How to Start a Print-on-Demand Business on Etsy in 2025

[00:00] if you're wanting to start an online business or a side hustle in 2025 print on demand is a great opportunity especially if you want to sell on Etsy or just want to have your own brand without holding any inventory then this

[00:13] could be a perfect option for you so in today's video I'm going to show you how I go about my design research and how I upload products from my printify account directly onto my Etsy shop for sale and if you're new to my channel hi I'm MAC I

[00:26] am a print on demand seller and have been since 2020 and I post lots of online on my channel so if any of that interests you I would love to have you

[00:38] Etsy so we're actually going to do a little bit of design research on Etsy before going right into this I'm going to show you with the example of St Patrick's Day St Patrick's Day is coming up in a few months and believe it or not

[00:53] people actually start searching for products before holidays so I'm filming this in the beginning of January but now is the time that you want to be posting St Patrick's Day and even like Easter listings or at least thinking about them

[01:05] holiday could be coming up but in this case it's St Patrick's day so I'm going to show you my research process but you can obviously swap out whatever it is your store and do exactly this process so I'm just going to go to the Etsy

[01:21] search bar and I'm going to type in St Patrick's Day and I'm going to do shirt same design for either of those products then I'm going to go to all filters and

[01:33] I'm going to go down to where it says start seller so that's going to filter out some sellers that are doing really well on Etsy but we're not done yet delete where it says star and we're going to type best Etsy doesn't let you

[01:48] filter bestsellers and buy their own filters anymore so that's like a little hack on how you can do that so now this is showing me the best sellers for the search term St Patrick's Day shirt so one of the first things I see here is

[02:01] this one here it shows that they have 58 sales and if I use my everb Chrome extension this is showing me that it might not have that many sales for this year yet but they have sold some of them and they're making revenue on it and

[02:13] note of also this design Style with the large alphabet letters with patterns behind them it seems to be something that's very very popular all over Etsy

[02:25] through different niches like if you search mama or you search nurse which are two really large searches on Etsy you'll see that this design style is actually going to right click copy image and then I'm going to go to canva and

[02:40] I'm just going to paste that here and I'll show you why I'm doing that in just I also came across this shirt which seemed to be selling really well for a popular saying I had to look this up but it's like a cheers in the Irish St

[02:56] Patrick's Day theme and I see that this is selling exceptionally well so I'm going to do the same thing copy image and then I'm going to paste that into my canva artboard as well and essentially what I'm doing here is I'm finding

[03:08] different design Styles or sayings that I can combine into my own design so I know that I like this lettering and I know that I like this word so I would combine these two designs and make a design of my own so I'm going to show

[03:20] you that process but first I'm going to find two others that I want to do the same with okay so here's my artboard I have two different shirts that I want to combine design Trends so this one here it says everyone loves an Irish girl but

[03:33] I like the design style of that so I want to take this word and create the that and then I'm going to do the same thing here where I'm going to use this that I'm working with here what I did is I actually got these cute letters from

[03:51] lucky blessed with these cute little letterings so I just used a creative Fabrica download which I'll show you it looks something like this creative Fabrica is an amazing online library for different Sellers and if you're doing

[04:07] then this is eligible for commercial and pod usage so I just used that and then imported the letters directly into my canva artboard so see I literally

[04:19] uploaded them as images and boom we have a design I do have that link below for is I just took this design Style with this word because I know that both of

[04:32] these are selling and I'm adding something new and valuable to the market for St Patrick's Day and if I even wanted to add a shamrock to this one because I know that this has a shamrock I absolutely

[04:46] could even change the colors to match this was the other design that I came up with as well both text based pretty simple designs I just did the word here and then added some Shamrocks on it to give that overall feel of what this

[04:59] design is portraying and then what this design says so that's the way that I do my um you know design research for combining Trends so now I'm going to go ahead and download both of my designs here and then we're going to go and

[05:11] upload them onto printify so on printify if you're not aware it's free to use onto your Etsy shop and you don't have to pay anything until you get an order

[05:23] on your printify account which is amazing and printify has so many different types of products to work with there's t-shirts there's sweatshirts all different things blankets um and especially for apparel sweatshirts and

[05:36] more creative but I'm going to show you on a t-shirt for this example so I'm have there's so many um the two that I really like to sell are going to be the

[05:51] Gilden 5000 it's a very classic print on demand shirt it's good every time it's very cheap and affordable um especially if you have a printy premium membership like I do it's literally $6 and then you can charge you know

