joe from nebraska just purchased this specific shirt seven days ago and then they can like click the shirt and go to the product page so it's like a little social social proof feedback mechanism so again i'll put a link in the description to the printful checklist and before i wrap this video just wanted to remind you i run a weekly print on demand giveaway two winners are selected every single sunday make sure you enter at ryanhog.com forward slash giveaway this week sponsored by flying research automate pod all american graphics and bubble scout you can find a link in the description also in the description you'll find a link to my 8 day print on demand mini course which also coaches you through everything you need to know to get set up with the printful etsy integration and you'll find a link to my print on demand facebook group lots of active discussion going on there every single day and last but not least guys i did write a full print on demand course showing you how i make six figure print on demand sales every single year it's extremely thorough i'm redoing a bunch of the content just updating it for 2021 check that out link in the description guys thank you so much for watching make sure you like subscribe and i will see you tomorrow [Music] you
2021-05-18 05:55
