Print on Demand and Shopify 🚀

I can't seem to find any legitimate communities around PoD, and Shopify that aren't full off Gurus promising me millions... eeeek!

So, I guess I'll share on IH!

My partner decided she wants to give selling things online a shot. I've dabbled in this scene a bunch before, but never fully committed.

We decided to give print on demand a shot, with her handling the products, and me handing back of house. After watching / reading a bunch of stuff here is some condensed knowledge for those who might be interested:

1. The standard model of success revolves around using a Facebook tracking pixel. For better or worse... The goal is to get your FB Pixel "Hot", or use it to refine an audience of people who purchase, or in some cases even just add to cart.

2. It's highly suggested that you retarget people who visit your site, but don't purchase, these people are more likely to convert to customers.

3. The big "guru" secret for success when getting started is to invest in Instagram Influencers to drive traffic to your store to help "warm up" your pixel. The traffic is much cheaper than diving right into ads, and it's a lot more quick to execute.

4. If your mocks suck, your store will never convert. Use PlaceIt to make mocks that don't suck. Personally, I dropped the $80 for the year sub. (Hey, maybe opportunity of IH competitor).

5. I don't really like this one, but: You need to make a sense of urgency at time of checkout. Many suggest a count down timer "Your stock only reserved for this much time" "Sale price for only another HH". "While supplies last". Next, don't do this for every item in your shop..

6. Unless you're an organic traffic master, or have a large audience, you're going to need $1000-$3000 to invest in testing ads / scaling ads. Note, I've seen some conflicting advice here that suggests testing products on a marketplace sites like "redbubble" that will promote your product for free, then see what takes off.

7. On the topic of scaling ads, they don't scale linearly. So, if $100 a day yields $500 in sales. $1000 in ads most likely won't yield $5000 in sales. Take time to deliberately ramp up your ad spending while carefully manage your CAC.

8. lol, I already assumed this one, but you actually need to pay for the PoD item in order to get it shipped. So, make sure you have a credit card on file, or a stash of funds to fulfill items.

9. Disable PayPal checkout in Shopify, they're a plague. Invest time in making your checkout page feel authoritative.

Anyone else here doing Print on Demand, did I miss anything?

Hope this is useful!