[06:06] almost double that especially if you are paying for the shipping and you can make a better profit it's almost $2 cheaper than the normal price and then also another great option and loved by so many Sellers and Etsy buyers is the

[06:19] Bella canvas tea it's a little bit more expensive than the Gilden because the qualties just a tad better um and that's a bestseller as well so I'm going to go with that one so when you get to this page printify actually gives you a few

[06:32] options printify choice is going to give you um like top rated sellers you don't have to actually pick your exact provider but what some people don't realize with printify is they work with a lot of different fulfillment centers

[06:44] so printify is like the Hub of a ton of different providers you can see here to are located there's a provider for that so that you can get the fastest

[06:56] shipping possible to them so you can pick your own supplier if you want to or use whatever printify recommends for you my personal favorites for t-shirts are always going to be Monster Digital and Swift pod I find that they have really

[07:09] fast shipping they're reliable and their color options are good and I actually do usually go with swift pod because of all of the color options so I'm going to go ahead and click Start designing and then here's my artboard

[07:23] where I can upload my design so all I did was just drag and here that my design popped right up and is ready to go and then I'm just going to size it how big I want it and where I want it to be placed that looks good

[07:42] okay and then I can select my variants so variants are a fancy way of saying the colors and sizes for your products that you want to offer so on Etsy you can offer you know different colors and sizes for someone to choose like when

[07:55] they're checking out on the cart they can select size small with blue or size medium with gray it just depends so you're in control of what colors and sizes you want to offer on your store and then I'm going to do like a gray

[08:08] color as well and then I'm also going to do black and I want to offer a green of course for St Patrick's Day so I'm going to pick which one of these looks best

[08:20] with the color of the shirt I think Leaf is pretty um is pretty good there and then we can offer an maybe a darker green as well and then I'm going to go to preview and it's

[08:35] going to show me what that looks like on all the different colors of shirts that I'm choosing so I'm choosing military green white gray black and then two another green as well and something to keep in mind when you are doing this is

[08:50] on Etsy it's great to offer a ton of different colors and variants for your customers but I personally don't like to overwhelm people I find that when you have up to like 10 different colors it just gets confusing and I prefer to only

[09:05] offer up to five colors per listing I'd rather create an whole like separate listing than have a listing that has so many colors that people just can't decide and you only get 10 photos for your mockup um to show the products I

[09:20] something that I've learned along the way so once this looks good everything's lined up I have my color what I'm going to do is hit save product

[09:32] and it's going to bring me to the next step to upload this onto my Etsy shop so PRI will give you a ton of different mockups to choose from they'll give you because it's great to give a size chart for your customers on Etsy this is what

[09:48] it looks like and it helps you with not having unhappy customers if you give them a size chart to me um to measure before they make a purchase and then you can select which mockups you want want to integrate right over to your Etsy

[10:01] shop so you have up to 10 that you can upload so I like to make sure that I give a pretty good show of what the flatlay looks like this is an example of a flatlay and then it's always good to show the product on someone with someone

[10:15] wearing the product so here's an example here like it just shows how the product looks and that's something that you should want to show but sometimes these mockups aren't exactly what you'll be looking for especially if you're selling

[10:27] for a specific Niche or in this this case a holiday so pry actually just made the best integration ever I'm actually so excited about this if you follow my Channel or you know anything about me you know that I am obsessed with playet

[10:42] mockups I've used playet mockups since my very first print on demand store in 2020 and PR IFI just added them to their platform which is so cool because you used to actually have to go to place it which is still fine um but you used to

[10:58] have to like go here here create a mockup download it go back over to Etsy upload your mockup but printify just integrated with them so you can do that directly when you're doing the upload process which like thank you printify

[11:12] thank you pleas it I'm actually really really excited about this so you will have to log in I'm already logged in here but I'm going to give you an example of how this works you don't have to do this it's just optional and it's

[11:24] actually something that is really beneficial so I'm going to show you what it would look like if you did choose to do this so it already is showing my design on all the variants of products right and here I can choose the color of

[11:38] the shirt that I want the mockup for and then I can do filter out by gender age ethnicity all different things um I'm going to do the black shirt and I'm going to search for

[11:52] t-shirt and then I'm GNA get a bunch of different t-shirt mockups so see how this mockup is a lot more flattering than like this flatlay you know it just looks a little bit better and tends to sell better on Etsy when you can kind of

