- So a lot of you asked me to make a video
about selling t-shirts online
and about print-on-demand eCommerce.
Selling t-shirts and other print-on-demand products
can actually be a really great way to make money online,
and if you do it right and set it up properly,
it can become automated, it can become passive income.
But if you want to start selling t-shirts online,
there are a few questions you'd have to ask
and have answered, to even know
if it's worth your time and whether this is something
that you can actually pull off on your own.
So in today's video, I'm actually gonna answer
all of your questions about selling t-shirts online.
How much money can you make selling t-shirts?
What are the best websites for selling t-shirts online?
How much does it cost to get started?
And is any of this really worth your time and effort?
Can you do it even if you don't have a large audience?
Also, I'm gonna show you exactly how much I make
from selling my own t-shirts and hoodies,
a link is in the description down below
if you want to check out the merch.
Anyway, let's jump into the video.
Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake,
helping you create something awesome today,
welcome back to the channel.
Today we've got another making money online video
and today we are talking about selling t-shirts,
hoodies, and print-on-demand products,
it's a video all about eCommerce.
So let's start with what you really need to know,
how much money does it cost upfront
to sell t-shirts online?
And the answer shockingly,
is zero dollars upfront.
If you really want to do this,
units for zero dollars
using websites like Teespring and Spreadshirt.
Now of course, you can use other sites like Shopify,
if you wanna have your own website, your own domain name,
I'm going to get into the pros and cons of that in a minute,
for a lot of you selling t-shirts
and hoodies is gonna be a lot faster
than trying to make money on YouTube
from ad revenue and sponsorships,
so how much money can you make?
Well, when you sell hoodies,
they're obviously a little bit more expensive,
but you might get better margins out of them.
When you sell t-shirts,
they're going to be a little bit cheaper,
and so depending on which websites you wanna use,
and which process you go through,
on average, I would say between $5 and $12
is what you could look for in profits.
'Cause when you use print-on-demand,
they are going to take some of the money
from the sale up front,
but it's not costing you anything,
and what you're gonna make in profit
is gonna be whatever is left over
after they cover all of that.
So that's how print-on-demand works.
No more buying expensive,
vinyl machines, heat press,
silkscreen printing, no more standing on the hot sun
in the middle of July,
selling them out of the trunk of your car,
we just use the internet, it's amazing.
So that answers our first couple of questions,
Zero dollars upfront, if we use websites
like Teespring and Spreadshirt,
and our profit margin is usually gonna be
between five and $12.
There you go, but there's a couple of things
you need to really think about.
I brought up Shopify earlier because
if you really want to build a high end,
merch store of your own,
or start doing a print-on-demand business,
Shopify is amazing.
And it's gonna cost you about $20 a month,
sorry, $29 a month, for their basic setup there.
And then there are a few other things
you'll want to look into,
but here's why a lot of us use things
like Spreadshirt and Teespring.
Obviously, it is because
they are zero dollars up front,
you don't have to invest anything,
and you can actually use free design software
if you don't have Adobe like me,
to be able to make your designs and get those things done.
But, there's going to be a catch here,
it's very hard doing that to make really competitive
products and merchandise they're gonna sell to your audience
or to strangers who have no idea who you are.
So that's not really making a clothing line.
And so, it's a good place for beginners,
but if you want to really make money at this,
you're gonna have to go a step further,
and so you're gonna want to have good software
for designing stuff like Adobe,
or you're gonna want to have to hire somebody
from Fiverr or another website to be an artist for you.
So you're gonna have to go ahead
and commission some really good custom artwork,
to go on your t-shirts, your hoodies,
your merchandise, your posters,
your mugs, whatever it is.
Then on top of that,
when you use Teespring and Spreadshirt,
the shipping on these things can take like forever.
So there are downsides to zero investment upfront.
