How to Start a Print-on-Demand Shop on Etsy with Gelato

[00:00] start a print on demand shop selling on Etsy. You can sell unique products and have exposure to millions of people on the platform of Etsy who are going there to find those unique products, whether they are shirts or hoodies or mugs or

[00:14] wall art or anything like that. And by using the print ondemand method, you're having inventory, which gives you a much lower overhead, which means less upfront

[00:26] money and therefore less risk to get started. and way easier to iterate on those designs. And so, in this video, we partnered up with Gelato to show you how to get started with print on demand on Etsy, which, as I mentioned, has changed

[00:39] little bit different on Etsy and on Gelato, and a lot of the really cool paste the photo on some model and everybody has the same looking one all

[00:52] over like all of Etsy. It's very easy to avoid that now, either by buying samples at a discounted rate, which I'll show you how to do in just a minute, and also to have some AI generated images that look incredibly realistic and have a

[01:06] much better looking mockup of your shirt in basically any environment, any vibe difference when you're selling your product. So, with that being said, I'm going to head over to my laptop and we can get started. So, starting off on my

[01:20] everything we use in this video. Or you can just go to etsy.com/sell and that'll bring you to the seller center of Etsy. You can click on get right now. But because we don't have an account, I'm just going to type in my

[01:37] password and we can register. All right. Now, during the setup for an Etsy shop, there is a one-time setup fee. Depending on where you are, it might change. For me, it's $29, but there's no monthly fee after that. It's just one time to make

[01:51] do this." It's going to ask me a couple questions. You don't have to worry too us in the end. We can still do everything. Uh, but I'm going to say I

[02:03] can start our shop. And you'll see there are six steps across the top. We're currency, and stuff like that. I'll save and continue. We can then name our shop.

[02:16] continue. Oh, it looks like that was already or we have a space in there. It can have spaces. Sorry. So, no spaces, no special characters. Santrell designs. We'll save and continue. And now we can tell us we can tell Etsy a little bit

[02:29] This is print on demand, of course. And we could choose later if we want to sell shirts, hoodies, you know, posters, whatever. Um, but we're going to choose category right here. Just for the first one, I'm going to say I'm selling uh

[02:43] can say down here, another company or person made it. And then when was it partner. This is not being literally made by us. Of course, we're using

[02:57] about Gelato later on in the video. They do pretty much everything for you. So they'll do the printing, they'll do the packaging, they'll do the shipping for when an order is placed. So you don't have you don't have to go on and like

[03:14] for you. So, we'll say they print, package, and ship my designs. We can Oslo, Norway here. Then, we can choose why we're using this partner, uh,

[03:27] true. I don't have a t-shirt printer, else I totally would do it at home. The role of them, I design everything myself and their role in the production And now, we have to add some more details. Stocking our shop essentially.

[03:42] Uh just essentially a placeholder. So for the first thing, I'm just going to call it graphic t-shirt. We'll say Santra Designs. And we have to add an delete all of this later and have other products in our shop. But at least for

[03:58] going to call it our first t-shirt product. Uh we're going to have this for $1 and we have one in stock. And then no variations. Ignore all this stuff down

[04:10] Category. This can be t-shirts. We already have that. And once we set up So, don't worry about the shipping and stuff like that. Just enter whatever

[04:22] bottom, renewal options. I'm going to manually renew this because it's going to cost 20 cents every time it expires and then renews. So, I'm not going to do just delete it. But, I don't want to make sure I don't accidentally leave

[04:37] this up. So, we'll save and continue. We have to get a return policy. Let's apply Great. Let's say do this later. I'm not going to add any more listings at the moment. So now we have to decide how we are going to get paid from Etsy. Now

[04:51] buyer, but that's not of course related to how you get paid. So they can accept they'll pay you out. And so we have to set up our bank account location. So

[05:05] to change this in the future, at least not very easily. And then for tax That's going to use in America at least your social security number. And if

[05:17] below, we have to enter our details. Uh I'm obviously not entering that on guys in the next screen. And once your bank account is connected with Plaid,

[05:30] entering the numbers or automatically by just signing in with your bank's username and password. And now we have to verify our identity with a photo ID, a selfie, and then you're ready to go. So once your ID has been verified, you

[05:44] email and confirm your email account. So I'm just I'm going to copy this over to the same browser and you shouldn't have a problem. So let's go over here. I will