[12:05] make like a connection and it doesn't look as blah and it also helps you stand out when you have mockups that aren't as um you know just plain it doesn't mean they're bad but they're just a little bit more plain and photos are everything

[12:18] on Etsy so I'm just going to go through here and pick out some mockups that I want to use so I'm just going to choose this one to show you I can hit edit and move it around if I'd like to get it to the exact way that I want it and then I

[12:30] can hit select mockup and it'll upload it with my products see how it just popped up over here for me and then I can do that and filter out for women if I want a woman wearing the shirt and then if I want to change out

[12:43] leaf select mockup and it'll go over and of course you can do this accordingly to who you feel your target audience is cuz again mockup photos are something that

[12:56] you want to kind of match with who exactly you're trying to sell the I'm going to hit save selection and continue on with my listing so this is

[13:08] where you can input all of your information for a successful listing the price for your products I like to edit my title and my description later on in Etsy after I do a little bit of SEO research um but I'm going to show

[13:24] you how I go about with the pricing situation for my print on demand product show you how I would go about doing that so if you're not familiar with Etsy it

[13:36] shows here that after October 1st they made it known that any time a seller is charging more than $6 for shipping meaning that the customer would have to pay over $6 for shipping that they're not prioritizing those listings in

[13:50] Search and obviously if we're selling on Etsy we want to stand out against competition and we want Etsy to prioritize our search so two that you can do is number one don't charge your customer for shipping you can offer free

[14:03] shipping we know that everyone loves free shipping on Etsy and in my five years of experience I've learned that when I give free shipping on listings they do just sell better I know that it doesn't look as sexy of a price when

[14:16] you're scrolling but it does have that free shipping badge um and people get annoyed when I mean I'm sure you've experienced this before where you go to check out and you thought an item was a certain price and then you see the tax

[14:28] the shipping and you abandon your car so I prefer to offer free shipping that's just my word of advice for you I prefer that over a free shipping guarantee I do think that well I know that it cuts into my profit right but I have found to

[14:44] prefer to offer free shipping and then work on order volume verse order profit quantity if that makes sense so I'm going to toggle on free shipping and it's telling me that yes I'm going to have to pay for the cost and then right

[14:57] down here this is where I would do the price for my product so I can see each size and color variant and I can see the price at retail price which means the price that you'd be selling it on at on Etsy and then the profit meaning what

[15:12] you would make after production cost plus shipping plus Etsy fee so printify breaks all this down for you which is so helpful because honestly like if you don't understand how much you're profiting print on

[15:28] demand can become something that confuses the heck out of you so whatever your production price plus your shipping price is so in this case our production cost is around $11.40 plus our shipping cost was around

[15:43] $4.75 so if I round that to $12 and $5 we're at $17 give or take for our t-shirt production cost which means we have to charge more than $17 to our Etsy customers so that we make a profit when

[16:00] we buy that product from printify because we're going to buy that product from printify when someone buys it on our store and that money is not going to need to take your customer's money that they paid you and then pay printify and

[16:15] keep your profit in between so as I said we need to charge more than $17 to make a profit now on top of that we have our Etsy fee which is around $3

[16:27] well 268 but I'm just generously rounding here um rounding up so that we don't miss out on any extra coins here but so then 17 18 19 20 so we need to

[16:39] charge realistically more than $20 for us to make a profit so for this t-shirt right we're seeing okay what can we charge for that to make a profit that a customer will still purchase at so I'm going to price this at $26 because

[16:54] that's showing me that I'm making around a $7 profit um and I don't feel that that's a super high price something that I want to talk about with pricing really that people get really tripped up on is your price at the end of the day does

[17:11] not matter as much as you might think what really matters is your design somebody is going to be looking for for that Niche or Trend or holiday whatever

[17:24] it is that you're designing for let's think about for a moment something that you've wanted really bad a t-shirt right maybe a sweatshirt you see in a store were in the market for people will always pay for what they want if they

[17:39] mean that not to price competitively no it just means don't emphasize on your price nearly as much as you emphasize the research for the design and product

[17:52] that you're selling and I don't want to talk too much about that I'm going to the description if you want to learn more about that but basically what I'm only making $7 but okay then I'm charging $30 like charge what you feel

[18:11] is a decent amount of profit for this item ideally with print on demand products because you know we have printify shipping and printing it for us our profit margin is not going to be as high as somebody who holds inventory and

