Print-on-Demand Seller

As a print-on-demand seller, you’ll do four things:

• Build and maintain a digital storefront on a platform like Amazon, Etsy, etc.
• Design new products and add them to your store
• Advertise your products through various channels, such as social media
• Handle customer service requests and inquiries

In essence, you’ll be part designer, part marketer, and part customer service rep.

Again, you won’t have to worry about actually “fulfilling” (shipping) the orders you receive. In most POD models, they’ll be automatically referred to your supplier. In fact, you’ll never have to handle physical items yourself in any way, with the possible exception of occasionally ordering your own products to check their quality.

What products do print-on-demand sellers usually make?

If you’ve ever spent time on CafePress—one of the biggest print-on-demand marketplaces—you’re already familiar with the types of products POD sellers usually make. Clothes, stationery, and cups are particularly popular.

If you’re interested in this side hustle, consider brainstorming designs for:

• T-shirts
• Jackets and hoodies
• Phone cases
• Mugs
• Tumblers / water bottles
• Tote bags
• Backpacks
• Notebooks and planners
• Posters
• Stickers
• Blankets
• Cushions (and pillowcases)
• Face masks

It’s possible to reuse designs for more than one product type. If you create a graphic for a T-shirt and it takes off, you’ll be able to transfer it to tumblers and other products with relatively little effort.

Print-on-demand vs. dropshipping: what’s the difference?

It’s worth noting that print-on-demand is often confused with another model of selling, dropshipping. This is common enough that some websites use the terms interchangeably.

However, although the two models are similar, they aren’t the same. Like print-on-demand sellers, dropshippers don’t handle inventory or fulfill orders, but the difference is that they generally sell pre-manufactured products that they didn’t design themselves.

Dropshipping is usually harder to turn a profit with than print-on-demand. As a POD seller, you might strike gold with a design that happens to go viral and take off, whereas as a dropshipper, you’ll have to heavily market your products to get people to buy them from you (instead of any of the other sellers sourcing identical products from the same manufacturer).

The amount you can make from a print-on-demand side hustle depends on your store’s:

• Profit margins: Selling print-on-demand products comes with several expenses, including the cost of commissioning items from a supplier and shipping them to your customers. The higher your prices are relative to these expenses, the more you’ll earn per sale.
• Volume: It probably goes without saying that the more you sell, the more money you’ll earn. This means it’s important not to set your prices too high; if you do, you risk losing out on sales.

Many POD sellers report that their initial profit margins hover around 30%. In other words, for every $100 they take in, they pocket just $30, with the other $70 covering the unavoidable expenses associated with shipping and manufacturing.

Note that other expenses will continue to chip away at your profits further down the line, such as taxes (any and all money you make from e-commerce counts as taxable income). That $30 is what you’ll pocket after giving the print-on-demand service its cut, not necessarily what you’ll keep when all is said and done.

How much can you earn from print-on-demand per month?

Because your earnings with POD depend on how much you’re able to sell, there’s no way to predict exactly how much you’ll make per month. It depends entirely on how popular your store becomes.

That said, most people make relatively little money from this gig. There are a few star sellers making big bucks, but they’re the exception. As we’ll explore in the next section, that’s an issue of supply and demand: there are a lot of sellers competing for the attention of a limited number of buyers.

If you launch a print-on-demand store and you don’t have an established market for your goods (e.g., pre-existing customers, if your online store is associated with another business you already have), you shouldn’t expect to make much money for the first year or two at all.

Once you’ve been at it for a while, $1,000 per month is a reasonable goal to shoot for, although it will take a lot of work to hit that, and there are no guarantees.

Social media vs. reality: how worthwhile is print-on-demand?

Because print-on-demand is a relatively hands-off method of selling (like dropshipping), it’s a very popular side hustle.

There are a lot of social media influencers who claim that it’s a great source of passive income—in other words, that you can look up a few trending product categories on sites like Etsy, create a listing or two, and let the money roll in.

Unfortunately, the reality isn’t as idyllic as these influencers would have you believe. They have an incentive to make print-on-demand sound appealing so that people will watch their content (and often buy their courses or training sessions), but in reality, many of them aren’t very successful sellers themselves.

What’s more, if you investigate the ones who are provably successful, you’ll find they had some sort of leg up, such as an extensive background in sales and digital marketing, or simply a very long history on major selling platforms (meaning they got in on the ground floor, when the market was less saturated).

Is print-on-demand really an easy way to earn passive income?

The truth is that print-on-demand is a competitive niche. If there was a time when it was a route to easy money, that’s in the past.

As mentioned, there are a lot of other would-be entrepreneurs out there. This will make it difficult to carve out space for yourself. You’ll have to work hard for those 30% profits.