[05:57] paste that in to confirm and we're ready to go. So your account should be all information. They're going to have a credit card number and like I said that onetime fee of $29 and then it's like 20 cents to renew a listing. So very cheap

[06:12] to do. Now they have an offer for us. I'm just going to skip this right now. future when you sign in, there's a second layer of safety to keep other

[06:25] an authenticator app. That's probably the best way to do it. Or you could do a minute and you'll be sent over to the Etsy dashboard. And that's pretty much

[06:38] here later, but now it's time to go over to Gelato and set up our actual products either go to the link in the description, or you could type in

[06:51] central media.com/gelato. And I'm going to put this in my browser. link, it does take you, of course, to Gelato, but you're now getting a little purchase within the first 3 days of creating an account. And that I think is

[07:08] really important because this could be uh essentially anybody buying anything can then take photos and I'll be able to use those as marketing material. And getting 50% off that, I think, is a pretty nice bonus. So, let's say get

[07:23] offer. And that'll bring us to set up an account with Gelato. So, I'm going to can get started with some basic questions here. Again, these questions don't matter that much. You can just say whatever you want. And uh it's not going

[07:36] ultimately uh you'll be able to do everything you need to in the end. So, that. Uh expand your product range. Heard about it from am I an influencer?

[07:50] Am I social media? Am I I guess I'm an influencer. San Trial Media and I'm that there was no entering of credit card information. There's no subscriptions you can upgrade to and I'll explain what those do later on.

[08:07] packaging options, some discounts on products and things like that. But to get started, it's nice that there is no required subscription. Now, from here, Etsy. But if we look at view all integrations, you'll see there are a lot

[08:23] of things you can sell on. So you can sell on Tik Tok shop, on Amazon, on Woo Commerce. If you have a WordPress site, Shopify is a really popular one, and I have made videos in the past about how to sell on Shopify. And if you're going

[08:35] video, I recommend checking out that Shopify tutorial. So let's connect to into Etsy. So you can see it just linked over there. I just have to say grant

[08:48] access and it links up very easily. Basically one-click linking there which I'm really happy to see makes it a little bit more stress-free and easy for beginners. Now we can say publish our first product or we could actually yeah

[09:00] Now in here you can see there's a very large library of products from Gelato here but a really big variety. So on Etsy, I have a full separate video about

[09:13] how to make a design, but you want to look at some trends on Etsy. And in general, people are kind of getting away from a lot of the like super curated models wearing shirts or those mock-ups that you see. A lot of times, people

[09:25] whether that is an embroidered product or a printed product that's a little more funky. Maybe it's a tote bag. Uh no matter what you they want to have also want to see photos that are going to be taken by you. So we are going to

[09:42] be ordering samples later on the video. And I think that really does help a lot. We also have of course wall art, calendars, cards, um like phone cases, year ago, is Gelato added some really big brands. So, if we go to brands, you

[09:57] can get like Comfort Colors, Under Armour, um you know, a ton of other generic Gilden 5000 t-shirts, but rather, you know, a much higher quality or much more sought-after material, you can go and go for like comfort colors,

[10:13] color shirt. I mean, like I said, depends on what you're trying to sell. I works well on Etsy. And depending on when you're watching this, the landscape

[10:26] does change for Etsy. But in general, what I mean kind of summarizing what I when you're making a design, what you want to do is find something that works in one niche. Find some format or or phrase or type of type of design that's

[10:42] whether that is maybe like house plants to like outdoor flower gardening or I it's gardening to beekeeping. That's a really good example I used in the past.

[10:54] well, is a proven concept. You're not just guessing. And then you're bringing it to a new niche, which is very likely to adopt and really like that. This is also great for getting away from competition rather than jumping into the

[11:08] example, if everybody's making gardening shirts, then it's going to be very no reviews yet and people are not going to buy your product. But moving into

[11:22] beekeeping or something like that that is adjacent that maybe has significantly less competition means you're much more likely to get exposure and much more mind when you're making a design. Now in the Gelato editor, I'm going to skip the

[11:37] upload our design if you have an image. So I'm just going to upload. You can see on the left side if I click on files, we can choose file and I'm going to upload my first file for here. So let's go with this one. I'm going to say open. And we

[11:51] have our first image that we can move into here. Now, if I just once it's click on the plus. And that'll just bring it in to full size. We can then crop it or resize it. So, I can resize. You see like that. I can also crop it

