Learn Etsy Now: Print-on-Demand with Etsy for Beginners

1. Introduction: Hi, are you someone that's interested in learning how to start your own online business with Ets? Or are you someone that's just interested in learning how to use the Ts platform in general but don't know where to start. Or maybe you're just someone that's interested in print on demand, how it works and how you can use it to run and create a successful online business using Et. Well, then I invite you to learn now print on demand with Ts for beginners course. In this course, I will guide you step by step on how to create and launch a successful print on demand business using Et. In addition to this, I will provide you with all of the exclusive resources and materials only available to students in this course of mine. I will also be able to provide you with additional resources such as activities and quiz to help reinforce what you've learned in this course. As a business owner on Etsy myself, I can also firsthand give you my experience with the platform and the best tips and recommendations to get you successfully started and on the road to greatness using Etsy. I hope you'll join me and I hope to see you in my Etsy course. 2. What is Print-on-Demand?: In this video, we will begin this course by defining what print on demand is. If you already know what print on demand is, you can go ahead and skip this video. But this is for people that want to have a clear understanding of what print on demand is and how you can have your own online print on demand business using Ets. Print on demand is the name of a business model, specifically an online business model, that you can do with Ets. The basics of print on demand is that you don't have to deal with inventory. Instead of dealing with inventory, you work with a supplier that ships and prints all of the items that you design online for you. You avoid the headaches of trying to find out if you have an item in stock or not, or dealing with inventory and if you bought enough and so forth. Print on demand is a great business model because not only does it avoid this headache of inventory, but it also streamlines the process of sales by taking care of shipping for you as well. On top of this, there's multiple suppliers that you can work with and collaborate with to sell your products. And we'll get to that in a little bit. But first, let's just continue defining the basics of print on demand. Yes, print on demand is a business model can use with that doesn't deal with inventory. And whether you sell sweaters or shoes or anything else that you plan to sell, there will be someone, a company, or a supplier that can produce this product for you. Physically, when you have a print on demand business, all you deal with is the online side. What I mean by that is designing the merchandise, designing the products online. You don't have to deal with anything physically, if you choose to, you can. But again, the basic essence of a business model using print on demand is of course not dealing with physical inventory. Top of this, you can also use print on demand to set up your online business and expand it. Whether you are planning to create your own unique line of clothing or set up as a merchandise store for whether you have an artist that you're working with or anything else among those lines. In case you're wondering, is it too late to start using At Sea to create an online print on demand business? No, you are not late at all. In fact, print on demand continues to grow over the years and will do so over time. Therefore you're not late at all in anything. Just continue to use Ets to create your print on demand online business. And you'll be just ahead of the curve, actually, because a lot more businesses are taking this approach. This is what print on demand is. In the next video lecture, we're going to talk about how print on demand works with Ets and why Etsy is a great option for you to have your print on demand business with. 3. Why Print-on-Demand with Etsy?: In this video lecture, we're going to be talking about why you should have an online print on demand business using C. Or basically why you should choose C as a platform to host your print on demand online business. So if you're already enrolled in this course, you're probably already convinced that Ts is for you or maybe not right. And so hopefully this video clarifies any questions that you may have and also motivates you to get started and convinces you that yes, Ts is a correct platform for me to host my print on demand online business with. So let's start looking at some reasons as to why Ts is such a great and popular platform for print on demand online businesses. Why C? The main reason why C is a great platform to host your print on demand business with is because it's easy to use. There is no need to create your own website or learn complicated code or whatever have you to have your own C shop and storefront. Everything is already pre built, pre made, pre coded, and all you have to do is upload your shop information and your business products and so forth. There is no advanced code required. And it's really easy to get started, as you'll see later on in this course when we begin to create our account on Ts, specifically also our seller account, to open our shop. Secondly, it is pretty much free. There is no cost to get started and open an account. In fact, the only cost that you'll be seeing is when you upload your first product listing. Each product listing costs $0.20 to host on Ts and have it be renewed every four months. We'll talk about that later on in this course. But just know that in Ets it is pretty much free to get started. And you don't have to pay a single penny to upload your products and so forth. You only have to pay when it's time to renew your product listings and also when you make a sale because Es takes a cut. Thirdly, the site is reliable and there are almost no site maintenance issues or downtime issues. So something that can happen a lot that can hurt your business is that, for example, sometimes a website may be down or maybe it's overloaded with traffic or whatever have you, right? This almost never happens with Ets because it is such a popular platform, it always has to be running or else a lot of businesses can lose a lot of money fast. So this is good news for you because you won't have to worry about the headaches of your business being unavailable to customers. Fourthly, Ets already has a pre built in customer base that loves small businesses just like yours. In fact, there are over 90 million active users on Etsy. Imagine that 90 million, you can definitely take a cut of that 90 million for your own print on demand online business. This pre built in customer base is also really good because not only does it expose you to millions and millions of people, but these are people that are more interested in buying from small businesses. Buying unique little items from mom and pop shops as well. Therefore, this is really useful for a print on demand online business because you'll be selling your own unique designs and your own unique products. There are a lot of cheap and effective marketing tools that Ets offers you, such as Ets ads, which limits you to use about $10 a day in your budget. With just $10 you can promote your product listings to even more and more millions of people on Ets. This is really useful because by doing so, you'll be garnering more sales and more exposure towards your business. Six, there is an ample amount of customer support on Ets, whether you use the Ets community forum or the pre built in help guides or the websites FAQ or even contact the website itself through e mail. There is a multitude of resources to help you on Ets. This is very useful if you're starting off on your own. Of course, in addition to this course, you have these things as an additional guide and resources to help you out. When you get started with Ets, there's a lot of support and help handholding. When it comes to Ets, should you need any help? Seven Ets is compatible with multiple different devices, such as phones and also computers. If you're someone that's on the go a lot and wants to manage your, your Et shop on the go, you can download the mobile app version of Ets for sellers and you'll be able to manage your shop, track your orders, and contact customers using it while being anywhere in the world. This is really useful because you're not confined to one place or just one device, or just a computer. You can also download the mobile version of Ets and of course use it to manage your shop. Lastly, there's no commitment should you continue to have an online print on demand business for a long time or just experiment with it for a short time to see how you do. There is zero commitment. You can stop at any time you need to, should you want to take a break or permanently close down your shop. Both of these options are available on Ts. In fact, this is what I did myself with my shop bunny papa. I had to temporarily close it for over a year because I was focusing on other things such as creating online courses and the like. Ets gave me no problems. And I had the option to shut down my site temporarily, meaning that customers would no longer be able to access my listings or my business on Et. That I still retained all of my product listings and information, so I didn't have to retype it or create a new account all over again. This is really useful if you want to take breaks and so forth. Again, this is another great reason why you should use C for your print on demand business. Hopefully, these reasons have convinced you even more to get started. This, of course, is not an exhaustive list, meaning that it is not every reason why you should use C for your print on demand online business. But hopefully, these great reasons motivates you to get started. All right, so I hope this helped. 4. Creating an Etsy Account: Welcome. In order for us to start with C, we obviously need to create our account first, let's go ahead and do that. Let's go to Ets.com Now we are here in the home page, in the main page of the website. In order to create an account with Ts, we would click here where it says Sign In in the upper right hand corner. Instead of signing in, we will click the button that says Register Registration is easy. You just input your E mail address, your first name, and your desired password. I'm going to go ahead and do this for demonstrations sake, make sure you have a strong password. All right, Great. Now that all of that has been filled out, our e mail address, our first name, and our password, we can click register. Awesome. Now we've officially created an S account. When we do this, we are now logged in. This is all it takes to create an S account though. Be aware that you should also verify your email address. And you will be getting an E mail from C with a link code to verify your E mail address. It is important that you do this step. Of course, you'll be getting that e mail and it'll look like this. Confirm your C account. Then we would just click the confirm account button and our e mail address has been confirmed. That is all it takes to set up your C account. Now where we continue is by filling out our stores information. That is going to be the next part of our account set up and journey of establishing our business on Ts. 5. Establishing Your Shop: All right, great. Now that we've officially made our Ets account, it's time to launch, or rather establish our Ets store so we can be able to sell on Ets. In order to do that, we would go up here in the upper right hand corner where you see this gray circle avatar image with the dropdown button. And we click it, and we click here where it says Sell on Ets. It'll be the button right above the sign out button. Then we would click that, Sell on Ets. This Ts knows that we're trying to be Ts seller and not just a customer. It says, millions of shoppers can't wait to see what you have in store. We would click here where it says, Get started All right. It says here, welcome John. We're so excited to help you bring your shop to life. To kick things off, we'll get to know a bit about you and what you do. This process will entail you filling out some information regarding your business and you'll know what I'm talking about in a second. Let's click here where it says, let's do this. All right? The question is, what brings you to Ts will help guide you to success, whether you're a Pro or brand new to selling. We'll just click here where it says, I'm just starting to sell for the first time ever Then we click next. And then it says here, is there anything you'd like help with? Choose as many topics as you want. We'll share resources to help you grow. As you can see here, Etsy is also offering a variety of assistance in various things, such as deciding what to sell, shop naming and branding, Selling online, taking photos of items, and so much more. When you're going through this process yourself, you can check as much of these as you want, but since a lot of these I'll be covering myself in this course. I won't check any of them, but just know that you have the option to do so if you'd like, we'll click Skip this question. Now it says here, now time for the fun part. We'll walk you through creating your shop and filling it with items. Let's click here what it says, Start your shop to make it official. As you can see up here, we have approximately six steps that we need to take before we can officially set up and establish our Ts shop, the first one being our shop preferences. Let's get started. Tell us about your shop. When you do this on Ts, you obviously first want to make sure that your shop language is correct and selected to what it'll actually be in English for myself in this course. And then what country, the country of origin that your shop is