Praveen Kumar
Table of Contents
What is Print on Demand Business?
Print-on-demand is an e-commerce business model in which products are printed only when an order is placed on the website. In this way, sellers don’t have to stock their inventory and also they can hire a third party to fulfill that order. Generally, Print-on-demand businesses focus on products like T-shirts, bags, phone cases, posters, and more.
For buyers, there is no difference in the shopping experience, they won’t even notice that they are shopping from a POD website, it’s just a regular order.
How Print on Demand Business Works?
In print-on-demand business, sellers design their products and list them on their e-commerce website. And when they get orders they print it and ship the order to customers.
Now there are two ways to do this first one is to do everything for yourself like printing and shipping the product and the second one is to design the product and get sales, some third parties would print and ship products to customers.
Printing and shipping yourself require inventory and shipping costs whereas in the second case, a third party would
Also Read: How to Start a Profitable Dropshipping Business in India
How to Start Print on Demand Business in India?
There are two ways to start a print-on-demand business
- Self Inventory
- Outsourcing Inventory
In a self-inventory, you manage everything from printing designs on t-shirts and other products to shipping them to customers. You will need your website and advertising to sell the products.
In outsourcing inventory, there are many brands like Tshopper, Qikink, and more providing you with outsourcing services where you just have to bring an order and they will take care of printing and shipping. They will charge you a fee according to your product and design complexity. Usually, it can be cost from 400-600 depending upon the t-shirt quality.
Market Research
Before jumping straight into any business, you must research the market. The print-on-demand business is a trend business, which means you have to keep yourself updated with the latest market trends in which you will choose your design.
Some trending areas are anime, aesthetics, love, and more. You can also get new ideas from the Internet and other social media platforms.
Create Unique Designs
After doing market research and deciding which area to cover, it’s time to create unique designs for your products. You can create designs from scratch using tools like Adobe Illustrator and canva or buy designs from popular platforms like Etsy.
Creating new and unique designs is very hard, so you need a professional to create new designs and it can take days to create new designs for your products like t-shirts and other products.
Creating Mockups
After creating designs create mockups for your products, the mockup is just an image where you can place your logo which looks realistic like if you are creating a t-shirt design you can’t just upload designs directly, you have to upload your designs on a t-shirt for someone wearing it. Here is an example of creating mockups.
List on Your Website
After creating mockups your design is ready to be listed on your website, upload at least 4-5 images of your design with different angles and genders. add sizes and different colors to your products so people have more choices.
Choose attractive headlines and write detailed descriptions of your products. add reviews and other details to make your product look authentic. and finally, carefully calculate the pricing of each product, there are many variables involved in e-commerce business like product cost, marketing cost, site cost, and many more, set your price accordingly so you don’t get in loss.
If you are self-inventory, you will need your website while if you are outsourcing inventory, they provide you plugins that can connect to your site and import t-shirts and other products directly to your site from there.
Marketing Your Product
Marketing is the most important part of this business, without sales, you are not going to make any money. To sell products in India most people are using meta ads where they advertise on Facebook and Instagram and they are getting good results. They are spending about ₹50-70 per sale which is quite profitable.
You can use canva and AI tools to design your ads, typically people copy ads when they are dropshipping but since you are selling your products, you need to create your ads, generally, poster ads are used but video ads perform better. You can choose according to your needs.
Packing and Shipping
After getting the orders you need to pack them and ship them to your customers, you can hire delivery services to pick up and ship your orders. packing can cost you around 10-15 rupees per product and then shipping can cost you anywhere from 50-60 rupees depending upon the weight of the product.
Handling RTOs in e-commerce
RTOs are a nightmare for e-commerce owners in India because they can reach 40-60% of total sales. which means if you are not careful your business will sink in loss despite making sales.
Return to Origin means the customer has refused to take the order and now it will come back to the seller, in this case seller has to bear the cost of delivery and ad spend, which makes it a total loss on the product.
To avoid RTOs sellers use many tactics like avoiding areas that have high RTO rates, and adding instant payment methods so they can deduct the cost of shipping. These things you have to experience first to make it a profitable business.
Conclusion
Print-on-demand business is profitable in India and many people are doing it, you just need the right information and skills like Meta ads and marketing techniques to sell your products and reduce RTO to convert it into a profitable business. Many people on YouTube are demonstrating how you can start your print-on-demand business, you can learn there for free and give it a try.