That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t get into print-on-demand. It’s possible to earn real money from it, and plenty of people do. It’s just important to go into it with realistic expectations. Starting a POD side hustle probably won’t make you rich, and it certainly isn’t a way to earn easy passive income with no effort on your part.

There are quite a few websites that supply products on demand for e-commerce sellers. Many of them don’t actually manufacture items themselves; instead, they contract with third-party suppliers to do so. Some platforms will let you choose a manufacturer, whereas others will pick for you.

The largest print-on-demand apps and platforms include:

1. Printful

About the app: Printful is one of the two largest companies in the POD space. It’s an extremely popular choice, and it accepts designs for many different products, including all of the classics (clothes, home and office supplies, cups and mugs, etc.).

Affiliated platforms: Printful integrates with virtually every major e-commerce platform, including (but not limited to):

• Amazon
• Adobe Commerce
• eBay
• Etsy
• Gumroad
• Shopify
• Squarespace
• TikTok Shop
• Weebly
• Wix

You can see a full list of Printful’s integrations on their website.

Item production: Printful does much of their printing in-house, but they occasionally outsource it to third-party manufacturers. Some of these outside companies have solid reputations, but others have seen complaints from users about poor item quality.

If you’re serious about using POD to earn a second income stream, make sure to order and test samples before marketing your goods to real customers.

2. Printify

About the app: Printify is the second-largest POD service in the US after Printful, and it functions in much the same way. It has a significantly wider variety of products available, including—unusually—health supplements and beauty products, which you can slap your own custom branding on.

Affiliated platforms: Printify’s integrations include:

• Amazon
• BigCommerce
• eBay
• Etsy
• PrestaShop
• Printify Pop-Up Store (the company’s own marketplace)
• Shopify
• Shutterstock
• Squarespace
• TikTok Shop
• Wix
• WooCommerce

Item production: In contrast to Printful, Printify exclusively works with third-party suppliers. You’re free to select which company you want.

Reviews are mixed as to whether Printify or Printful delivers better-quality items on the whole. There’s a good chance this varies from product to product and manufacturer to manufacturer. Fortunately, neither Printify nor Printful will lock you into a contract, so if you’re having trouble picking between them, you can give both a try and stick with whichever you end up preferring.

3. Gelato

About the app: Gelato is a cheaper print-on-demand company than either Printful or Printify, and it’s arguably the most famous of the “budget” options. It offers a narrower range of products than its bigger-name competitors, but it still offers all the most common classes of print-on-demand products, including T-shirts and other clothes, stationery, drinkware, and posters.

Affiliated platforms: Gelato’s integrations include:

• Shopify
• Etsy
• WooCommerce
• Wix
• Squarespace
• BigCommerce

Item production: Gelato works with third-party suppliers, who receive decidedly mixed reviews. Most people report that Gelato usually fulfills their orders with no issues, but there’s a handful of (anecdotal) allegations that Gelato products sometimes take a long time to ship and have serious quality issues.

Gelato is a legitimate company and may be worth trying if you need to save money, but again, they are a budget option, with all of the risks that entails.

4. Gooten

About the app: Gooten is another budget print-on-demand company. The products they offer include clothing, home and living products (candles, blankets, etc.), drinkware, wall art, office supplies, and stationery.

Affiliated platforms: Gooten integrates with just a few platforms:

• BigCommerce
• Etsy
• Shopify
• TikTok Shop
• WooCommerce

Item production: Like Printify and Gelato, Gooten works with third-party suppliers. However, unlike Printful and Printify, they don’t let you choose which company will produce your products. This is a significant downside, since it prevents you from testing out different suppliers and sticking with the ones who deliver the highest-quality items.

There’s a lot to be said for saving costs with a cheaper print-on-demand service, but using Gooten probably is a riskier option than going with its larger competitors.

5. CafePress

About the app: You may have already heard of CafePress, which is both a print-on-demand service and a marketplace. You can use this site to sell a wide array of products, including clothes, tech accessories (smartphone cases and mousepads, etc.), home decor, drinkware, and stationery.

Affiliated platforms: CafePress is both a print-on-demand service and a selling platform, which means it doesn’t integrate with any other sites.

Instead, you’ll list your products on CafePress itself, which will provide your storefront. When people buy from you, the company will take care of everything, including collecting your customers’ information.

This means that you have less control over your branding and your buyers’ experience. On the plus side, it also means setting up your store will take considerably less effort than the other options on this list require.

Item production: CafePress handles all production in-house (at a facility in Louisville, Kentucky).

Other popular print-on-demand sites

There are many other POD services, including:

• PrintKK
• Redbubble
• Spreadshop (formerly SPOD)
• Teelaunch

All of these sites have their fans, and it’s worth investigating all of them to see if any offer particularly good deals (or provide higher-quality items) in the category you’re most interested in selling in.