from. In my case, that is the United States. Lastly, the shop currency, the currency that your shop will be using to sell and so forth. And it'll be the United States dollar. Since I'm in the United States that is all correctly selected for myself. These options may vary for you if you're located in a different country or your shop will be in a different language and so forth. All right, let's click Save and continue. Now here it says, Name your shop. Don't sweat it. You can just draft a name now and change it later We find sellers often draw inspiration from what they sell, their style, and pretty much anything goes. This is where you actually begin to enter your shop name. And this will be the name of your business, the name of your shop. This will be the name that anytime a customer lands on your shop, they'll see. And you see that there are some regulations here. It says that the shop name must be 4-20 characters and it must not contain any special characters, spaces, or accented letters. This is not set in stone at the moment. You can just use any default name or anything that comes to mind. Don't overthink this process, especially if you haven't even listed your first item yet, which we haven't. Right. This can be a placeholder name for now, and later on you can change it should you choose to. Once you find out what you're going to focus on as a seller on at C and what type of products you'll be selling. And you've got to make sure that once you reach that step that the name of your obviously reflects what you're selling. An example of this would be my business bunny Pappa. Which is focused on selling bunny and rabbit themed and designs on clothing and so much more. Therefore, my business name, bunny papa reflects the type of business that I am and the type of things that I'm selling. Likewise, your name of your shop should be the same and reflect whatever you're selling on Etsy. But since we're just getting started, we'll just choose a typical generic name. Let's call this John's new shop for now. So we've given our shop a name. All right. And that name is available. Sometimes certain shop names aren't available. So make sure to be prepared for that, that if you have a shop name in mind that you also have other shop names in mind as well. If the first shop name is taken by somebody else, sometimes that can happen. All right, then let's click Save and continue. All right, and then the third step requires us to stock our shop or create a listing. This is where we begin to create product listings that then buyers and customers can purchase. Right as we're just beginning. We won't put too much thought into this, but we'll just create a generic item that we'll be selling in no way a reflection of what you're actually going to be selling on your store. But this is just so you know how this process goes and what it looks like. It says here, add some photos and details about your item. Fill out where you can form. Now you'll be able to edit this later. Let me take a second right here, real quick to add some things that are required in an C listing. If you see a little asterisk next to the word in the listing, that means that it is required by Ts for you to have in your listing photos is one thing that Ts obviously requires you to have in your listing. Customers know what product you're selling and what it looks like to continue on from where we left off. Let's continue by filling out this product listing. This is just so you know what the process of setting up a listing is like. I can guide you step by step in case this is overwhelming to you. First things first, let's add a photo to our first listing where it says, here, add a photo. You would click it, then you would look for the picture of your list of the product that you're intending to add. We have this here right here. This little generic white shirt. And then we would click open here to insert. Now as you can see here, our photo is not quite up to Ess standards, which requires or not requires, but suggests that listings look best photos that are at least 2000 pixels wide. There's already a tip for you to remember, In order to have great listings on Ts, you need to have high quality big photos. But nonetheless, since we're just getting started, this photo will do from now. As you can see, you have the option to add a lot more photos from various different angles. And in fact, it's recommended because the more photos you have per listing on your products on Es, the higher the chance of someone purchasing something from your business. It's always important to have a plentiful amount of high quality pictures over here on the left side. You can even see that gives you some suggestions and tips to take great photos such as using natural light and no flash and so forth. Just keep that in mind. We can also adjust the thumbnail of our Es listing in the first picture. When customers see it, they'll see it like this. We have the option to zoom into the listings picture or zoom out. You can play around with these settings depending on the photo. You can also move it around to the top or to the bottom or whatever have you. Right. Then you would click Save your changes on that for the thumbnail of your product listing on Ets. Okay, This is all the photo section for our first product listing. If we scroll down, we also have the ability of adding a video to our product. If we have a five to 15 second video, we can add that here by clicking at a video. And then we would attach a video file like an MP four file and so forth. And this could actually even improve your likelihood of getting the sale, because customers will build trust by seeing that your product is legit and we'll also be able to see it in action. A video is much more proficient than just picture. Therefore, you can add a video to your product listings as well. Of course, since we're just starting again, we don't have this, we don't need to worry about this. It's also not required. This is an optional thing that C has, should you choose to go for it. Below that, we have the listing details. Tell the world all about your item and why they'll love it. First, we have the title here. The title goes here, and you can see has an asterisk. Because this is required, this title will be the title that will appear first below the picture of your product listing is this title. Now on Es, it's actually recommended that you have long product titles. This is because the longer the product title, the more keywords that will be used in that product title, then the higher chance you'll have to be found by a customer and thus make a sale. It says here under title include keywords that buyers would use to search for your item. Just typing something as generic white shirt would not be enough. As you can see here, we have 121 characters left. We have plenty of space. To add much more adjectives and so much more to give this listing some more exposure. Keywords, as we'll learn later on in this course, are very important in C and C product listings, you want to use as much as possible. In fact, sometimes it can even seem repetitive, but it's actually good because the more long your title is, the more chance you have of being found by a customer. Typically, what I do in C is that I separate my product title by dashes. When I want to add more adjectives that describe the product, I can say something like real cotton, soft, feel, Unisex. These type of adjectives that help narrow down in search results. The shirt and the product in this case. And help you get found by customers that are looking for something specific. You never want to be generic or short with your product titles on Etsy. Because then you'll get lost in the shuffle and you'll get lost in all the competition again, since we're just starting off. Not to worry too much about this just yet. Now below this, we have about this listing, also an asterisk. We must fill this out. The questions that we have are who made, what is it, and when did you make it? If we click who made it, there's a dropdown and you can select whether you made it, if a member of your shop made it, or another company or person. Now since this is a print on demand course and this will be a print on demand business that you'll be running, you obviously will select another company or person because you won't be creating the product, as in you won't be threading the shirt. Another company such as the print on demand supplier will be doing that for you. We would click here where it says another company or person. Then the next question with the dropdown, it says, what is it? Is it a finished product or a supplier tool to make things? If you're a print on demand business, you will typically always select a finished product because print on demand suppliers create your product for you, print it out, and ship it to your customer, that will be a finished product. Lastly, we have when was it made? Again, if you're a print on demand business, typically you will always be selecting made to order. Because you won't be distributing and shipping out these products until the customer clicks purchase or buy. Right, These are made to print on demand businesses work like this. These are the three options that you'll be selecting typically for product listings if you're predondaband business. Next we have category. It's also asterisk. It says here, type a two or three word description of your item to get category suggestions that will help more shoppers find it. As you can see here, we have a variety of different things like men's coats hoop, earring, wall hanging yarn, and so forth. What we'll type here is, for example, shirt. As you can see here, we have a variety of different categories and subcategories that C has. Please try to always make sure that this is a acc, as close as possible to your product listing. This is very important because if your product is not categorized in the correct section, it will be harder to find and those customers will have a harder chance of finding you. I typed in shirt. As you can see here, we have this first recommended one that says shirt and T shirts, tops and T's in clothing, gender neutral adult clothing tops and T shirts. This sounds the most similar to what our product is, because below this we have graphic that's more for T's that have designs on them and are colored and so forth. And we are selling a generic white T shirt. Therefore, we would first one, but make sure that your category is always on point. As you can see here, these are some of the suggestions that will be associated with this category that we've selected. Here, we've made some suggestions below. Adding attributes to your listings can help your customers find your items more easily. What does this mean? This means that you just have more additional things that you can add to your product listing. Such as what is the color of your shirt, the secondary color of your shirt, if it has one, what is the size, Right? These things are just optional. But if you really want to go into detail to give the customer as much information as possible, I really suggest you fill these out. All right, and then we have here the sleeve length. What is the sleeve length of our shirt? Right? Is it short sleeve, Is it a neck line, crew color, deep V neck? Right. Again, Etsy has some suggestions that we can just click Apply to choose them into our product listing. Again, these are still all optional. We don't need to worry about them too much. Okay, and then below, here we have. Renewal options. Each renewal lasts for four months or until the listing sells out. What does this mean? Well, on Es, product listings are renewed every four months or until you run out of stock. Typically for a print demanded business, you necessarily won't run out of stock unless the supplier runs out of stock first something and that we'll talk about later on. But anyway, you typically want to have this set as automatic. Each listing will renew for 20 US cents. This means at any time that four months pass by, your product listings will automatically renew to stay on the Ts marketplace for customers to purchase. You want this to be automatic because if your listings don't automatically renew, customers won't be able to purchase from you anymore. And that's not a good thing for your business, right? You always want to have this as automatic. Manual is more so for businesses that are more self reliant and create the products themselves. But for print on demand businesses, we definitely want to keep this as automatic. All right. After that we have the item type. Is it a physical, tangible item that you will ship to buyers or is it a digital file that buyers will download? Again, you have the option of selling either physical items or also digital items on Es, again, typically print on demand businesses, we will always be selling physical products that must be selected. Moving on, we have the description. The description is where we briefly talk about our product and our product features. Only shoppers will see this the first couple of lines, but it's very important that you actually fill this out. Make it personalized, make it very descriptive. Use a lot of adjectives like we did in the title, talk about the dimensions of the product or the product material. All of these things go here when we type in our product description. This will also help us for the Google Search Result Index, in which we can be found by anyone searching similar words that we used in our product description in the Google search engine. Here we want to be very descriptive about our product. Something like this generic white shirt is made of the softest cotton you can find. It is sewn by hand and has a crew neck line. Additionally, it makes for great indoor use and is Unisex. This is an example of a product description. Obviously yours would be longer, but always make