You're also driving your audience
to somebody else's platform instead of having
your own website and a way to also capture
that customer information and be able to market
to them in other ways,
so you're kind of stuck with their website
and quality control wise look,
I love the quality of the merchandise we have
for the awesome squad,
but you don't have quality control
when you are using Spreadshirt and Teespring.
And then you also have to deal with the delays
on the shipping and whether or not
your customers are happy with that.
So if you went with Shopify,
you could actually source things through Printful,
and that actually would be really good.
They handle all the processing, all the payment,
all the shipping, and so you don't have to deal with that
and it actually happens a lot faster.
So I think that that's actually a better route,
if you want to invest in this and go hard.
You also with getting a designer from Fiverr
are gonna be able to have a lot more options,
and you're not limited to your own artistic ability,
and your capacity to either buy,
afford or use apps like Photoshop and Illustrator very well,
and you're not limited by what free tools can accomplish.
You can get somebody who actually specializes in this,
do us good job,
and can take your ideas,
your vision and make something out of it that's really cool,
that would be worth people spending money on.
Now, can you sell t-shirts
without a large audience?
Well, yeah, you absolutely can,
if you're the type of person who is good at sales,
and if you're willing to do that,
do marketing or if you have the budget,
to do influencer marketing, paid Google ads,
you can use Google smart ad campaigns,
I use that for my coaching business,
and then you also have,
a few more options.
If you do have a large audience,
obviously, you can market directly to them.
Now, in a bit I'm gonna show you
my sales numbers on the merchandise,
from our merch here,
but I think you guys if you are familiar with me,
you pretty much know that
I don't move and push this merch,
I barely mention it to you guys,
and I rely on the Teespring integration
right below this video,
to do most of that sales work for me.
When I do promote it,
I actually make markups using Placeit,
it's actually really cool
and they have a lot of cool design features,
you can get markups for
not only your merchandise and your t-shirt,
but for all other kinds of things as well.
I actually use this for a lot of my digital products,
also in terms of markups,
where I sell things like the YouTube starter kit,
or when I'm promoting something that grows my email list,
I use Placeit for the markups,
I'm gonna link to that down in the description.
If you want to check it out,
it is an affiliate link,
they are I believe 1495 a month,
I just do the yearly for like 89 bucks,
and I think it's a steal,
when it comes to all the things that it lets you do.
But this would help you in terms
of your marketing effort,
to be able to promote your merchandise.
So if you do have an audience, that's helpful,
or if you need to make ads,
and then you need to pay for those ads,
that's also helpful for you to have that.
Now if you decide you want your own domain name
with something like Bluehost,
which we also recommend, then guess what?
that's gonna cost you about
I think, 15 to $20 a year,
depending on the domain name that you want.
So you're gonna have to do that,
so you can send them to your website,
Shopify, for hosting your eCommerce platform,
connecting with Printful,
that's gonna cost you $29 a month for the basic plan.
So while this isn't radically expensive,
and you could do this initially with like 100 bucks,
it could all start to add up.
And if you don't know that there's demand for this,
you don't have an audience, or you don't have experience,
then that investment may not feel worthwhile,
and then you're better off with something
like Spreadshirt or Teespring,
and that can help you out.
And that's probably the main reason
that I decided to go with those platforms,
was with all the other stuff that I do online,
I didn't feel like I was gonna invest the upfront time
to do that and build out a full on clothing brand,
it's actually something I would like to do in the future,
and it's something that I've been playing with,
and so I'll tell you a bit how I would approach that.
But the main thing that I wanna show you here is,
the idea of whether or not
this is worth your time.
Whether or not you can make money from this.
And the answer is yes,
but you are going to have to initially
put in effort if you want it to happen,
I don't think most of you can make this fully automated,
without a lot of upfront effort.
So I just want to be kind of clear about that,
but I do think that you could make more money,
selling print-on-demand products,
whether it's t-shirts, hoodies,
some of your artists, you do really good
with posters and artwork,
that would be actually really dope to see.
