---
title: 'How to Start a Print-on-Demand Etsy Shop: Step-by-Step Method'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=16YZH2M5AUk'
video_id: '16YZH2M5AUk'
date: 2026-07-12
duration_sec: 1798
---

# How to Start a Print-on-Demand Etsy Shop: Step-by-Step Method

> Source: [How to Start a Print-on-Demand Etsy Shop: Step-by-Step Method](https://youtube.com/watch?v=16YZH2M5AUk)

## Summary

This video provides a step-by-step guide to starting a print-on-demand Etsy shop, covering niche selection, product research, design creation, listing optimization, and pricing. The creator shares his 6 years of experience to help viewers build a profitable Etsy business.

### Key Points

- **Choose a Niche** [00:46] — Pick a specific target customer (e.g., book lovers, coffee lovers) to focus your designs and increase sales.
- **Research Best Sellers** [01:59] — Use Etsy search and tools like Everbee to find popular products with 'best seller' or 'popular now' badges. Observe trends without copying.
- **Combine Ideas** [04:03] — Take inspiration from two best-selling items to create a unique listing. For example, combine a popular phrase with a trending design style.
- **Select Print-on-Demand Supplier** [06:03] — Use Printify (free) to choose products like sweatshirts. Popular options include Gildan 1800 and Comfort Colors 1566. Choose DTG printing for complex designs.
- **Design with Kittl** [08:18] — Use Kittl to create designs with text and graphics. Export as transparent PNG with correct dimensions for the product.
- **Sync Printify with Etsy** [11:10] — Connect your Etsy shop to Printify, upload the design, select colors and sizes, and generate mockups.
- **Optimize Title and Tags** [14:03] — Use Printify's AI or research best sellers to create a concise title with relevant keywords. Etsy prefers shorter, clean titles.
- **Set Pricing** [18:17] — Calculate profit by subtracting production cost from your price. Use Printify's suggested price and check competitors' actual prices (not just homepage display).
- **Create Engaging Mockups** [22:33] — Use AI tools like Kittl's smart board or Placeit to create lifestyle mockups that catch buyers' attention. Replace basic Printify photos.
- **Publish and Scale** [28:23] — After finalizing, publish the listing. Repeat the process to build multiple listings. Orders are automatically fulfilled by Printify.

### Conclusion

By following this step-by-step method—niche selection, research, design, listing optimization, and pricing—you can create a profitable print-on-demand Etsy shop with minimal risk.

## Transcript

for sale on Etsy. This is something I've been doing for years, and it's a main source of income for me, and the idea of print-on-demand I'm going to show you my step-by-step method. We're going to go over
everything from how to find our products, how to list them for sale on our Etsy shop. We'll go over pricing, photos, designing, all the good stuff that you really need to know. So, go ahead and follow along with me. Save
this for later so you can go back to it, and feel free to take notes because it's get right into it. And my name is Matt. If you're new here, I make videos online, and I've been an Etsy seller for 6 years now, which is crazy. But, I'm
community here on YouTube. All right, let's go ahead and get right into it. The number one thing that is going to change the way that you sell on Etsy is figure out who you want to sell to. The last thing that you should do is go to
Etsy with [music] no idea and just start creating things. We want our time to actually matter, and we want to actually make money from this. So, my best advice is to pick a person to sell to. Pick a niche or a type of design. So, for
example, let's say something that you really enjoy is reading. There is a whole bookish niche on Etsy that sells products to people who like to read. Same for coffee lovers. Same for people who like really girly items. If you're
in a profession like nursing or doctors, or you're really into sports, these are all things that can narrow down a person that you'd want to sell to, meaning our target customer. I don't want you to overthink this, but I do want you to
have an idea of what you're doing and what you're creating for before you just is optimized. [music] So, here I am on Etsy, and what I'm going to do first is I'm going to type in the niche that I want to sell to. I
am going to do the bookish or book lover trend. And if you're not sure, you can interested in, or just take a look at what they're pushing on their catalog to go ahead and get started. So, I'm going to type in book lover, and right off the