sure that you're telling the truth, right? It's great to spice it up a little bit, but make sure that you're still accurate and that you're not trying to obviously scam anyone or make up lies. To get your product to seem better than it is, just try to keep it factual and that will go a long way. Of course, once you have this written, Okay, Next we have here where it says production partners. This is very important for print on demand businesses, your print on demand suppliers that you'll be working with that will be shipping out and distributing your products that you designed are your production partners. Here it says you must add a partner for this listing because this is a physical item that someone else, another company, has made for my business. Therefore, I need to add them. We'll talk more about this later on when we start researching our print on demand suppliers. But for now, we'll click at a new production partner and say John's production partner. And then we'll give it a state, New York. And then about our production partner, we can say this is our close production partner that prints and ships our products to our customers. Okay, This is important because this helps buyers understand what the partner does for you or the print on demand supplier. In this case, you just want to keep it general, not too descriptive, right? And then it says here about your partnership, why are you working with this partner? This is important if you're a print on demand business. These questions will typically be answered always as follows. I don't have the technical ability or equipment to make it entirely by myself or I need help meeting the demand for this product. Typically, your answer as a print on demand business owner will be the first one. Because obviously as a print on demand business owner, you give another company the discretion to create, print, and ship out your products to your customers. The only thing that you do is design them, Put the designs on their already pre made products that they just print the design on and then ship it to your customer. We always know that that's how the print on demand pipeline works and the model works, right? Therefore, this answer would be I don't have the technical ability or equipment to make it. Entirely by myself. Next is what is your role in the design process you can do. I design everything myself. If you design your own designs, or I design everything but get technical help, such as pattern making, or someone you hire, such as a freelancer, to design products for you, such as product designs and so forth. This is something else that we'll talk about later on in this course as well. You can also choose this if you have someone else working on your business for you, for example, you have a designer on your business team that designs the products, All right? You can choose whichever answer here is most relevant to your situation. But in this I'll say I design everything but get technical help. All right. Now for my business bunny papa, it's the first one. I design everything myself because I did design every single design and then just made the print on demand supplier printed out. But again, each business is different for print on demand in this case. Lastly, what is this partner's role in the production process? Typically, they do everything for me, right? They make a component on my product and I do the rest. Or they create a finished product and then I add branding and packaging. But typically for the print on demand model, won't ever get to see the product unless you order samples, which is again something we'll get into later. Don't worry about this too much. You will just say they do everything for me. All you do is create the designs and then again they print out and ship out the product to your customer. All right, and then after we've filled this information out, we just click Save Partner. All right, then we would check this as the associated production partner for this particular product. All right, Section is something that we'll get into later on when we're adding more detail to our store. But you can have sections in your store to comparmentalize everything into different sections. After this, we have tags are great because they also allow us exposure and can get us found in the Ets search engine. Typically, you have up to 13 tags that you can obviously separate by commas. Here you just type in whatever adjectives are associated with your product, such as, for example, shirts, Unix, cotton men's women's generic white shirt, cotton shirt. This is how you would go about adding tags to your Ts products to get them found and also give them more descriptions. You can also add the materials such as, for example, in this case, cotton, you just type it in and then press the Enter key on your keyboard. And then it'll be added to the listing. All right, and then after that we have the inventory and pricing. How are we going to price this product? This is up to you. But again, if you're a print on demand business, you want to make sure that you're obviously having good margins, right? So let's say that your print on demand supplier charges $15 to print out this shirt. You want to make sure that you're selling at a price where you're reaping some profit. For example, if they will produce this shirt for $15 from me. I may want to sell this at 1999, right? I'm getting about $5 in profits for each sale that I make of this shirt. That's how you should be thinking about your product pricing if you're not sure, because each print on demand supplier will obviously charge you first for creating the product for you. And you need make sure that that price is convenient to you and obviously that you're selling on Etsy at a higher price than that, you reap the difference in profits. That's the price, 1999. And then let's say hypothetically, our print on demand supplier charges $15 for this listing, we would make $5 per sale. Then it says here, quantity. You can add as much quantities as you want if you're a print on demand store. Because again, these print on demand suppliers have huge warehouses where they have unlimited stock. Rarely they run out though. Again, this is something that we'll talk about later on. You can put whatever number you want here. They'll always make sure that your print on demand supplier has your items or products that they will be printing on in stock first. Okay, SKU, We don't need to worry about variations as if you have variations of the same product. So for example, if it came in a different size or a different color. All right, personalization, we don't need to worry about this right now. Let's keep going. All right, shipping. Now, shipping can be a little bit of a headache if you're starting out, but Ts has a lot of great preset prices and settings for you to use. In addition to this, I should say that if you're a print on demand business and you'll be using the print on demand model, you won't have to worry about shipping because that will already be in the charge that the supplier, the print on demand supplier charges you for printing and shipping out the product to your customer. You won't even have to worry about this too much because each print on demand supplier already includes how much it's going to cost to ship to your customer when you obviously ask them to create the product for you and so forth. Shipping prices here, calculate them for me. You typically want to leave that alone. If you're a print on demand business origin zip code, you should at least put your Zip code here. Therefore customers know where your business is located. Let me just put that there. And then processing time. Once a buyer has placed an order, how long is it going to take to prepare and ship it out? This varies depending on the print on demand supplier that you choose. Some print on demand suppliers take longer than others to process, print and ship out the item to your customer, take three days, some take a week. When we get to that, later on in this course, we'll talk about that. But for now, let's just say it's one to three business days, okay? Yes. Buyers are more likely to purchase items that ship quickly. Of course, then after that we have where I'll ship the United States and worldwide. As a default, some print on demand suppliers only ship to certain countries. Again, that also depends depending on your supplier. Next we have shipping services. Typically this will be not something that you'll worry about because again, your print on demand supplier deals with your shipping. Okay. All right. And you can also add a handling fee if you want to. This is a charge or a fee that your customer will pay on checkout if you want to charge them an extra amount for handling the product and so forth. Okay, great. Then after that, we just have to add our item weight and item size. These are important because this lets the customer know how much the product weighs and how much the dimensions of the product are. This is also important for shipping purposes. For now, let's say that this shirt is about zero pounds and 12 ounces, right? It's a lightweight shirt as an example. And then the item size when packaged. Let's say it's about 5 " in length, 5 " in width, and 5 " in height. Again, this is just an example. This is not actual, but this is just Ts Knows how to calculate your shipping and so forth. All right, again here it says Preview shipping price. We can even see how much at would hypothetically charge and so forth. All right, then after this we have returns and exchanges. Typically the policy is that you can return, if you're a customer, the product within 30 days. We will just click here for Tim sake, apply simple policy in which the buyer can return or exchange the item within 30 days. They are responsible for the shipping costs of returning the item and they are responsible for the loss in value if an item isn't returned in its original condition. This is a pretty good, simple policy. We'll just apply this for our store and our product listing. Just like that, we've filled out a bunch of information regarding our product, our first product listing. Now that is all filled out, let's click Save and continue. After this, it says, great job. On your first listing, you're one step closer to your first sale. Consider adding more listings. Five is a good start. This gives buyers more chances to find your shop. This is something that we'll talk about later. The more listings, the more exposure your shop on C has. Just know that for now. But since we're just starting off, we'll do this later. Next is the fourth step, how you'll get paid. How are we going to get paid with C, we can get paid in a variety of ways. We can get Paypal through debit card, credit card, and so forth. It says here, for tax purposes, what type of seller are you? If you're a print on demand business, typically you'll be an individual, right? Most sellers on C fall into this category because C is oriented for individual type of sellers, mom and pop shops and so forth. Then it says here, tell us a little bit about yourself. Again, we just need to verify our identity, our country of residents. Of course, this is something that you'll fill out, your first name, your last name. This is just information that they need in order to be able to tax you and so forth. Then you just fill this out. Let me just go ahead and quickly do this. And you'll do this as well when it's your turn, okay? And then just type in your address and so forth, a bunch of information for verification purposes. So therefore they know that you're legit and also they know where to send your payments and so forth. Put in your phone number. Okay, great. So that's all been filled out essential before moving on because this is how you'll be able to get paid by confirming your identity. All right? And then say, where's your bank located? Again, this depends on you, so make sure to fill this out. All right. And then we can connect our bank using Plaid. Let's just go ahead and get this out of the way so we can set up our payments. I'm just going through this process. I'm just skipping through this because it's not necessary for me to explain everything, but just know that you'll be doing this too and you have to do this so that way you have your Es payments set up. Okay, Great. So now that we've connected our bank to Et, we'll be getting paid through Pd says here, your bank account has been connected a Plaid. This means that I'll get my C payments when I make sales and so forth, through direct deposit. So it's very useful because it's a time saver. Okay. And it says here that I can receive my payments on a deposit schedule that's once per week. I can change to be every day, once every two weeks, or once per month. This is depending on your preference. Okay? But once per week will be default for you to get your T payments and so forth. The profit that you make from your sales, of course. All right. So just know that you have to connect your bank account first to Ts in order to be able to do this and get these payments from your sales of your shop. All right, so then let's click Save and continue. Now we see here the fifth step where we set up billing. Again here it says set up billing, let us know how you'd like to pay your T bill. Here we have to add a credit card and expiration date. All this information for T to be able to bill us, just go ahead when you do this process and add your information. It's secure, don't worry. But you will be, of course, charged $0.20 for each listing on your C store. If you have, for example, five listings on your C store, you'll be charged $1 okay? So let's just go ahead and let me go ahead and just fill this information out so we can continue to the next step. All right, now that my information has been added, let's go ahead and click Saving. Continue. All right, now for the last