And so I think you could do that a lot more easily
and make your first 100 or $1,000 online,
than probably trying to do YouTube
and get monetized here on the platform.
Now with Teespring because I'm a YouTube partner
that has more than 10 thousand subscribers,
I do get the merch shelf,
and so when people want to buy this,
they can just go down to that and they can see it,
YouTube kind of puts it there like an ad,
and that's actually really practical,
if you have an audience.
If you don't have an audience,
then the main ways that you're gonna be able to benefit
from print-on-demand, would be that you have to do
some form of online advertising,
or get influencers shout outs,
and that would move your merchandise.
Now let's see real quick how much money
I have made on Teespring with my merchandise.
It looks like in the lifetime
of me doing merchandise without me pushing it to you guys,
telling you guys to buy the merch,
buy the merch, buy the merch,
it looks like I've done 82 sales,
so I've sold 82 products,
whether it's t-shirts, hoodies, whatever,
and that has done us in profit,
in profit $761
and in terms of some of the money
that it's helped us raise for charity,
it's helped us raise $66 for charity.
So, that's actually not bad considering,
I'm not aggressively pushing this stuff,
but it does mean that
when it comes to all time sales on Teespring,
we haven't actually even cracked $1,000 with this,
the good news is, we haven't tried to push it aggressively,
and if we sold 100 of these products, whatever it is,
we sold 100 of them, then we'd be close to cracking 1000.
So that tells you that between six and $12,
five and $12 is pretty accurate
for how much money you make for every one of your sales.
Again, I think you make more on the hoodies
than anything else,
t-shirts is going to be the lower priced
and lower margin in terms of profit.
Now, I'm going to probably do some kind of video
about Teespring versus Spreadshirt.
But the main thing that I think you should know
watching this video is that,
Spreadshirt actually ships to more places outside
of the US than Teespring does,
so if you have an international audience,
I think putting your products in both websites
is probably the best idea,
but if you had to commit to one,
because of the YouTube integration
and because I think the quality is slightly better,
I would say Teespring.
But if you want to reach more people
in terms of international audience, then Spreadshirt.
And I've used both, and so I'm actually happy with both,
I don't have negative things to say about them,
but that is the place that I would start.
If I wanted to take this super seriously,
I'd get a Shopify store,
I would definitely hire a designer on Fiverr
to make a couple of different designs,
it's not gonna be that cheap to do,
so I would put some real money into this.
I'd probably put $1,000 into this,
if I was taking it seriously,
get a couple of designs done,
get a website domain, get Shopify,
make some markups in Placeit,
then I'd put a little small ad budget
probably into Google and Instagram,
and I'd also probably sell,
not sell, I'd probably send,
I probably sent to the PO BOX
of a couple of my favorite influencers,
I'd probably send my t-shirts and hoodies to them,
I'd figure out what their size is,
and I would send them that as a gift,
and then if they shouted out, that's great,
if they don't, they don't,
and that's probably how I would approach it.
I would use Shopify and Printful,
because I can do the branding and packaging the way I want,
I could even put my own logo on the label of the hoodies,
and so it would look like a real clothing company,
and that's probably the way that I would do it.
In the future, I actually want to do an experiment with that
and show you guys what the step-by-step process
would look like,
so if you're interested in that kind of video,
let me know in the comment section,
also, let's do a little fun experiment,
let's see if we can get 500 likes on this video.
Question of the day,
what else do you wanna know about
print-on-demand products?
Do you wanna know more about selling merchandise
through free websites,
and which ones are the best free websites
for selling t-shirts and print-on-demand?
Do you want to know more about Shopify?
Let me know in the comment section.
Like this video if you liked it,
don't forget to subscribe.
Check out all the awesome stuff here on the channel,
also, resources links to everything I talked about,
are in the description down below,
along with the merch,
as always you guys,
thanks so very much for watching, and don't forget,
go out there and create something awesome today, take care.
(gentle music)