Dropshipped POD: Redbubble Sales Review: 2019

Redbubble Sales Review: 2019

By Ryan Hogue on January 10, 2020

Today I'll be reviewing my Redbubble sales over the past year, showing you what product sold, how much revenue was generated, and how much I kept as profit.

Redbubble

Redbubble is an "all-in-one" print on demand marketplace.

💰 Monthly Cost: 100% FREE

It can hold its own with the best of them, namely because it's 100% & it lists products on its own marketplace that is integrated with Google Shopping. Here are my thoughts on Redbubble:

Redbubble had 20.8M total visits in October, 2019 [source].

Google Shopping: Listing a product on Redbubble means that your product will show up for sale on Google Shopping. Given that Google is the most trafficked website in the world, this is a great way of getting organic traffic.
Easy to use UI The Redbubble user interface is clean, intuitive, and easy to use. It's more tedious than Printful, Merch, & Gearbubble if you just want to upload a t-shirt design, but if you want to place your design on multiple products, they make it very easy to do all at once.
Integration: One downside is that Redbubble doesn't integrate with other online marketplaces, so you are essentially uploading your designs to products that will only sell through their marketplace. Sometimes I manually cross-list products such as popular stickers onto other marketplaces, but I'm forced to manually create the order to the customer in an online arbitrage fashion when they sell.
Pricing: I don't know if this is more positive or negative, but you can't control your profit margins on a per-design basis. Rather, you control your margins on a per-product basis and you do so by entering a % markup that will instantaneously be applied to all of your product listings (making it hard to target price points like $19.99).
Three negatives about Redbubble: #1 Inability to control product costs on a per-product basis (& cost control lacks flexibility) #2 Lack of integrations with other marketplaces #3 People steal each other's work from Redbubble all the time

Reviewing My Redbubble Sales in 2019

2019 was my first full calendar year on Redbubble, and I believe I had finished uploading my existing catalog of designs by around May.

Towards the end of the year I developed & refined a new workflow that allowed me to generate enough designs to push 50 a day to the platform... although, I typically would upload every other day and do it in bulk to Redbubble + Teespring / Teepublic / Spreadshirt / Zazzle at the same time.

(Some platforms reset the 50/day upload limit at weird times, preventing you from truly uploading 50 per day)

Uploading was a breeze thanks to the Merch Titans Automation app.

Ultimately all of that lead to this.

2019 Redbubble Profit

Sales: 965
Revenue: 11,696.67
Profit: $2,665.48

Sorry for the image above not matching the numbers... I didn't see a way to sort from Jan 1 - Dec 31st on the Redbubble website.

The rest of my data images will be generated in Google Charts, so that I have full control over what's displayed.

Redbubble Revenue vs Royalty Breakdown

As artists, we don't really care too much about the revenue aspect... but it's interesting to see revenue side by side next to profit, to see which products have the most earning potential as a function of their cost.

This chart shows both: