Selling t-shirts online is a great way of earning passive income.
I constantly see people doubting it as a method of earning passive income on Facebook groups & Reddit threads, but as evidenced by my income reports, it appears to still be viable. Most people are looking for an excuse to give up!
What's amazing is how you don't even need design skills anymore! Web browser based design tools are popping up left and right that rival Adobe Photoshop in their functionality - and many are free!
Oh and did I mention that you don't need to hold inventory!
That's right - you can dropship your print on demand (POD) t-shirt sales by outsourcing the work to fulfillment partners that have millions of dollars invested in their stock + printing machines.
My favorite part is that if you integrate everything correctly, then you're only responsible for creating & publishing products - everything else is outsourced!
Whether you intent to sell t-shirts at a profit for some side income or want to start your own brand of merchandise, it's truly never been easier to do.
Best Print On Demand Sites
Printful is my print on demand production parter of choice, for various reasons that I've outlined in previous articles:
- Printful Hat Embroidery Multi-Color Designs
- Printful Sales Tax Update
- Printful vs Printify For Etsy
- Optimizing T-Shirt Designs For Hats
- How to Upload Printful Products
- Selling Printful's Customizable Embroidered Hats
I am also actively using additional services like Amazon Merch to sell Prime eligible t-shirts at no cost to me, as Merch simply lets you upload designs to products & collect royalties on your sales at the end of the month.
Amazon Merch was my introduction to print on demand, and I think it's a perfect way of getting your first taste of designing custom shirts for sale online without inventory.
The more you sell, the more shirts you're allowed to list on Amazon, the world's largest online marketplace. Sound too good to be true? I thought so too!
Eventually I found out about Gearbubble and realized I could upload my existing designs onto more products than were available through the Merch by Amazon program, so I opened an account & took advantage.
It worked out perfectly for me, because I already had an Amazon seller account that I was using to sell Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) products under my own private label brand.
Gearbubble's dropshipping program integrates with Pro Amazon Seller accounts ($39.99/mo) easily via API so that you can get started listing print on demand products (after you get a GTIN exemption). Once every 24 hours Gearbubble will download your GB + Amazon integration sales and fulfill them to your customer.
You have to keep a credit card on file with them to cover the base cost & shipping cost for any product you sell.Whatever is left after Gearbubble costs + Amazon order fees (+ advertising fees) is your profit!
When they download your sales from Amazon, you receive an email. If you sell a ton of products in a day, the result if something similar to what you see above(that I took from my personal email inbox). That was a VERY good day of sales, to say the least :)
In 2018, I uploaded over 10,000 fulfilled by merchant (FBM) print on demand products to Amazon via the Gearbubble integration!
For the most part, I sell coffee mugs & shot glasses, with the occasional pillow case. I know jewelry is also a big seller for many people using Gearbubble as well.
Things were going great, but they eventually got even better!
This is becuase one day I found out about the Printful + Etsy integration, and how it could be used to do exactly what I was using Gearbubble + Amazon for.
The best part about Printful is that where Gearbubble comes with a monthly fee, Printful is completely FREE.
On top of that, my top three additional favorite things about Printful include:
- Their user interface (UI) for designing products & managing orders is world class
- They offer volume discounts - the more you sell, the higher % off you get the following month
- The dynamic shipping options are AMAZING - I charge my customers flat rate shipping & fulfill using dynamic shipping, often yielding around $2 in additional profit
I could go on, but like I mentioned earlier - I've published quite a few articles in the past where I talk about why Printful is such a good fit for my business selling shirts onlin without holding inventory.
One last thing (I can't help myself) - I REALLY fell in love with Printful when I sold over $15,000 of custom embroidered hats via the Etsy & Amazon integrations in August 2018 (click to view the income report)
Your print on demand site of choice is an extension of you & your business, so choose wisely!
Dropshipping T-Shirts With Printful
I recently made a YouTube video walking through how easily you can design dropshipped t-shirts using Printful's wizard & publish them to your eCommerce website of choice.
If you have a personal website with decent traffic & you want to sell merch, it integrates with platforms like Shopify also.
I'm going to play around with launching a store using Ecwid (via Printful integration) soon as well for my website that I built in college that gets 200,000+ monthly visitors in hopes to monetize it more than just Amazon affiliates & Google AdSense.
But back to the point - Printful has a large (& constantly expanding) assortment of men's & women's POD shirts that you can customize
My personal favorite shirt to print on is the Gildan 64000 Unisex Softstyle that has a base cost of $8.95, looks & feels great, and customers LOVE.
I also made a YouTube video that goes more in-depth about why I believe this is the primary shirt in your consideration to be sold online:
They offer all kinda of t-shirts, tank tops, sweatshirts, and hoodies that are perfect for starting a brand or selling a funny/trending design to customers.
You can even create custom all-over prints, or have designs embroidered onto the shirts!
Once you decide what product(s) to push to your online store, you can stand out from the competition & increase the likelihood of a clickthrough by using the mockup generator which will dynamically generate images of your POD products as if they were taken with a camera in real life.
Check out these Printful coffee mug mockups:
Don't lie - you know you're impressed :)
You're not limited to just clothing, there's also a variety of accessories that can be printed to.
There's no excuse not to start your print on demand business selling dropshipped custom t-shirts -get started today NOW - you won't regret it!