step, the sixth step in setting up our shop, your shop security. Our shop security, it says here, keep your shop extra safe. We can set up two factor authentication to ensure that I'm the only one that can access my T account. Then every time you sign in, you'll enter a unique code sent to your phone. This is to add extra protection to your C shop in case you're in the threat of being hacked or whatever. You can set up two factor authentication to make sure that you're the only one that gets access to your account. It says here, choose an option to get started. We have SMS via text message, or we can also have through phone call verification or the authenticator app. For the sake of this, we're just going to do it by text message. All of these three options are safe. Okay, we click Continue, Type in your phone number here, and then click Send Code. If you selected the SMS option like I did, you will have been texted a phone code from C that will allow you to verify the account that you then type in here to set up the two factor authentication. Let me type in the code that I was just texted from C, then click continue. Then it says here, you're all set, your C account is now protected by SMS via text, two factor authentication. Okay. These are the backup codes that you should save to your computer once process of setting up your Ts shop. That way in case you ever get locked out of your account, you can log in back to it using these authentication backup codes. Okay? All right. So we have officially completed the set up your Es shop steps and now we can officially open our shop by clicking here, it says, open your shop. Your shop is open for business. There we go. And just like this, we have our Es shop set up. This is what it looks like, right? Very similar as I've showed you all earlier in the previous video with my business bunny papa. Right? This is what the store front looks like for customers in C, and also for sellers as well. Obviously, it looks a little bleak, too simple. We can obviously spruce it up, add some images and vibrancy. That's something that we'll get to later on. But the whole purpose of this video was to be able to set up our shop to finally be able to then sell on C. We've got all of that done. We have our shop name here, our first product listing that we've just done together, that is the process of setting up your C shop. And I hope that this video helped. 6. Navigating the Shop Manager: Welcome back. All right, great. Now that we've officially created our Etsy shop and it's live on the website, It is important for us to move on to being able to know how to manage our shop and also be able to do more things regarding our Etsy store that we go to the shop manager. The shop manager can be found up here in the upper right hand corner, you'll see this little icon that looks like a store front. This is the shop manager icon. I'll just preface this lecture by saying that the shop manager is the central station, or the brain of your entire at C shop. From there, you'll be able to see and manage a variety of different things regarding your shop. Let's go ahead and take a look at our shop manager. And you can see that we have one little notification here, that's what that little number one is for or stands for. Okay, now we are at our dashboard tab. Within our shop manager, how the shop manager is laid out is that, as you can see here on the left side of the screen, we have a list of different tabs that exist within the shop manager. And each tab deals with certain things. And it's pretty self explanatory. The dashboard will always be the default tab or where you'll be taken first. Always in the shop manager above it, we have a little search bar here. This search bar just lets use specific things regarding our Etsy store. Within our shop manager, we can search, for example, orders or listings, or even conversations that we've had with customers or just other things regarding help and so forth. Right? As you build your store and your shop, you'll see this begin to populate. If you type in something here that's like a keyword or a search term such as, for example, shirt, right? Once you press the Enter button on your keyboard for this term that you typed into the search bar, you can see that we have a variety of different things popping up now here and populating regarding that specific search term, since I typed shirt. And in the previous video lecture, we established and created our first product listing, which was for a generic white shirt. We can see here that this matches the name of that listing, and therefore it appears here. It even shows you in subsections where the search results come from. We have one listing named with the word shirt in it. Zero order results with the word shirt. Zero conversations with the word shirt, and 155, etc, help articles with the word shirt. As you can see, Es has a lot regarding this in their own self help guides on their website. If we click the Ts Marketplace tab, we can also see different search suggestions for searching the Ts website itself, the C Marketplace, where customers can go and search these terms to find your shop and also your listings. Shirts for women, shirts for men, and so forth. These are typically ordered in most popular search to least popular search. Okay. That is what the search features for within the shop manager and Ets very useful. Now let's take a look at the dashboard where we're at since we've just started this shop. We can see that there's a lot of zeros up here, right? These zeros though, begin to populate and increase as you are creating more listings and time passes by in your shop. And of course, when you make sales, these are the general statistics for your shop. Total views is the total views of your shop. So for example, if a customer landed on your shop and was just browsing it, that would count as a view. A visit is more specific because this requires them to actually engage with your shop and click on a listing, or actually visit your store in general. The difference between total views and visits is that total views includes just them browsing past your listing, whereas visits actually deals with the number of people that actually click your shop to visit it. After that, we have the number, the number of orders that your store has made. Obviously, let's say if we hypothetically had an order from a customer, this number would change 0-1 Lastly, we have revenue, which is how much you've made and profited from your at C shop. Now in addition to these four, you can also manipulate the overview for a certain time period. The default will be the last seven days. But if we click this dropdown icon, we can see that we can change the stats overview for a variety of different time periods, such as today, just yesterday, the past 30 days, this entire month, this entire year, last year, or all time, which includes from the inception of your store to present day. As you obviously manipulate these time frames and periods, these numbers will change accordingly. Now, you may be wondering, what is this little percentage underneath? Well, this is just measuring your percentage of either growth or decline for this specific time range compared to the last one, right? Obviously, there's no data for this time range last year to compare again, stats because we just started, obviously. But that's what this is for here, these little percentages underneath. And we can also click here where it says View Detailed Stats, in which we get into more detailed stats in the stats tab in the Shop manager, which we'll get to later on. But let's go back to the dashboard now that we've covered these first four sections, the stats overview. Next you can see that if we scroll down, we will see our shops checklist. Nice. There's nothing you need to do right now. That's a good sign. We wanted to say that because that means that our shop is in good standing and there's nothing missing. We also get information here about how many listings we have on our shop in addition to how many of those listings are active listings, meaning that customers can go ahead and buy and purchase them, compared to expired listings that are no longer active on our shop. Compared to sold out listings, listings that have run out of stock and are no longer available, we even get that breakdown of specific data for our listings on our shop. This is really useful as your shop increases in number of listings and you can manage them by looking at them all here and also clicking view all listings up here in the upper right hand corner. Which will then take you to the listings tab in the shop manager, which we'll get to next. But let's go back to the dashboard. Okay, let's scroll down. And I should also mention that, of course, if you have an iphone or an Android phone, you can download the C app to your phone to manage your store. From there, they have a specific C app for sellers on those devices. On those mobile devices, you can get the app if you want to manage your shop on your mobile device. Let's say you're on the go. You don't have access to a computer or a laptop. You can definitely use the Etsy Seller Marketplace app to manage your shop through a mobile device. Okay. Now, below listings information. We have a recent activity section here in the dashboard tab. This just tells us any changes that we've made, any orders that we've made, or just any general recent activity that either customers have made on our shop or we've made on our store. That's just what this is. For any time a customer, for example, hearts, your item or likes them, would get a notification here in recent activity. Then after that, we have the listings tab, underneath the dashboard tab within the shop manager. As we mentioned earlier, the listing tab deals with your shops listings. We have one listing that we've created already here earlier on, right? And it shows us everything about that specific listing, the title, the pictures, how much are in stock, the price when it ought to renews, and so forth. This tab is really, really useful if you want to either change, edit, or delete certain listings from your shop. As you can see here, below this one listing, we have three different icons. We have this little checkbox which we can check this listing. This is useful if you want to edit multiple listings at once. So let's say I had more than one. I could checkbox multiple listings and then execute a variety of different actions up here, such as renew the listings, deactivate them, meaning hide them from the shop, but not delete them or just delete them permanently. We also have other editing options here that we can edit the title, the tag, the description, the price, and so much more. You have a lot of different that you can do here, two listings at once with the shop manager. Okay. That's what this little checkbox is for. And you notice that when it is selected, we get a orange tint to it, so that's how you know it is selected. Next to that, we have a little star underneath here. This allows us to feature this listing on our store. Earlier on, when I showed you my bunny Papa, you saw that at the top of my listings in my storefront, there were four featured items that had to deal with our Christmas collection. That is what this little star here is for. This is to feature items at the top of your storefront. When we go back to our store front, which is where we were earlier at the beginning of this video, You'll notice that this will be at the top. This is obviously something that you will use if you want to feature certain items that either are best sellers or are your favorite type of items or items that maybe you want to sell more or are on sale. Again, that's just what this little star is for. We can unfeature it by clicking it again. Then this gold star turns back into a black star. Then after that, we have this little gear or cog icon. If we click it, we have a drop down with a variety of different options. We can either view this listing on Ts, we can view the statistics for this particular listing. We can again edit this listing, copy this listing. Copying this listing just allows us to copy it in order to duplicate it. If you want to, let's say make another copy of this particular listing or a duplicate, you would click the copy button here. And then we would have two of the same listings here. If I click copy, I have all of this information again here where I can particularly change anything that I want in this copy. And then here at the bottom right hand side, I can publish this copy. And then there will be two of that listing that we made. We could also save it as a draft if we just want to have it as a draft in our store, in our shop manager, but not as a published listing live for everyone to purchase. All right, but let's just go ahead and click cancel for now, and click Discard Changes. Let's go back down here to this gear icon. So that is what the copy button is for now. Deactivate. Deactivate is pretty self explanatory. It is to remove this listing from our shop, but not delete it if you want to temporarily hide a listing or a product, because that's essentially what each listing is from your shop on Es. But not delete it, you can use this deactivate feature and it says here, once deactivated, this listing will not appear in your public shop, meaning that customers won't be able to buy it again, just know that deactivating a product or listing doesn't affect its four month listing period. If your listing expires while inactive, you'll be asked to renew listing for a 20 cent fee before you can reactivate it. And there is no fee for reactivating a listing that hasn't expired. Know that. Okay, that is what this deactivate button is for. Then if we scroll down, we have the renew listing button which obviously lets us renew the list. This is not something that you have to do if you