[18:25] creates the products on their own so you want to aim for any between a 15 to a 30% profit margin honestly with print on demand products it's going to be more towards 15 to 20% that looks good um but just keep that in mind with this on here

[18:40] and PR ify does have a beautiful profit calculator that you can move over to settings and I'm going to select hide and store what that does is it's going

[18:52] to make it so that when we upload this onto our Etsy shop that it goes to our drafts and doesn't go live already for our customers to purchase because then here you can go ahead but we haven't done our title yet so I'm going to make

[19:07] to go directly over to my Etsy shop so after a few minutes as you can see in my FC drafts that this did just pop up ready for me to start finishing my

[19:20] listing so the first thing I wanted to talk about was my title now with SEO it stands for search engine optimization what you want to do do is create a title that has highly searched for keywords but they're relevant to your product so

[19:38] are everb and e- rank and essentially what they'll do is tell me what the search volume is for a specific term also how much competition is going to be

[19:51] with that search term so honestly for your title your very first thing that you put in your title is what is be called your longtail keyword and which is also going to be what's considered an exact match keyword meaning that the

[20:05] product is as you say so what I would use for my exact match keyword in this case would either be the phrase that's on the T-shirt or St Patrick's Day t-shirt so I'm going to do St Patrick's Day t-shirt comma followed by some other

[20:24] keywords so for the t-shirt that I was referencing in the beginning on the be Chrome extension as I said we see it's making sales so I'm going to look at the words that are in here so it says women's lucky shirt St Patrick's Day

[20:37] shirt cute St Patrick's Day funny Irish shirt so I can take some of the terms from this listing and put them in my title because I know that these types of keywords are working for this listing so if I wanted to check the phrase that I'm

[20:50] using on there I would just type it in and hit search and then we could see if there's a search volume for that specific word so I can see that there's not a super high search search volume for this product but when I scroll down

[21:04] it actually does have a pretty high key score on here because there's not as ton of competition as there would be for another search term like St Patrick's Day so what I'm going to do is take slain Irish I'm sorry if I'm saying that

[21:17] [Music] wrong Irish shirt now I'm not going to keep repeating the same phrases in my title so like t-shirt I'm not going to

[21:30] repeat but I can put shirt or I can put te shirt and do different spellings continue this process and come up with the title for my shirt okay so here's

[21:42] the title that I came up with St Patrick's Day t-shirt slint Irish shirt lucky Shamrock tea for women cute St Patrick's Day top wom St Patty's Day so see how I've hit a few popular keyword searches but I'm also not repeating

[21:56] myself too much so that um Etsy can take a bunch of those different keywords to use in my SEO then for my description I can make this a little bit better by just adding some different keywords in here essentially printify gives you what

[22:08] is a template for what you should use in your description because it's telling you all different parts about this actual product something that you can do is copy and paste this into chat GPT so I'm going to say can you just make this

[22:22] in a few keywords or even copy and paste some of them from my title directly in

[22:38] there next I'm going to scroll down and make sure that everything looks good and then I can add in some tags to also help with the SEO of my product again I would just grab those from my everb Chrome extension so I would do the same exact

[22:52] thing that I've been doing taking a look at these popular best-selling listings using this and then I can scroll down and it'll show me exactly which tags they're using so I see here this one says Clover shirt Irish shirt Irish

[23:05] sweatshirt and then depending on which one you you or click on you can take certain keywords from there that they have so they using fourleaf Clover and you can actually copy these directly see here and paste them into your Etsy

[23:18] listing but I recommend taking them from multiple listings not just one you don't want to just use the same exoct listing and like take all the stuff from it you title all my colors my price and then my description here and then um like I said

[23:37] refresh it see I just refreshed it here and then I can pick which one of these I want for my first image so maybe I want this one and then followed by the white

[23:49] and honestly your mockup images should be something that you take a lot of time for you but essentially this is what your listing should look like so here's a beautiful we have the design there our title looks good um and this is what a

[24:06] customer would see if we went ahead and made this design live so regardless of what product or Niche or holiday you're selling for you can follow this exact process that I just showed you by creating products on your printy account

[24:19] please let me know by leaving a comment and a like and if you have any questions leave them below I also want to say that everything I talked about in this video check any of it out again um printify is free to sign up for and that is there as

[24:37] well and I do have a link for Etsy if you don't have your Etsy Shop set up yet you can get 40 of your first listings for free meaning that you save that 20 cents a listing every time so that will be below for you as well thank you so

[24:50] much for watching and I hope to see you in the next video