🤔 Does The POD Stuff Really Work?

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Got a few questions yesterday on the same topic - POD stores.

I’ve got one standalone Shopify POD store (soon to be two!) and the rest are all essentially part of a niche site. And yeah, some have been duds.

So, I can tell ya what I know based on my own experience.

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Making POD Work (several questions answered here)

The main thing to know about POD is that it won’t work for every niche.

This means you need to dig in and do some research to know if it’s a good idea for your niche.

But first, let’s look at popular POD products you can sell - things like hoodies, t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, phone cases and a million other things. I use Printful but Printify is another option.

Printify actually has more products that you can print designs on, including fucking supplements. wtf?

I literally just saw that for the first time. You could totally YMYL into the health niche with these.

Anyways, check out all the different things you can sell and THEN determine if you have an audience that will buy any of that stuff.

What you want is an audience with a strong identity - coffee drinkers, Republicans/Democrats, social workers, boaters, etc. If women are your target audience, this brand is one of my favorite places for inspiration.

Someone gifted me a tumbler from there a few years back and I’ve been watching them ever since. Mostly because it is obvious that the tumbler design, at least the one I have, was made with a Cricut machine. And you can find all their white label products on Alibaba. Y’know, if you wanna deal with inventory.

But you can also find them on POD platforms.

Another place I look to check out the viability of a market is Amazon. I want to see what sorts of tees, cups, etc. are selling to my market and how well they are selling (by looking at rank numbers in the product listings).

I also look at Etsy.

Once you think you’ve found a market with hungry buyers, you can’t just publish the products to your store and wait.

You gotta find that audience and sell to them. This can be as simple as running Facebook/Instagram ads or growing a Facebook page (and newsletter) so you can market directly to your audience. Or maybe even YouTube and Pinterest.

Doing POD with a niche site only solves the problem of not looking like a niche site - unless you actively work on the ecomm side to promote the products and get customers.

The upcharge on those POD item is high though, and their shipping costs are also often a bit high.

At the end of the day, you either need an audience that buys a lot so you can work on thin margins OR an audience that is used to paying high prices for whatever you’re selling.

And make sure to order a sample before you start selling to make sure that it’s actually a decent product. You don’t want to be dealing with returns.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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