[12:05] with the little kind of pill-shaped things on the sides. And it'll tell us the the resolution on the top. So, right now, 96 dpi is relatively low. Usually, what you want to do is have, as they say right there, a minimum of 150. So, I

[12:18] could either make this smaller until we have 150, but that's going to be quite small. Instead, you're better off finding a different design that is going be using this one in this video. So, let's use this one right now. And we

[12:34] the sizes for the product. And because this is print on demand, we're not holding inventory. I usually recommend just having all the sizing options. Why options there? We also have a ton of different colors. So you can select

[12:50] different colors." And you'll see the images over here for each one. And you good with this design. Maybe I don't like this one. I'm going to delete

[13:02] those." And we can remove the colors that we don't like. So I will just keep, I don't know, one or two colors in for now. Let's go with maybe uh the ivory their own tool. Even though I usually make the designs elsewhere in Photoshop

[13:18] or Canva or something, you can make designs in Gelato very easily. So, you personalization. I'll talk about personalization a little bit later. But, you know, edit everything as you would. We also have templates down here. We've

[13:36] something like that, you can add, you know, all types of graphics that are kind of pre-made for us over on the left side. And layers, if you have multiple things on there, you can organize them to make one on top of the other. So, you

[13:50] down here if you want to have like a kind of a split view or have it, you know, perfectly split in half or biased to the left or something. Easy to set that up. Personalization allows end users to customize what's on there. So

[14:04] wedding or you want to have like a fun little saying on there or the name of the bride, whatever it is. You can have the end user able to add their own information when they make the purchase on your design. Uh and it could also be

[14:18] makes it better for the customer to buy something that you designed, but that things down here, but I'm going to continue to mockups. And within mockups,

[14:31] of course, we have a bunch of the basic ones. So, uh, every different product's photos of of the product itself. But one thing that Gelato added relatively really nice uh kind of step in between is the magic mockup. So, if I click on

[14:50] magic mockups, we can give it a prompt and tell Gelato what we want uh this to look like. So, it could be like uh some woman in a coffee shop reading a book or prompts. You can have them in, you know, as they show you right here, urban,

[15:05] outdoor, or nature or studio. And you kind of can give it basically anything you want. And it does a surprisingly good job of designing a mockup or make it look quite realistic. Now, this is something that is rolling out and I

[15:20] value in taking photos yourself. So, this is great to start. But, we're going studio. So, it doesn't need to even be worn by anybody. You can have your product on a nice little dresser or a desk. You could throw a couple flowers

[15:35] or a coffee mug next to it or something. You could even set it outside on the grass, just like nice basic green grass on a nice day and take a photo uh with your iPhone. And that usually does more than more than a sufficient job. Here we

[15:48] looks really good. So, I'm going to add this mockup. And we do get, I think, like 10 mock-ups per day. There we go. nine out of 10 daily uses left. So, you select that one. Uh, and I will continue to details. Actually, one more thing

[16:06] automatically prompt you to make a new one. So, what you have to do is click on there. You can make a new one, say preview design, and then that'll make

[16:20] pretty awesome. Another thing that you can do with magic mockups, which I didn't even realize until now, to be honest, is it doesn't have to be on a day. It'll do that. I'm going to add this mockup. Uh because I have seen seen

[16:37] And also, with your mockups, you can choose which one's your primary. So, right now, that's our primary. I don't really want that to be the primary. But the predefined mockups the primary, at least for now. And if you want to add

[16:53] your own mockups, we can do that later on, but I'll say continue to details. keywords. We can add a description on there. Uh depending on how you're in, you can obviously tailor this to your own needs. And you can also

[17:09] yourself, making the description. And you can read, like I said, check out description, and then kind of use that same idea, that same tone or format uh

[17:22] in your own niche with this new product. Then we can continue to the prices and margin to 50 or 65%, you can also set the margin or the profit to a specific

[17:35] amount. So maybe we want it to be like $10 profit for each one. Maybe we want it to be a retail price. So, set them all to, you know, make every single one of them like, I don't know, $17 or something like that, and it'll adjust

[17:47] we do have some negative profit down here on the 3XL's, and only 11cent profit there. So, I think $17 is not the right price. We can instead just say, let's do the margin to 50%. And I'll say update. And now we have all of our

[18:02] say maybe 3XL. Uh, all the 3XL's are going to be $39. We could do that or you could say, "Hey, just the ivory color is going to be $39.25 and we can have

[18:15] that." So, you can customize the prices for every single one or as a group and then we can continue to review. Now, we have a big permutation, a lot of sizes, a lot of or two different colors here, we can then publish that and we will

[18:27] little dots right there. So, we'll order a sample in a minute. We're going to do there. You can see you are getting half off. So, I will close out of that.