have your listings as automatically renewed, something that we covered in the previous video lecture. For print on demand model businesses, it is recommended to always have your listings set on automatic so that way you don't have to deal with this manual renewing of listings and then lose track and potentially hurt your business and sales. Okay. Just now, if you ever want to manually renew a listing, you can do so here through the listings tab in the shop manager. Then after that, we can change the section of this listing. This is something that we haven't really talked about too much, but on your shop, you can have different sections. And what is the section? Well, a section is similar to how you would have sections in a department store. For example, you went to a store and you see that there's a men's, a woman's section. Right? You can have this on your shop to have items in clusters divided by the type of product they are, a men's product or the women's product, or the kids product. That's what this section is. If I click Change Section, I had a variety of different sections here. I can click this drop down and then I can move it to a different section. Obviously, we haven't done that, but you can go to Manage Sections here to create new sections by clicking Add Sections. And then you can add something like men's section. Right? And then we would say add section, then say women's. Okay, now we have two out of 20 section slots. You have up to 20 sections that you can use and create on Ts. This just helps shoppers be able to buy from your store in a more cleaner way and helps to comparmentalize your store and divide it in a more neater way. We can also drag the order of these sections as you'd like. Let's just keep these two for now. And then go back here and click Change Section. Let's say I want to change the section from not having a section to a men section. I would just go ahead and do that. Selected from the draft down. And Apply. My listing has been updated to be in the men's section of my store that you'll see in the storefront, which will get to near the end of this video lecture. So we can see all the changes that we've made displayed on our public live shop. Okay, then lastly, down here we can see the Share button. The Share button here, from this dropdown in this Cog is just for us to be able to share our listing on social media. We can share it on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter, right? We can also copy the link directly. And this copies it to our clipboard that we can then paste wherever we'd like. This link take us directly to the page of this listing where it is, just not for our entire shop, but just for this particular product. This is useful if you're interested in expanding your clientele by creating a Facebook page or Storefront for your C print on demand business, you can share it to Facebook. Or if you have a Pinterest page for your business, you can share it to Pinterest. Or if you have a Twitter account for your business, you can obviously also share to Twitter. Of course, if you have other platforms that you would like to share in, such as, for example, an e mail list of customers, you can go ahead and do the direct link, but that is what this is for J, the particular product listing. Then after that, we just have the delete button, which we already talked about. This deletes our listings permanently. There's no going back from this. It's different from having a listing be deactivated. Once you delete it, you really want it gone. Make sure not to click this or mess with this unless you really want a listing to be deleted from your shop completely. Okay, that is what these three little buttons below each listing is for. They'll be underneath each and every listing that you have here on your Et in listings tab within the shop manager. Then after we've covered that, we can see here that on the right side of the screen we have some more options that allow us to change our listings or change how we view our listings. For example, first first here we have the Quick Edit button. This allows us to quickly edit our listings without having to click each one manually and go into detail. Because let me show you the difference. If I exit Quick Edit and then click my listing to Edit, as you can see here, this is a lot more in depth and in detail, right? Similarly to how it was in the previous video lecture. But let's say you don't want to see all of this because this is too right now, we can go ahead and click cancel and discard our changes. And instead go to Quick Edit up here in the upper right hand side. We can quickly edit anything regarding this listing faster, such as the title, the price, the quantity, and so much more. That is what this quick edit feature is for. Obviously, if we want to get rid of this mode, we just click Exit Quick Edit, and we're back to where we were. Then underneath that, we have the stats toggle. This just allows us to either hide or show the stats regarding our particular listings. If it is orange, that means that it is selected. And as you can see here when I clicked it, we can see things regarding the status of our listing, such as many visitors have visited this listing. How many favorites favorited this listing, right? So this is just when we have customers favoriting items, that's something that we talked about earlier. Customers can favorite items on Ts, you want them to do that because this allows them to keep track of your listing or product and maybe they can come back to it and buy it at a later time. Favorites are always a good thing to have. In addition to this, we can see the all time sales revenue and renewals of this particular listing. That's just what this stats toggle here is for. By default it'll be turned off, so it'll be great. Then here we also have the different views of the listings. We can have the default thumbnail mode, which is this little four square window type icon, or instead of a gallery or thumbnail, we can view our listings as a list. That's just what this is for the view of the listings. This doesn't affect how they will be shown to customers, this just affects how they will be shown here and the listings tab in the shop manager. Then we can sort our listings that we have on our shop by a variety of different variables. This is a really, really great tool here. We can sort our listings by title, alphabetically A to Z or to A. We can sort our listings by how much stock, right? The higher the stock or the lower the stock. We can sort our listings by the price, either low to high, high to low. And we can also list or show our listings by how soon or how late they will expire. Right? This is really useful if you have a variety of different listings and you want to sort them in a particular way. That's just what this little drop down here is for. Just know that you have this capability in the shop manager. All right, and then after that, we have the listing status. This just shows us a variety of different Type of categories our listings fall under, Whether they're active or they're drafts or they're expired, sold out or inactive. If we click these dots, it'll filter out our listings by the listings that fall in line or fall under this particular category. It'll only show, for example, active listings right now, because this is the selection on right now, of course, we only have one active listing, so therefore, we only see one thing, right? And the others cannot be selected right now because we don't have any that fall in that category or that status. Right. You can also of course filter out, only show the featured listings which are the listings that will have this little star with them associated to them. All right. And then after that, we have the sections which we talked about. Right. There's no need to really go into detail again. But remember we made two sections earlier. If I click this drop down here, we'll see the men's and women's section that we created earlier. And we did add this generic white shirt to the men's section, So that's where you see this little one next to it. And notice that when I clicked this product then appeared here. Okay, so that's just what this is for. All sections will just show all your products. Now, shipping profiles, This again, if you're a print on demand business on Es, which we are, we don't need to worry about this too much because our print on demand supplier will deal with shipping our product to our customer. No need to worry about this. This is more so if you're a mom and pop business and you personally ship out your products, a shipping profile is just a profile that you use for a set of products, depending on where you're shipping them to. For example, if you're shipping internationally, you would have an international shipping profile. If you're shipping domestically, which is within your own country or region, you would use a different shipping profile. And these typically vary by time and also by cost. Just know that that is for. We can also have a variety of different return and Exchange policies, right? We use the default one that Ts provided with us in the previous video lecture, right, the Return and Exchanges policy for 30 days. But if you want to create your own, you can definitely do so by clicking Manage. And then you can create your own personalized return policies that we'll get to later on in the Settings tab. But let's just go back to the listings tab. Okay. If we scroll down after that, we have the production partners. Again, we can filter out our listings by which production partner, or in our case, print on demand supplier is working with us. If you work with a variety of different print on demand suppliers, which you most likely will be with, then you'll see them listed here. And we created one in the previous video lecture, John's production partner. If I select it, it'll filter out the products that only use that particular supplier. Okay. So that is what that is for. Then underneath that, we have listing videos which shows us the listings that have videos associated to them. Again, if we have listings with videos, this would be here clickable. And then without videos we have one which is the generic white shirt listing. Right. We can even filter out by which listings have videos and which don't. Lastly, we can filter out our listings by which tags they have all will be the default selection. As you can see here, the listings tab has a variety of different capabilities that you can add to your listings and also manage them within the shop manager here on etc. In addition to this, you can also search your listings by their title. For example, if I'm trying to search a particular listing or listings that have Word Shirt associated to them. I would go ahead and type shirt, then press the Enter key on my keyboard. And then here we go, We would see the shirt associated listings, which in this case is our generic white shirt. Now we can also use this search bar here to search by tag and also ID number. Lastly, in the upper right hand corner, we have this black at a listing button, which is pretty self explanatory. If you're wondering, well, how do I add another listing that's brand new to my shop? You just go up here and click the at a listing button and then voila, this page look familiar to you by now, right? This is where you can add a photo to your listing at a video at the title Add who made it at the category? At the type of listing that it is the description which print on demand production partner is working with this product. The section that it'll be in, the tags, the materials, the price, the quantity, if there are any variations and so forth. Everything that we've already covered previously. That is how you add another listing to your C shop. You go to the Listings tab within the shop manager and click here where it says Add a listing. Okay. Then after the listings tab within the shop manager, we have the messages tab. This is a very important tab. Because this is where all customer communication is located. So anytime a customer is communicating with you, sending you a message about a particular listing or any other question that they have about their order. They will all appear here within the messages tab in the shop manager. So it's important that you keep an eye out on this and no worries. Ts will notify you if there is a new message by giving you a notification circle that's orange like we have here in the Finances tab. Next to the messages tab. Okay? We can filter out our messages by those that we've sent messages to or all messages or unread messages, messages that have been marked as spam, and messages that have been marked as trash. Obviously, since we just started our shop, there are no conversations or messages here. But just know that you can also filter out your messages by these different type of categories, like in your own email inbox, right, For your e mail address. Again, you can do that here. You can even also have the capability to search your particular message for a particular name or product and so forth. If you ever get lost in the shuffle and you're like, oh, I forgot about this customer, type in their name here to go to their message directly. Instead of scrolling endlessly, you can go ahead and type it here. Now to compose a brand new message, you would click here. This black button that says Compose here in the upper right hand corner. This allows you to type in the name of the recipient, the subject of the message, or the title and the message itself. We can even add images to our messages, or we can also use custom replies that C has pre written for us that we can just click use. This is useful if you want to save time and don't want to type everything out yourself. You can use the that C has created for you already. You can even actually create your own saved replies. That way, you