up to me. And you'll also notice that there are some analytics here. That is from an Everbee Chrome extension that I use for research. We'll talk about that do is just click on gift. It has 6,400 monthly searches, meaning that people
are actively looking for products that are for book lovers as a gift. Right off the bat here, I can see two important things. I can see a best seller badge, and I can see a popular now badge. That means people are actively buying
products that are listed under book lover gift, but while also, what are are sweatshirts. So, automatically in my mind, I think, "Okay, now I'm going to
sell a sweatshirt. That's my product right there." Now, [music] when doing you an example of things that you're constantly seeing are best sellers and popular now are going to be things that you'd want to move forward with versus
something that does not maybe have a best seller badge, save that for later. We want to make things that we know will sell. Now, what I'm doing here is I'm simply just observing. I am not going to be copying anyone. That is not what I'm
encouraging you to do, but we're observing what's already working in the market. The importance to this is that when we're selling on a marketplace like Etsy, we need to actually put [music] products in front of the buyers that
that they're [music] interested in, right? And that's actually not as hard as it may seem because we already have a full library of data right here. We
already have a library of Etsy telling us what people are buying, so we want to take note of that and add something new and valuable to the market with our own creativity. So, what I like to do is I like to pick two specific best-selling
from both of them to create a winning listing. Now, I really like this sweatshirt here. It says "Will yap about books." It has a popular now badge. It's light pink and then has literally no designing involved. It just says "Will
can easily create even without design experience. So, I'm going to take note come back to it and remember it. Also, I see a phrase "I bought my Kindle just in
at this and taking notes. I also really like this saying here, "Just one more ch favorite this one because this is something that I also want to take
take inspiration from, not copy, inspiration, and favorite them. Now, one note here, this listing actually has 153 monthly sales and it's only been up for
6 months. Now, I'm using my Everbee Chrome extension data to see this and $5,000 in revenue a month at it only [music] 6 months old. So, people are
loving this sweatshirt. It's priced at $33 and we can see a lot of information dips that it's had, we can see how much revenue dips it's had, and all data
involved. We can also see all of the different keywords that this person is using to get the reach possible. These are called Etsy tags, which more on those later, but overall, this Chrome extension gives me a lot of data that I
can use in my research process and I do highly recommend having something like Going back to this listing as well that says "Will yap about books," it's not as successful, but it seems to be popular. So, that's kind of telling me that I
with the saying "Will yap about books." Who knows? We're going to keep looking, look for things, and then we'll take it into the next step, which is designing
our product. After research, I have some favorites that I'm inspired by to design. So, what I'm going to do next is go over to my print-on-demand supplier to pick the actual product, in this case sweatshirt, that I want to sell on my
Etsy shop. Now, I say sweatshirt because that's the product I kept seeing, but you want to sell. And Printify is free to use. You can sync it with an Etsy shop for [music] free. You're only going to pay as you get an order on your sale
for that production cost. [music] So, it's pretty much risk-free to try out feel like you have to be very meticulous of what you pick. You can absolutely try going to go to women's clothing and go to sweatshirts and decide which
sweatshirt it is that I want to sell. Two of the best sellers that I have experienced success with, and when I went to Amplified this past year [music] and actually worked alongside the Printify team, we were told that both
the Gildan 1800 sweatshirt and the Comfort Colors 1566 are very popular. Gildan. What you're going to do is go down here, and there's [music] three