As you’ve probably gathered, although print-on-demand sellers work with dedicated POD companies to actually create their products, they usually sell them on separate sites. There are two ways you can do this:

1. Sell on an online marketplace

Many POD platforms are designed to interface with e-commerce marketplaces. If you go this route, you’ll create product listings on your site of choice; when customers make purchases, the orders will be automatically forwarded to the print-on-demand service you integrated your store with.

There are dozens of online selling apps that accept print-on-demand products. We’ve already mentioned some of the most popular, which include:

• Amazon
• eBay
• Etsy

The advantage of selling via a marketplace like this is that they all have enormous bases of users, which means people may stumble across your store via the site’s search function (or those “recommended for you” product lists that e-commerce platforms sometimes display).

The disadvantage is that it’s harder to establish your own brand identity when you sell through a large marketplace. You may find that you’re pigeonholed as an “Etsy seller,” and that it’s hard to break out of that niche and expand your customer base.

2. Create your own store

There are also several services that you can use to create your own store, which you’ll host on a website of your own (instead of just creating a storefront on an established marketplace). These include:

• BigCommerce
• Shopify
• Squarespace
• Wix

As you might expect, going with this option has essentially the opposite pros and cons that selling on a service like Amazon has. It gives you significantly more room to customize your store, but it also takes more work, both to set up your shop and to advertise it to potential customers.

Fortunately, these options aren’t mutually exclusive. If you’re just dipping your toes into the world of print-on-demand, you can start out by selling on a marketplace that will give you the extra support you need to get established, then transition to a store you fully control once you’ve generated a little buzz and your brand is a known quantity.

Again, it’s possible to make money with print-on-demand, but it isn’t as easy as certain content creators would have you believe. For it to be viable, you have to work hard and take it seriously.

Follow these tips to make the most of your POD side hustle:

Create your own designs (and don’t take shortcuts)

Many print-on-demand tutorials recommend using easy shortcuts when you design items. In particular, they often suggest using:

• Premade assets: Major POD platforms provide clip art, backgrounds, and other graphics that you can use to create designs with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
• AI-generated art: These days, it’s also very common for sellers to use generative AI (e.g., Midjourney) to create art, which they then try to sell on a print-on-demand basis.

Unfortunately, these aren’t the “hacks” they’re often portrayed as. The problem is that there are just too many sellers creating items this way, and they’ve flooded e-commerce platforms with low-effort designs. While some of these are genuinely attractive, there’s very little that makes them stand out from the competition.

In general, you should be suspicious of “quick fix” strategies when it comes to print-on-demand (and e-commerce in general). If they really worked, the thousands of sellers using them would all be rich, which is something that the market obviously couldn’t sustain.

How to come up with new designs

The best way to establish yourself as a print-on-demand seller is to bring something new to the table.

If you’re a graphic designer or illustrator and you can create items with a unique look, you’re in great shape. Alternatively, you can find freelance artists on websites like Upwork or Fiverr and hire them to create designs to your specifications.

If you aren’t able or willing to do that, you should still try to come up with clever ideas for products that you haven’t seen before (e.g., novel or funny text to put on T-shirts and mugs). Even if you execute on them with AI or premade assets, your products will stand out more if the actual ideas behind them are original.

You can and should look at other trending products to get inspiration, but don’t copy them outright. Even setting aside ethics (and copyright), one genuinely clever idea will be worth five highly derivative ones.

Pick a niche

It will be easier to come up with ideas—and establish a coherent brand for your store—if you specialize, rather than trying to create designs that will appeal to the widest possible audience.

Your niche can be anything you feel a strong affinity for or understand well. For instance, you could specialize in creating designs for a particular:

• Subculture (e.g., goth-inspired apparel and other items)
• Profession (e.g., items with memes and in-jokes for programmers, lawyers, etc.)
• Hobby (products for people who are into camping, fishing, thrifting, etc.)
• Fandom (gifts for fans of Marvel movies, etc.; be careful to stay on the right side of copyright law)
• Demographic (items for millennials that are inspired by 90s nostalgia, etc.)

Niching down will narrow your customer base, but it’s usually better to sell items that appeal strongly to a small group of people than items that have only mediocre appeal to the widest possible group.

Advertise on social media

There’s a reason why so many people discover print-on-demand by way of Instagram reels and TikTok videos. Social media platforms are very popular places for e-commerce sellers to advertise their wares.

If you want your store to take off, it’s worth getting into that game, too. Post about your products (and any promotions or sales) on Facebook and Twitter/X, and consider uploading videos to TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

The content of these is up to you, but you can consider creating:

• Tutorials on how to create print-on-demand products
• Videos of yourself drawing or workshopping designs
• Content related to whatever niche you picked

If your material performs well, you can look into monetizing it with ads or affiliate or sponsorship deals. In addition to driving traffic to your store, it could eventually become a money-maker in its own right.