can create your own pre made and pre written replies. Or responds to certain things. Such as, for example, let's say you want to thank a customer. Every time they place an order, you can create a saved reply. And every time you send one, you just change the name and then click Send. And then every customer gets that automated pre written reply. So that way you don't have to keep on retyping it manually by yourself one by one. That will be stored here in your library of saved replies that you can categorize and so forth. We have one already for custom orders personalization, one for customers that you want them to leave reviews for your store. We also have pre written messages for shipping times and size and Fits. But if you want to create your own one, you can click your word says Add, and you can either create a brand new category or a brand new saved reply. Which will be that automated type of message or E mail to the customer that we already talked about. Such as, for example, thanking them for placing an order. And then you can add a category here to add it two. Or make one, for example, such as customer thank you. Right? And then we would click Save. Then we would have one here that we can add it to specifically. That's how this works. Okay, that's what saved replies is for. Then auto reply here. This dropdown here is that we can create now a new way to auto reply to customers. We can set up weekly auto replies to customers, or we can also create temporary auto replies. This is if you're someone that's busy or gets a lot of customer inquiries and you're probably not available at that instant moment. You can create auto replies for your customers and messages your Etsy shop to reassure them that you're on it and just give them three to five business days for you to be able to respond to their inquiry. You may have seen that big businesses do this. Let's say for example, you send them an e mail and then they automatically respond back to you saying, thank you so much for contacting us. We will get back to you in three to five business days. Let's say you want that for your shop. You can set this up here using your auto reply feature that Ts provides you with for your shop. But again, that's getting a little ahead of ourselves here since we're just starting out, just knowing that this is what this stuff is for. Hopefully this helps you understand how this all works and it is laid out a bit more. Again, that's the messages tab in the Ts shop manager. After that, we have the orders and shipping tab. As you probably assume, this tab deals with all our customer orders and also shipping. Anytime a customer replaces an order, it will be listed and populated here within this tab here. It says, easily managed orders and shipping stay organized and up to So from an order place to an order shipped, all the updates will be here. And as you can see on the screen right now, this is an example of what a shop manager orders and shipping tab looks like for a store. In this case, my store that has a variety of orders and you can see their status, most of them are listed as delivered or shipped. Right, again, back to our new store, you don't see anything yet because we don't have any new orders. But once you do, you'll see the status change depending on where it is in the order process. It'll go from order processed to order shipped, to order delivered. If we click here where it says, take a tour. Go through this together, We can take full control of our orders. We can select multiple orders for bulk actions and so forth. By clicking the check boxes here, we can customize our workflow as, again, as I told you earlier, each order will have a different step. This is useful to you as a store owner because it'll help you keep track of where each order is in the process of being created, printed, shipped, and delivered. Right? These new progress steps, orders, help you stay organized and buyers won't see this, they're just for you to keep note. But they're useful to let you know where each order is in the process being shipped and delivered to the customer. We can also again, filter out our orders by a variety of different variables that we're going to get to in a second. Much like we saw earlier in the listings tab. Some of these include by shipping, date, by destination, by delivery status, and so much more. We can also save time and money with Ts shipping. Again, something we don't have to worry about because we are a print on demand business model. All right, obviously since we just started our store, again, we don't have any orders, but you can already see everything that this tab offers you. First, again, here we have a search bar where we can search our order by the name of the customer or the title of the product and so forth. This allows us to filter out our orders to find them faster. We can also see down here that we have a variety of different things that we can do. We have new orders that will appear here, and we can even change how many orders per page we want to be shown. The default will be 20. And we can also filter by the completed tab, the orders that have been completed, that are done, that have been delivered to the customer. This is really useful because you don't want new orders and completed orders to be mix in the same space because that can make it confusing for you. You want to be able to know which orders are still in process of being delivered to the customer and which are already delivered and completed. Because that way that will help you keep track and manage each one and the process of where each one is to the customer. That way there are no potential shipping delays or problems with the order being delivered to the customer. Right. Again, we can also manually mark orders as completed. If we have an order and let's say C is not updating this or you want to be in charge of that, You can manually check item here or an order here. And then click Complete Order, And then it'll be sent here to the completed orders section. More actions just include other actions that we can see later on in our store, such as providing a refund or messaging the customer and so forth once you actually start getting orders. Then here on the right side of the screen, we can see that we have again, a variety of filtering and sorting options for our orders. We can sort our orders by newest to oldest, by the ship, by date or their destination. Right? So if you want to see, for example, the orders that you have that are the newest orders at the top, which will be the default selection, you'll see a little check mark next to it. And then here the newest orders will appear at the top, while older orders will appear at the bottom. Okay. And then we can also of course filter this our number of by the ship by date if they're overdue by their ship by date or if they're due today. If they're due tomorrow, if they're due within a week, or if there's no estimate, C does this as well based on your store settings. It also reminds you when the customer is expected for you to ship the order by. That's what this is. Again, we can also filter out by the destination, is it going to the United States or International? And lastly, if it's eligible for shipping, again, we don't need to worry about this. Of course, we can always reset the filters if we want to go back to the default settings, which are what we have here on the screen. This is what the orders and shipping button is for in the shop manager. One thing I will say though, before moving on is that you want to make sure that your processing times are accurate. What is the processing time? It's how long it'll take you to actually ship out the product to the customer, because let's say you placed an order on a shop. Immediately get shipped, right? You typically have to wait a few days for the shop to actually ship out that order to you. Because they either need to print out the item or find it within their warehouse or stock and then put it in a box and then ship it out to you. Same applies here for your print on demand business with Ets. Once a customer places an order on your shop on Es, you immediately don't get to ship it out to them because the print on demand supplier first has to get the information of the product, the information of the customer, print out the product, then package it and ship it out to the customer. That takes a couple of days. You've got to make sure that you take note of this. Later on, when we talk about selecting print on demand suppliers, we'll talk about one of the things that are important to think about each one's processing times. You want this to be as less as possible because obviously customers love getting their products as fast as possible. If you have inaccurate processing times, customers will begin to get grumbly and also begin to complain because they are not seeing their products land on the doorstep as fast as predicted, because you listed that incorrectly on your C shop. It's just something to think about. Always make sure that your processing times are on point, are the same as what the print on demand supplier or production partner is saying they'll be. Each one has a variety of different times. Some take three days, some take a week, and so forth. All right, after that, we have the star seller tab. The star seller tab is relatively new, but this is a great tab for Etsy shops to stand out. Let's say you've been doing really good on C, right? You've been shipping your orders on time. You've been accurate. Your customers are satisfied. They're happy. They're leaving good reviews and so forth. Everything is going great. Then you will get a positive reputation. Es will reward you with, by making you or labeling your shop rather as a star seller. As you can see here, it says star seller celebrating the best in customer experience. Badges tell buyers your shop stands out when it comes to service. On the first of every month, we'll check to see if you've earned any badges based on your shop's performance over the past three months. You'll be eligible to earn badges 90 days after you make your first sale on Ets. You may be wondering, well, what are some things that qualify me for this purple star seller badge on Ets? Well, if we scroll down we can see here that are about five different things that help launch to be eligible for this desired badge. You have to have at least a 95% response rate to customers. You have to have at least a 4.8 rating on your store. So this is based off customer reviews. You have to have at least 95% accuracy on on time shipping and tracking, meaning that your customer gets the product on their doorstep by the date that you said it would be or before. You have to have a minimum of five orders and you have to have at least made $300 in sales in the past 90 days. As 7. Editing Your Shop's Storefront: All right, welcome back. Now that we've covered the rest of the tabs within the shop manager, now let's cover the final part of the shop manager, which is its own section, which is called the Sales Channel section, here at the bottom left. As you can see here, when I click this little pencil icon, it takes me to this page, which is our Storefront, except in edit mode. We've seen our Storefront earlier. As you can see on the screen right now. This is not in edit mode. This is what it looks like to the public. Again, back to here in the C shop manager, we are in the sales channel section. In the editing our storefront section. So now that we are here, it's important to talk about this area within the shop manager, in this entire area within the sales channels. When we click this little pencil icon, lets us edit and modify and customize our Es storefront. Everything that we've covered in the previous video lecture dealt with the list things and other back end things. This deals with more front end things. And what I mean with front end is the more obvious and external things that your customers will be seeing, which is your store front, right? Much like you enter a store because you like the window display or whatever have you. You want up your store front, it becomes appealing to the customer and it's eye catching, right? As we can see right now since we just started our store, it looks quite bland. There's no graphics, no banners, no icons, and so forth. But in this video lecture, we'll go through that and a little bit more. Not to worry, let's just go ahead and get started here. First things first, within the sales channel section of the shop manager, in E, we see here that it has banner option. It says here, banner to showcase your brand enlistings In case you're wondering what a banner is, a banner is a horizontal image that appears above your shop. And this is good to create a banner, therefore appealing to the eye. It's eye catching and your customer is immediately reeled. Now, for the sake of this video, I'm just going to add a banner for the meanwhile, that is just a placeholder, so you can see what it's like to have a banner. But before we get to that, you can see here that we have a variety of banner styles to choose from. We can have a big banner that fills the top of your shop with one big image. And you can see the preview here and the size dimensions of the image that it needs to be on the right side. Or we can have a mini banner that adds a visual pop while keeping the focus on your listings. This is up to you, or we can just have none and have no banner at all. Right. Then below, we have two more options that are available with an Etsy upgrade to Et plus that we talked about in the previous video lecture. But let's just go ahead and add a big banner and click Done. Now we have here a big gray horizontal space. To add an image, let's choose an image from our computer. Then click here, this banner image that I created. And click open. There we go. It's adding the banner that says, John's new