different options. You'll see there's DTF, DTG, and embroidery. I'm going to choose DTG, which is a traditional method of printing. It means direct-to-garment, and that's how the ink is going to be pressed into the
just two things that you have here. Embroidery's best for simple and text-based designs, and then DTG is great for more complex. When you're start designing here or manually choose your print-on-demand supplier. Printify
reason I'm having you do this is because here is where you can get design dimensions, which are important for when you actually start designing. You want correct for your actual print on demand product or at least close dimensions to
customer. So, I'm going to take these design dimensions and then go over to my designing platform and create my art board. So, now I'm going to go over to is a design platform that I absolutely love. It has quickly become my most used
design platform and I really like it. And so, I have a lot of tutorials about create a design so we can kind of follow along here. [music] I'm going to click new project and then here's where I'm going to type in those dimensions. And
now we can go ahead and start creating [music] a design that is actually sized for that listing. So, as I mentioned, I want to do something with the text will add a headline on here and [music] type will yap about
books. Just keep that there. I usually start my designs with text [music] because it's the easiest way. And then I'm going to change my font style. There's a lot of different fonts available on Kittl. I like to go to the
handmade section cuz it has more of a feel for the types of things that I like >> [music] >> and it will give you lots of options for fonts. So, I like this one here. It says will yap about books and I'm going to
keep the typeface like this. I could also like move it around, but I feel like this one will yap about books. Okay, perfect. Over here on the left, you can think of. I can type in book and some book stuff will come up. I could
type in the word coquette or anything I'm looking for. Stars, bows. I was noticing a lot of the stuff on Etsy that [music] was selling had these books with flowers on them. So, they really have everything you can think of for designs.
sell for this niche. So, I'm going to bring in maybe some stars and maybe a bow and just keep it very girly. Okay, now I have some graphics to work with. So, I'm just going to kind of bring them in, [music] see where they might fit. I
like this one here. I'm going to duplicate [music] this, bring it over here. I do have a full Kittl design tutorial that I will link below for you cuz I know that learning to design can be a bit intimidating, but Kittl
actually [music] makes it very easy and they have a lot of different things you can do like AI and so much more. So, I will leave a tutorial if you're really But, essentially I'm just grabbing text and I'm taking [music] different
elements and then incorporating it all into the design. All right, I have my full design here. It's very simple, very dainty and cute like the other designs tutorials which I will link below for you. But, overall this is just an
example. So, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up here to export. I'm going to hit remove background. Make sure that the correct artboard is selected and then I'm going to download this as a transparent PNG. After you've
print-on-demand product to list on your Etsy store. [music] Now, with Printify as I mentioned, it is free for us to design this on our Printify store and
then to upload it to Etsy. If you are not an Etsy seller yet and you don't have an Etsy account, no worries at all. It takes just a few minutes to set up actually save some money when starting out. Normally, Etsy charges 20 cents per
listing meaning that this design I put on this sweatshirt would cost us 20 that link and get 40 for free. Once your Etsy account is set up and it's live,
you can sync it very easily to a free Printify account as well. These are just a few simple steps and it shows you the whole process once you go on Printify to sync your shop as soon as you create your account. So, very easy steps and
which would be what I'm about to do here. So, I've already selected the going to upload the design that I just created on this sweatshirt. So, as you
can see, boom, it's sized perfectly because we did that earlier and then I can also pick the colors [music] and size variants that I want to offer in my shop. So, I can just go through here and see what colors look good, what
