Want to steer away from Aliexpress and China for a while? There are other methods of making money online.
Shopify
Shopify has recently released an Amazon integration where you can list and synchronize products from Shopify to Amazon, this is a great feature if you want to run your own website and also integrate it with Amazon for extra income.
Now, I’m assuming we’re all dropshippers so we don’t really want to stock any products and you’re probably wondering how we’re going to source products.
We’ll be focusing on Print On Demand services for our products, all integrated with Shopify, products like t-shirts, mugs, phone cases are products that sell well, just look how popular Teespring has become.
First let’s compare a few available services, all integrated with Shopify
Printful
– Supports custom logo’s for the packaging sticker.
– Accepts and handles returns for you
Unique products:
- Leggings
- Socks
- Hats (embroidery)
- Dresses
- Skirts
- Dog clothing
Teelaunch
– Cheapest option of out the three however they don’t process or accept returns.
Unique products:
- Pet bowl
- Mousepad
- Accessory pouch
- Beer stein
- Beach towel
- Fleece blanket
- Cutting board
- Pet bed
- Shower curtain
- Tapestry
- Yoga mat
- Poster
- Flag
Printify
– Only accepts returns with faults that were caused by Printify
– Supports custom logo’s for the packaging sticker.
Unique products:
- Laptop sleeve
- Journal
- Notebook
- Travel mug
- Wall decals
All these services support automatic order processing, when someone orders on Amazon the order gets transferred to Shopify which then triggers one of your POD services and gets automatically fulfilled.
Sourcing designs
Now where do we get designs from, if you’re confident enough in your graphic design skills you can make your own designs, however that will take time away which could be spent listing products.
This is why we can outsource designs, I went on Fiverr and looked around for people who do graphic design, I made sure to find a gig that gives me commercial rights to the design and thee artist doesn’t charge any royalties, this is the link to the gig I used for the ‘Fishing is not just a Sport’ design which you can see above.
This is what my order looked like, I gave the artist creative freedom and asked for the design to be fishing related.
Now keep in mind the t-shirt market is a little bit oversaturated however our goal is to re-use our designs over multiple products increasing our chances of selling a design, for example I would put my design on a t-shirt, mouse pad, sticker, poster etc
You could also try other freelancing websites like Freelancer or Upwork however I found Fiverr to be the easiest to use for this.
Picking the right niche for our designs
You can use the websites linked near the bottom to do your niche research in the previous post I wrote here Aliexpress Dropshipping Essential Tools and Websites [UPDATED]
You should also be looking at Best Selling Items on Amazon and trying to see what kind of designs people like and relaying that information to your designer to get the best possible designs.
Designs that sell well – quotes, social media memes, typography + art
Note: This integration only supports Amazon.com and you will need to be on a professional selling plan billed at $39.99 monthly ( unless you don’t have an Amazon account there’s a chance that they still offer trials) , which lets you list products in the Clothing section and also removes the per item closing fee so if you sell more than 40 items a month you can make back the monthly fee
Check out my post about optimizing your listings through search terms here
Update – I made a sale!
Today I woke up and checked my emails as I usually do and I noticed an email from Amazon notifying me that I made a sale.
The product is a men’s tank top with one of my own designs, I haven’t put out a lot of products as I was busy with other projects however I am definitely going to dedicate some time each day to list more products and increase my chances of selling more merchandise.
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