shop. As you can see here on the upper right hand corner, I have a little trash icon. This just means that I can delete this. I change my mind, but we don't want that. At below, it tells you what you are editing. This is really great in Ets. It says here below, you're editing your banner. I can either cancel this change to revert everything that I changed back to how it was, or I can save this change to actually apply it. I'm going to go ahead and click Save. To save this banner for my shop, that is the banner section within our Es store front. We have other things here. If we look below, for example, here we have the title of My shop and the shop title that I can add, right? Describe your shop in one sentence. Keep it short and simple. What do you sell? Were you based? This is like a little tag line for your shop. This is important to add because this will appear in the Google search results preview. Typically, what you want to add is something that's related to the business, right? For my business bunny papa. You can see that below, I added your number one shop for bunny fans or the number one shop for bunny fans rather, right? That type of tag line is what you should be thinking about adding here in your shop title. Since we're just going through this, I'm not going to add one, but just know that this is what this shop title is for. Okay, next to that we have this little icon here of a little store front. This is where we add our shop icon. So much like we added our shop banner. Another graphic that we can add to our shop is our shop icon. And this is important to add because you want to make your shop stand out. And also to start creating a brand so people know who you are right at the gate, right? This is something that we'll talk about more later on in the course when we're talking about building a shop brand. But uploading a shop icon is definitely extremely recommended to customize your shop. Again, it tells you here the size, requirements, and what type of file of the picture it must be. Let's go ahead and choose a file from our computer and add this logo here that I created to add to our shop. We can adjust your crop, no need to do And click Save. You can see this is what it would look like if I click Looks Good. It'll add it to my shop. We're satisfied with this. And then let's click Looks Good. Of course, if you're not happy with this, you can click, go back and change it to another image. But typically, a logo should be simple, such as only one word, or one letter even. Or just a simple graphic that makes you noticeable and recognizable. All right, so let's click. Looks good. There we go. That shop icon has been added to our shop in our Etsy store front. We've just made two changes here. If you notice these little pencil icons all over, this just is an edit option, right? So we can edit it if pencil option, it means that it is an editable option. After that, we have here where it says no location set. We can add a location to our shop by clicking Edit here, and we can start typing the name of where we're located in my situation. I'm recording this from New York, I'm just going to add New York City, New York to be specific, and click Save. This is just suggested to help people find. Customers can also find you as well. Maybe they want to buy from somewhere that's local or whatever have you. You want to add your location. It also gives your shop some legitimacy. You definitely want to make sure that you have this added to your at C. Therefore, we've made now three changes to our storefront on C, the banner, the shop icon. And we've also added our location all the way here in the far right, you can see that it says John and has a picture of a default icon. This is to edit your owner photo. As we talked about in the previous video lecture on Ts, you have the ability to add the owners of your C shop to Ets. Then this will be displayed here in the E storefront. This is good to add because Ts buyers and customers like to see who the owners of these businesses are. And it creates a more personalized touch to your business. Therefore, adding your owner photo, such as a photo of yourself or your team, is really, really a good idea. And when you do this, customers will be able to click on your picture and read your bio and so much more. This is separate from your business obviously in terms of, for example, your business is logo and your business is banner. This is just for the owner of the business that's associated to this business, right? The account that's associated, of course, that's why it says there, John, and has that picture there. Theoretically, what I would do is I would go ahead and add a picture of myself to there, so that way I'm recognizable. This is, for example, my personal es, account layout, home page, as you can see here, it says, John's new shop. That way customers know that this business is owned by me and I'm associated to that business. That's just what the Ets owner accounts are for. Let's go back to where we were. You have the option to customize that as well if you want to add a more personal touch to your business, and I recommend doing so that way customers can feel more at ease and see that you're a legit business and there's actually someone that's a human actually operating behind this and not just a robotic type thing. Right? This helps add a more personalized touch to business. As you'll see throughout this course, that's very important in customers, and buyers love to have those personalized touches. And this is why this shop manager adds those things because it recommends and pushes you in that direction. Anyway, as a business owner on Ts, below that, there's just a contact button for customers to click to contact you directly. Instead of contacting your business, Should customers have a question or should something arise that they want to talk with you directly instead of your business? They can do so through here. That is what that is for. Let's scroll down and see what else we have here. First things, we have this featured area to highlight listings. This is something that we've talked about earlier on in this course, that we can have a featured area to highlight the listings that we desire. They can either be our best sellers or maybe we're selling a themed collection that we want at the top. As you can see here for my business bunny papa, I have four featured Christmas items because it was Christmas time and I was trying to promote my Christmas line for my business. You can do the same here. You can use this featured area to highlight listings that you want to promote more than your other listings. You can have a variety of ways to show it. For example, we can choose our featured layout here to be either a standard grid, which is four listings, or up to four listings with equally sized photos, or we can have none at all. Right. This is optional and if you have T plus, you can have a mixed grid showing up there. This is just up to you if you want to have featured listings. It's recommended to update these pretty often because it helps give your business a more modern touch and it helps customers see that you are actually doing upkeep, right? You're updating your business as the holidays pass by offering or showing relevant things here. It helps give the impression that, oh, this business here is actually being updated on the dot. And also helps customers sort out through things that you may want to sell or sell to them. That's what this is for. It says here we can change a layout, which is where we just were, or we can edit the Q, which is if you have a lot of listings here, you can add a queue where these listings are in a certain order. Since we only have one, there's only one shown right now, but this is what this is for. Hypothetically, we have three other listings or two other listings filling up this section. That's what this is for. It says below here, you're editing your featured products. This is what this is, this featured products section in your T C store front. Let's go ahead and click Save. So now we have a featured items section in our Storefront. If we scroll down, we can see here that it says Add and renew items from the listings manager. If we click this, it'll just take us to where we were earlier on in the previous video lecture. It'll take us to the list tab within the shop manager. But let's go back to the sales channel. Storefront, add and renew items from the listings manager. This is just another way to get to the listings tab within the store or shop manager. That's just what that is for. Below that, we have the at a shop announcement feature. This is also something that we talked about in the previous video lecture. This is where we can make an announcement to our customers. You may have seen this in other shops and so forth where it's like spend $35 to get free shipping. Or you can also make an announcement to tell your customers that will be gone from certain dates. Or you can even give your customers updates here regarding shipping delays and so forth. As you can see here, it says, Use this space to share important up to date information with buyers. You can mention new products and special promotions. Just keep it short so they can start shopping. This is important because this will appear near the top of your storefront. You can see on my shop and my business bunny papa, there is at the top where the announcement shows up. You want to keep this brief because this will be obviously read by customers first before they get to your products and listings. So just make sure that you always keep this up to date and relevant and if there's any old news to delete it because it may conflict with what's going on or the time period you're in and your customers may get confused. Right? So just make sure to use this announcement section for things that you really want to promote or announce, such as free shipping deals, discounts, or shipping delays, or any other sorts of things. And then if we scroll down, we just see more related things, updates. And then if we scroll down even more, we can see that we have reached the video section. We can add a video and up to five photos. It says here, Share photos of your process, work space, or anything that can inspire your buyers. In this section of your store front, which is about section, this is where some more detailed things can go regarding your business. This is not so much for your products or to promote your products or to sell your products. This is more to talk about the action that goes behind the scenes with your business. Obviously, if you're a print on demand business, you won't be filling this out with too much detail. This is more so for mom and pop shops that, for example, have a warehouse or a whole family working on this. But you can still definitely add a video here to show what you do, how you design your products, and so much more to help customers see how the process works for your business and so forth. So you can add a video to show here a little bit about what you do. Or below. It says that you can add up to five photos with captions and you can share photos about your process workspace or anything. Again, that might inspire your buyers. This is not required, but it helps give your business yet again, another personalized touch. And we can also add stories here to our shop. In case you don't know this, you can add a story headline. And then a story here. It says here in the headline, sum up what you do in one sentence or just write something catchy. And then below it says, how did you get started? What inspires you? We know each seller's story is unique. Tell yours here. This would be a good section or area to, for example, write about the beginnings of your business. What made you start this business? Was there a problem or a gap in the market that you wanted to fill with your business? Things like that you can add here. Customers can then scroll down and read it should they choose to. That's what you can do here in this section, adding stories to your C Storefront. Additionally, if you have social media or websites that are, for example, Facebook pages for your business, or Twitter accounts, or Pinterest pages, or even a website that you own. You can add it here in the around the web area of your C storefront. And you have a variety of different things that you can add from such as, again, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, your website or a blog. And then you can just type the URL here and then click Save. Right? But again, this is just if you have those social media platforms or a website, a separate website from your C shop that you want to add here to your C Storefront. You can definitely add that there. And then below that we just have the shop members section, where again, you can add other people that are key players in your business. You can definitely do that, for example, if you're going to be running this print on demand business with, for example, a friend, a partner, family member, whatever have you. You can add a personal bio with some fun facts about that member that is also a part of your business. You can add a photo for them, their name, their role, or they the owner or the assistant curator, designer, yada, yada, yada. Or you can even have your own custom role. Right. And then give a little brief description about them and what they do. That's what that is for the shop member. Then we have shop policies. Again, we talked about this in the previous video lecture. You can use the default Return and Exchange Policy that Ts provides, which is 30 days. But again, you can set up your own policies should you choose to do so. If we click here where it says try it. Now we're going to be taken to the shop policies section within the C shop manager, which we covered already in the previous video lecture. But just know that that's