colors don't, and what I want to offer in my store. I know I want to be light pink and also offer white and maybe we can offer a black as well. Now, I'm colorways, so beautiful. And this is what's called a mock-up. So, this is a
mock-up of the actual product that our customer will receive if they order from however you want. If you want to add multiple prints, that's also an option,
here and download this mock-up and I'm going to do that for all three of my colors and more on that later, but I'm going to show you why that's important actually start uploading it to Etsy. [music]
Printify and it is a few steps that you'll have to do. This is important because you can't upload anything unless your store is actually connected. So, Printify over to Etsy seamlessly. Now, this is where you can select more
mock-ups for your product. Printify has it pretty easy to use here, but essentially when you select one, you can then check them off if you'd like to if you want to right now, grab these ones because they can be useful on your
that are like already being worn because we're going to make better mock-ups. But then I am going to grab this size chart here so that people know what sizes to save selection and it's going to bring us to the next step, which is for our
title and description for our product. Now, this is where a lot of people get caught up because this is how we're going to get traffic to our Etsy [music] shop, right? Our titles and tags need to be relevant to the product we're selling
so that we can actually get [music] sales. If we don't give Etsy the correct know who to put our product in front of. So, to create a title is very important for the actual, you know, success of our listing. Now, this is something that a
lot of people overthink, but we don't need to overcomplicate it. We just need options with this. You can use Printify's optimize listing option, which is really great. I'm going to select that and here it will say to
optimize the listing and you can type in some things about your listing that are relevant. So, my relevant is pink coquette sweatshirt for book lovers will yap about books, okay? Then I'm going to hit generate and what this is going to
do is it's actually going to use its AI to give you a fully designed title, description, and keywords for your product. I do like to use this and hit
apply listing because this is like an AI that's for free. Printify gives you 10 availabilities to do that for free a day and I would encourage you to try it out. We are going to add more to our title to make sure that it's very optimized for
you want to just use that to get started, totally fine. All this can be edited later on in Etsy. Now, something else you can do to get some keywords is to go back and look at those different sweatshirts that are selling. This is a
best-selling sweatshirt. It's 20 hearts. It's really popular, and we can see the sweatshirt, book lover sweatshirt, teacher book lover sweatshirt. I don't also incorporate in my listing. So, on my listing, we say "Will yap about books
sweatshirt, pink coquette book lover design." I'm actually going to take out design and type book lover gift, because that's a keyword that I'm seeing in a lot of the titles for the bestsellers. So, "Will yap about books sweatshirt,
embroidered crewneck custom sweatshirt, merch book club shirt." There's another thing I can use. Book club shirt, okay? And these are a few keywords that are
consistent with what the product is that I'm selling. Now, you don't have to repeat a ton of keywords here. Like, I've already used book and books, right? I've already used book gift, book shirt, book club. These are all things. You
don't have to overdo it in your Etsy title. Etsy actually released a statement that they prefer shorter, clean, and concise titles that actually showcase what you're selling. And I feel like with this, we've given enough
coquette bow on it. It's a book lover gift and a book club shirt. Maybe I can add in one more thing if I keep looking on here. Cute book lover sweatshirt, bookworm, bookish merch, reader, okay. Girly top. So, I'm just taking note. I'm
a minute. So, book nerd, book themed gifts. So, I'm just using all of this add the word cute. So, book cute book club shirt. And I think that looks
pretty solid. I can always add it on later. Then, for my description, Printify already input that for me. It also gives a lot of product features. I don't like to have all of these here. I'm just going to delete a few of these.
