ESYB2 143 - Overview of Shopify Dropshipping and Print On Demand
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[00:00:00] In this video, I want to give you a complete strategy for an e commerce brand. And I say brand because in this case, I mean brand like a bigger vision, bigger potential. And I'll give you this example of my own e commerce brand, which I'm actually sort of just in the middle of starting out. The entire brand is wave if you like.

So the idea is when you're walking by on the street, if people like what you like, they wave at you, right? So it's kind of catchy and it's a little bit viral in that. It creates an interaction between people. And so you'll see that I've got to like, wave if you like cats and here I've got like, wave if you like SEO and.

You know, I've got wave if you like wine, and of course, here's wave if you don't like COVID. So you get it. It's basically all kinds of topics. And what I want to explain to you with this example is how to create a dropshipping slash print on demand e commerce business that's almost entirely passive income right from your website.

But also this is very closely related [00:01:00] to what you might be. Familiar with also is selling on Amazon, selling on Etsy, selling merch, right? Merchandise. All of this is print on demand. Let me explain to you what all these things mean so that we're all on the same page. Let's say if I was starting this business like Twenty years ago, I would have to go and find somebody who would create this t shirt in some print shop, then I would have to go and ship them myself.

It would be a pain and a nightmare. Because you see, these don't sell for that much money, so all that extra work would eat into my profit and it would make this business really hard. Today None of those challenges are present. The only thing you have to do is make these designs. Like I had somebody on the freelancing site, create this design with the cat.

Then I superimposed it on a t shirt, as you can see here, and I submitted it to all kinds of sites. For example, this is a Shopify site, but I connected my Shopify. Which is just [00:02:00] the e commerce platform to something called Printify and Printify on the back end of Shopify they print and they ship so I never have to touch a single shirt I never ship them.

I never print them All I have to do is drive traffic to the store with fashion or e commerce Usually inventory is a big problem in this case. I don't have any inventory Now, the same design, take a look. All of these designs, they're also on Amazon, because Amazon also has merch. amazon. com. The same shirts are on Etsy.

The same shirts are on different stores, like you might have heard of Redbubble. This is Redbubble. Basically, all it is, is just You upload designs and you can put them on products. You see, put them on phone cases, accessories, all kinds of things, right? They create the products, they ship the products. All you provide is the design and make sure that you get discovered.

And it's the same thing on [00:03:00] a website like Teespring. This is Teespring. It's essentially the same thing. And there's a million designers who can create your t shirts. And I had to go through a few iterations like. Some of them were bad, fine, that was easy to identify, but some of them are okay, and then you kind of have to get to a point where your t shirt is great.

For example, this t shirt, maybe not in white color, but like in pink color, it's kind of cute, and I like it in, um, green, but you see the picture of the cat is like really cute and endearing, and this shirt actually gets a good response. For example, much better than a shirt like this, which is also cute.

Kind of like that, but maybe just a little less endearing. So the design takes a few iterations of improvement, but once you get to a good design, then you can just replicate it. And future designers don't have to design from scratch. They can just copy a lot of elements of previous designs that worked.

And so then there's two questions that remain. How do you [00:04:00] sell these shirts? How do you actually create a brand? And another question is, what's the potential? In fashion, potential is limitless. Everyone in the world has clothing. And this can be t shirts now, this can be jackets later, hoodies later, hats later, you name it, right?

Sweatpants. The only limit is the quality of the execution. Because if I keep this store as it is, you can probably see it's a little bit early days for this store. It's not mature yet, but if I have hundreds of designs, the actual design of the actual site is great. The logo is better. I'm actually working on improving it now.

Then because there's a theme here and it's kind of a catchy theme. Maybe it's not the best theme in the world where if you like, but it's kind of catchy and it's viral. And people are like, what's that? You know, people get curious and because it's memorable, if I. Make it look great and everything. Have a bunch of great designs.

At that point, let's say I start to get publicity. Like mentions by big [00:05:00] influencers. Creating my own big social media accounts on this, all that stuff. Now, everybody will know about it. And this is going to be amplified by, you see, Wave If You Like, it's literally viral because it gets another person to engage with the shirt.

So even people who don't buy it at the moment, they sort of remember it. That's why it's brandable. And then guess what happens? People search Wave If You Like. Oh, Wave If You Like. I'm on Etsy. I'm, you see, wave if you like on Amazon. It's all under this wave if you like brand, you see? All you have to do is type in wave if you like on Amazon and boom, you get a bunch of t shirts, all mine, wave if you like.

So, wherever people are comfortable shopping in all the major fashion retailers. And I can manage it easily even by myself because all I have to do is upload designs and that's it. That's the beauty of this kind of business. Having said all this, it's potentially amazing, right? But it's actually really, really, really hard to pull off.

Here's the main [00:06:00] reason why and essentially the only reason why. It's incredibly hard to promote. There's a million shirts with cute cats, with cute dogs, with cute everything. Super competitive, and there's only a few ways to sell these ads, which is very risky because you may experiment with ads might never actually find the formula to sell it profitably because the margin here is pretty low, right?

The price is only 20. So you don't have that much spending per ad, then SEO, search engine optimization. Again, it's brutal, SEO is so hard because there's so many other t shirts. If people search cat t shirt, dog t shirt, gift t shirt, all of these keywords are incredibly competitive. Then, of course, publicity.

And publicity really depends, do other large publications think your brand is noteworthy? Like, I think Wave If You Like is cool, but maybe not others. Some people have a lukewarm reaction to it. And if they do, they're not going to give me the publicity. And so I'm stuck without sales channels. And then this business dies, [00:07:00] despite all the potential what's going to happen to this business.

I don't know equally as you don't know, because it is early days. And of course, most businesses. Despite their founders hopes do not succeed. So chances are against me here, but I'll do my best. But what I did want to do in this video is give you a really great overview of the entire print on demand ecosystem and creating a fashion brand versus just e commerce.