[18:39] You'll see three dots. Uh, so green, good, red, bad. Uh, this is not even a from our store. Let's delete that one. Delete that from our Etsy store. And connected and ready to go. We have no variants that are not connected. And we

[18:56] have nothing that is ignored. So, that is a really good sign. We've got one product ready to go on our Etsy shop. If we go back to Etsy, I could refresh this. Now we can explore our our man our shop manager. We can see our listings

[19:09] and the first one should be there. So now that we have our product here on just click on add product on the top right. Uh but kind of walking you go over to the left side. You'll see the product catalog. We already talked about

[19:25] all there. Orders, you can see who ordered what. You'll be able to track everything right here. You can also order a sample right here. That's one of I mentioned before you do it within the first I think two or three days. Uh then

[19:42] we have stores. So what are you connected to? If you want to also connect this to Shopify, you can have one gelato shop connected to both Etsy and Shopify. Very easy to have both of them running. Personalization studios on

[19:54] up. That is a separate plan. So, you have to pay for personalization studio options for upgrading. So, if I click on the top right and I go to subscriptions,

[20:10] is personalization studio as I mentioned. The other two are Gelato Gold and Gelato Plus. Obviously, Gelato Gold is much more expensive than Gelato Plus, but with that, you are getting, you know, a more greater discount on the

[20:25] the table right there showing you all the differences between the free plan, the plus, the gold, and of course the platinum. So, you're getting 20 to 25% off products. You're getting premium mockup tools. You're getting more stock

[20:39] images. Branded labels and packaging inserts could be a a good way to get that you want to ship with your actual product, and it does look a lot more professional. So, it makes sense eventually to upgrade to Gelato Plus

[20:53] or two, it could definitely be very viable to go with the free plan, which is free forever. Like you don't have to worry about paying a certain subscription to sell on Gelato. But getting back to the Gelato dashboard on

[21:08] the left side, branded packaging is there in case you ever do want to set that up. As I mentioned, that's going to be a little card in your packaging or on navigator which can help you determine if your prices are fair and competitive

[21:23] if other people are selling for more or less and how you might want to change your your your product pricing there. Mockup studio down here is another option as I talked about before for kind of creating the mockups. And that's

[21:35] essentially everything you need to know within Gelato. Now let's place our first can place an order now. And as long as you're within the first two or three days, as I mentioned, you can save 50% either ordering here or ordering there,

[21:50] you go to listings, you can place an order there. Uh and that'll give you the what kind of emails do you get? Does it just say my shop or is it the name of

[22:04] does have some value. But there are going to be of course extra fees, uh, you'll see where the money goes, how you can collect the money, and how it's all

[22:17] there. But if you want to save money and just get the product in your hands, you can place an order directly from Gelato. Either, like I said, clicking here or dashboard as opposed to from Etsy. If you're doing it in Gelato, you will have

[22:34] that set up. So, you can go down to the product we had before, comfort colors. We can choose the color. We can choose the size. Uh, we can choose this and say add to order. It'll have us read that design here. So, let's read the design.

[22:50] We can say add to order. And then you can check out for like seven. What is this? $75. Yeah, $7.50. So, I think you guys know how a normal checkout process works. You can continue to shipping and buy that. But going back to Etsy, a

[23:03] is you want to increase your exposure as much as possible. Etsy is a great way to gain exposure to get people to come to you without having to advertise. But in search visibility. So it'll tell you, you know, some flags like, hey, right

[23:21] now your shop doesn't have an icon. So you can add a shop icon and that makes it more visible and also people more likely to buy from you. They also have or what can be improved. And if you want to change anything about your store, you

[23:36] can see down on the bottom Etsy sales channel. We can edit the shop by clicking on the pencil icon. And we can add a lot to this. Our shop currently this out with your profile photo, your shop photo, a banner, and everything

[23:50] like that. So, now that we have our Etsy print on demand shop set up, there's two so you can sell on Shopify as well as a second outlet. And the second thing you want to do is design more products to sell print on demand on Etsy or Shopify.

[24:05] those out and I'll see you in those