I feel like it's a lot. Okay. Has the care instructions. Okay, perfect. We can add to this later. Okay, awesome. And then our tags were already put in for us. And like I said, that Printify does actually use data. They use eRank data,
which is another Chrome extension, to get these keywords. So, they're not coming from anywhere. You can absolutely keep these or change them out. I'm going have to delete one. You get 13 tags on Etsy. So, again, it's just like extra
keywords to tell Etsy what to sell. Then for shipping. So, shipping with print on demand, your print supplier is who ships your product. And very important, but also something that a lot of people get tripped up on, because you do have to
have to pay for their shipping. So, if you're going to offer free shipping on your item, keep that in mind, because it is going to factor in with the product cost. Now, for product cost, that's where we lead to pricing. I like to
click this button here that says quick overview. This shows you what the suggested price for your item is when selling, okay? If I hit optimize, it's telling me that I should sell this product for $3.99 up until $47.99. Now,
it's giving me a variant there, because I am offering my sweatshirt in different sizes. So, let me show you this very quickly. When we were actually making our design, when we hit variants, it offers in a lot of different sizes. This
goes up to 4XL. Obviously, larger products are going to cost more. So, our 4XL is why it's giving us that double pricing. I'm going to actually just select these off. I find 3XL and 4XL are not as popular when purchased on Etsy,
but I can absolutely accommodate if someone wants to buy that size, just by But for right now, we're just going to have a 2XL as the biggest size. So, that way the pricing is a little bit easier to understand, especially if you're a
pricing goes from $37 to $43. $43 meaning that would be the most expensive for the 2XL. [music] So, here I go. Now, I'm ready. It has my estimated profit at
$16 and $17, meaning that if someone purchases my product, this is how much going to make off of that. If I were to check off free shipping, meaning the
buyer pays for the shipping. Now, you can see that my profit did drop significantly, but I'm still making a profit. However, keeping in mind that more for this item, but offer free shipping, but technically the customer
leave free shipping off, optimize this, and leave it at around $39. On the table view here, it shows you everything. So, this will show you profit margins. It will show you your Etsy fees and all in between. I encourage you to take a few
minutes when doing this to figure out how to price your item and just understand profit versus revenue. When someone purchases your item from Etsy, they're paying you, but you have to pay your print supplier first to fulfill
that item for you, okay? So, you do want to charge more than your production price to make a profit. In simple terms, if your product cost from Printify is $15, you have to charge more than $15, so that when you pay Printify after your
customer buys your item, you still make a profit. So, if our production cost is 15, we want to charge like $30, so that after we pay Printify, we still have a profit in between. I can also go over here and see what people are charging.
This sweatshirt here is selling very well and they're charging $46 for it. through and see what people are actually charging. And then when you're doing this, if you see, like for instance, this one says it's only $23, go ahead
and select a color and a random size and then see how the price will change. This is called price gouging and a lot of people do it on Etsy, okay? So, no, it's not actually $23. This sweatshirt's actually $37, okay? So, your price
else's Etsy listings on the homepage are a lot cheaper than mine." Make sure that you click it and do that because I just saw, like here's another example, it will drastically change. selection option, okay? This one has it
the same price. If I hit add to cart and then go to my cart, you'll see that they're charging for shipping and their actual price is around $32, okay? So, these are all things that can take into consideration and not skip out on with
price that's being shown on the actual homepage. Now, the next step is to publish. I'm going to click this button that says hide in store and then I'm going to hit publish. This is because this won't go live on Etsy yet and
there's still some edits that I want to make before I tell Etsy that my my going to go over to our Etsy shop and I'll show you where to find your product. Under your shop manager and listings, this is where your product
will show up. Now, disclaimer, because I hit hide in store, if you do this too, your listing is going to show up under draft, okay? As you can see, I click draft, boom, there's my listing ready to go. Now, our listing is pretty much
almost ready to be live, but what we're going to do quickly is grab some photos photos, but essentially when you're scrolling on Etsy, here's a perfect
example, this image catches your eye, right? It's something that somebody would want to buy. It's not just a basic photo. Now, there's nothing wrong with the photos that Printify gave us, but is that going to stop anyone's scroll?
engaging photo. So, there's a few ways to do this. Now, on Etsy, you can case, that would be the Gildan sweatshirt, followed by the word
their mock-ups because there is a lot that are actually taken of the physical product, and then you would bring this image into your Kittl design, and then a whole bundle of the different colors that you could use, and then you would
just place your design there, and then use this as your product image. There's also a website called placeit.net that I like as well. They have a lot of for plus mock-up. You choose one that you like, you upload your design, get it
to where about it looks on yours, then you change the color of the sweatshirt, then there's also an option through Kittl. So, remember earlier when I told
you to save your actual product photo? That's because my new favorite way to make mock-ups is using AI. And I know that a lot of people don't like to use AI, but personally, I find it to be so helpful and save me a lot of time. So,
what I'm going to do is create another artboard in Kittl. I'm going to make this one 3,000 by 2250 pixels. That's because that's the standard size for an Etsy photo. And then I'm going to drag in the mock-up that we made earlier,
right? That basic mock-up of the pink sweatshirt. Okay? I'm just going to make So, what I'm going to do is remove the background, so it's just my sweatshirt. Okay, I got rid of the white background. Make sure to do that. Make it as large
as you can. Then select your artboard and click add smartboard. We're now going to use AI and give it a prompt to make a mock-up for us. I'm going to say, "Take this sweatshirt and make a mock-up of it.
Keep the design and color the same. Have the sweatshirt be folded and placed.
Okay, and then hit go. So, you can use any type, literally any type of prompt up with that prompt?" I've been doing this for a long time. A great hack is to
actually use ChatGPT to get your prompt to use for your mockup photo. There's a ChatGPT section in Kittle, so you can actually talk to it directly in your Kittle artboard. Um I've used this for lots of things, as you can tell. What
I'm going to do is just say, "Can you give me prompts for clean Etsy mockup photos for my sweatshirt?" And it will give you some prompts. Okay, so as
that's working over here, you can see how beautiful I This is why I love this so much. I feel like you can get the most amazing mockups doing this actual method, and you can make multiple smart boards off of your image. So, I can
create multiple mockups just like this, and this is such a hack, honestly. Like, prompts from ChatGPT. So, I'm just going to input that, and you can make multiple
and put them directly onto our Etsy listing. Also, when I have one that I like, I can add a smart board off of it and then say, "Make the sweatshirt
white," so that we can create [music] for multiple colors. And this is how do that, I will leave a link for Kittle, along with a discount code as well. Kittle does have a free plan that you can try this out with. You do get free
AI credits, but the AI credits credits are limited. So, if you do end up designing on Kittle, using this for your mockups, there is a code there for 25% off of any paid plan. And then I'm just going to go ahead and quick export all
of these smart boards for my images. And then I can go right back to Etsy and see that these are just much more interesting than this photo, right? Like
it's good, but one of these as our first thumbnail image has a better chance of getting someone's attention and selling. Let me know if you would like to see a video of me fully creating mockups like this. I'd love to make one and actually
give like prompts for you to use. I can include the prompts in the description of this video to be helpful as well of the ones that I used, but essentially where our pink image like this went, but [music] good news, we still have it. So
now we have some images and I'm just going to preview my listing before I make it go live. So it's $39.99, my title looks great, all my photos came in, my colors and sizes are all correct. And this is just an example of what my
listing would look like to a potential buyer. And as you can see, this took me time. Take your time with this. Make sure everything looks good. But this one is is an example of a ready Etsy listing. And I have to go back and get
Printify as well or create your own size chart, too. But overall, this looks beautiful and it's ready to be posted for sale on Etsy. So once I hit publish
listings. We can then see what it looks like live on Etsy. So let's hit view on Etsy and look how beautiful this looks. I mean, honestly, I would stop for this image. It looks beautiful. We'll yap about books and it's ready to go. So
what will happen now is you can continue this process of posting all these listings and listing them on your Etsy shop. And what will happen is when you get an order, Printify will actually print it up, pack it, and ship it
directly to your customer, cuz all of this is inputted, and it's all synced below, because I'm sure you're wondering about any marketing techniques, maybe
more SEO or mock-up or design tutorials. So, all that will be listed in the leaving a comment. And if you want to join my program, I did just open it.
It's been in the works for a while. It's a step-by-step Etsy program that has everything that I just showed you all laid out, but also from the beginning stages of actually signing up for Etsy, signing up for Printify, syncing your
shop, everything and all in the in between up until a successful shop. So, possible right now for the launch price. So, grab it while you can with an step-by-step from me, and there's lots of different tutorials in there. But,
it by liking the video and subscribing to the channel if you want more videos and I'll see you in the next video. Happy selling.