another way to get there. You can create your own policies for year business, for either shipping times or for returns. Right, Which is important. All right, let's go back. So that is what that is for then. If we scroll down, we can see that we have the frequently asked questions section of your C storefront. In fact, you can have a frequently asked questions section in your C storefront. For example, let's say you're getting a lot of common questions in your messages or your inbox, and you want to answer these through the frequently asked questions section, so that way customers can just be referred to there instead of having to answer every single time. You can definitely do that. You can add an FAQ to your shop and you can add a variety of different frequently asked questions such as questions about orders or sizing details, care instructions, gift wrapping and packaging, wholesale availability, even a custom question that you come up with on your own. And then you can give an answer right here. That way in case a customer that has a question lands on your storefront, they'll have it answered right then and there without even having to contact you anymore about it. Because it's in your FAQ in your frequently asked questions section, of course. So remember that information in your FAQ's may not contradict Ess policies or your own shop policies. That's obvious because you don't want to make things confusing. But just know, for example, if let's say someone keeps asking you or customers in general keep asking you about how long is it going to take to process the item to ship out to the customer. You can add an FAQ here that says, what are your processing times and then answer something like, typically our processing times are 3-5 business days or it varies depending on the product. This of course, depends on the print on demand production partner that you'll be working with. All right, then if we scroll down, the last thing that we have here in the C store front that we can edit is the seller details. This is for complying with the European Union. Again, this by default will be set as private individual because most business owners and especially specifically print on demand business owners are private individuals. But just in case that you're not, you can go ahead and edit this and change to be a trader. This is likely not the case, especially if you're going to be a print demand business owner. So don't worry about this too much. You'll be typically just one person that's selling through the print on demand model on T. I would suggest to leave this alone, but you can add your contact info here and I recommend you do so. That way it's easier to contact you should any questions arise. Right. That way customers can easily contact you. And also so you are in line with the European Union standards. This is just what this is for, the sellers section within your C store front. But just like that, that is the last part of your Et storefront, all the way here at the bottom. If we scroll all the way to the top, we are back to where we were and this is what our shop will look like so far to customers. If I click here where it says View Shop in the bottom right hand corner, it'll take me to my shop and what it will look like to the average Et customer. As you can see here, we have the banner that we added. We have the store icon, the location on top of that. We also have the featured items section which we added together. Right. Again, if it looks a little plain, not to worry, but again, this is just because we're getting started with this. When you go through this process yourself, you'll be adding much more. You'll be adding your own businesses logo and banner that either you designed or hired someone to design for you or whatever have you. We'll talk about this more later on in this course when we're cultivating and creating our own business brand. But just know that this is what the sales channel section is for within the shop manager. Should you ever want to edit here C Store Front? Instead of editing your listings or products, make sure you click here where it says Sales Channel and click this little pencil icon to be taken to the Etsy store front of your shop. So therefore, you can edit it, so you can add things or remove things that you don't like or outdated. I hope this video clarified any questions that you may have had regarding how to edit and customize your es shop store front. I hope this helped. 8. Finding Your Niche: Welcome back and welcome to the next section of the course, Brainstorming and Researching. In this part of the course, we'll learn all about generating your own ideas for your own print on demand business with Ts. Along with choosing your print on demand production partners and much more. Now that we've learned all about how to create an Ts account, how to navigate the Ts shop manager, and how to set up our own shop on Es. It's time to move on to the brainstorming and researching phase of launching your own print on demand business with Ets. First, let's begin with the basics, Finding Your Niche. This video lecture, we're going to talk about how to find your own niche. But first, we must ask the question, what is a niche? Well, a niche is a subcategory that a business focuses on within a larger category of products and customers. For example, think of the category of pet owners. That's a huge market that entails millions of potential customers. Unless you're already an established company, like let's say Petsmart or Petco, you'll get lost in the sea of competition within the pet owners category. Therefore, a niche lets you focus on and target a specific portion of a broader or larger category. For example, within the massive pet owners category, your niche could be Chihuahua lovers. Notice how I mentioned a specific dog breed, as even the dog owners subcategory within the pet owners category is still much too big. Focusing on a specific dog breed can allow you to build a business without as much competition and will make you stand out to customers. This will be your specific targeted niche. This might even also make you a reliable option for customers to go to when they're looking for something that's related to your niche. In this case, Chihuahua Lovers. You sell certain specific products that caters to a certain type of customer. All right, So that is what a niche is. Now this isn't to say that you should stick to only one niche. Of course, in fact, you can fuse multiple niches to expand your customer base and presence within a market. I did this with my business bunny papa. The entire basis of my business was to focus on rabbit themed products and designs for, not rabbits, but for their owners, rabbit loving humans and of course, anyone else that owns a rabbit. Instead of just focusing on the rabbit lover's niche, I also targeted the rabbit owners niche as well. These two niches allowed me to fuse two similar niches in order to broaden my business and my potential customers. You should do the same. When you think of potential niches, think of one or two that are similar to your chosen niche that you can combine. However, keep in mind that the niches must be similar to each other. Because if you try to combine two niches that are completely irrelevant and separate to each other, such as, for example, vegetarians and meat eaters. That's most likely not going to work due to the customer profiles being complete opposites. And you'll be setting yourself up to fail In order to combine niches successfully. They must overlap with each other and be similar already. So now that you know what a niche is, the question becomes, how do I find my niche? Well, there are various ways to do this. To this video lecture, I have attached a brainstorming activity where you can list various niches that you might be interested in running a business with. This is based on your already existing passions and interests. You may already even have some niches in mind that are being generated or may have come into this course with a pre existing niche in mind. However, if you're still struggling to generate any ideas for niches to start a business with, then just think about what you love or what you're passionate about. Is it Chihuahuas? Is it Parrots? Is it Guitars? Right? Think of your interests and things that you already love. This is recommended because building a business on something that you're passionate about is something that will make it easy to run a business in. And also something that will feel fun and not like work. However though, remember to be specific, but not too specific when it comes to selecting or choosing a niche. Your niche should be big enough to have a sizable customer base, but not too big that you get lost in the shuffle from all the already existing competition from other businesses that also, of course, target the same customers from your intended or desired niche. Now a great way to check if your chosen niche is big enough is by checking Es itself. Just go to the Ts website and type in keywords related to your niche in the search bar when searching for products as if you were going to buy something. For example, if you search Chihuahua, then a dropdown of recommended searches will populate below. These are based on the most popular searches that customers have typed into this search bar. Do this for your intended niche. That way you'll see how much products are going to generate when you type in that search term and hit Enter, for example, if your niche targets Chihuahua owners and lovers. Just type in Chihuahua and Shirt. Those two keywords combined. You should then see a sizable amount of product listings related to these search terms. As you noticed, when I typed in those terms, again, like I told you just earlier, a list will pop up below of related search terms. Use these related search terms to also help give you ideas for your niche and to see if your niche is actually being searched for in the market. That way, you'll know that there are actual customers out there looking for products related to what you're intending to sell in. Also known as of course, your niche. This is a great way to find out and figure out how much competition there is on Ets already and how sizable your niche is, right? So if you see thousands of products, that's a good sign. If you see hundreds of products, that's a good sign. But of course, if you see only tens of products or no search results, then that means your niche is too specific and that's not a good pick. So keep this in mind when you're doing the brainstorming activity and jotting down niches. Make sure to do research for every single one on Etsy and use this little tip to help figure out and find out how big your niche is. And if you can find and create a little market or business within that niche. Another great tool to check on the popularity and size of your niche is by using this website called an rank is a very useful website and tool. And the best part is that it's free. All you have to do is make an account first, which is easy by going on the website and registering. And then rank lets you search terms related to your niche and lets you see how popular it ranks on Ts and the price points of product listings in this niche category. As you can see, it goes much more into detail than just using the Ts search bar on the C website. Because rank tells you the specific price points, the number of product listings, the popularity within the C marketplace for this niche or search term, and so much more if you're really into doing your research, this hardcore and really want to look at every single data point to analyze how profitable or successful you can be with a certain niche, then rank is a great website and tool that I recommend for you to use to find out if your niche is going to be one that works with Etsy or not. Definitely keep in mind these two tips to find out how profitable and sizable, and scalable, which is another term for sizable, your niche can be on Etsy, both by using the Ts website search bar and also the rank website. As you decide on your niche, I definitely recommend doing research by using these two tools. Now, before moving on, remember that in order to have a solid niche, it must be one that you stick to. This is why it's important for you to do your research first before going and choosing a niche. Because once you select a niche for your print on demand business, you cannot be changing it all the time. You must stick to it. Changing niches after starting your business is not a good idea. It's not a good business move either. As you'll basically have to start all over again from scratch the product designs to your entire brand. And this will confuse and alienate customers. Remember, before you continue on ahead in this process of launching your own print on demand business with Ets, make sure to have a solid niche. Or two, locked down that you feel comfortable creating a business with. Again, these are the summarized steps to find your niche. One, list your passions and interests within the activity attached to this video. Lecture two, evaluate if your niche has a sizable market. Three, research your niche online for competition. And four, choose your niche after doing the research. In the next video, we will talk about the product designs for your products in your print on demand business on Ets. And whether you should use custom made designs for your prints or pre made ones. I hope this helps. 9. Using Custom Designs vs. Pre-made Designs: Welcome back. In this video lecture, we will be talking about using custom designs versus using pre made designs for your print on demand business with etc. In the previous video lecture, we talked about finding your niche and what a niche is. By now, it is expected that you have completed the brainstorming activity and have a niche or two locked down and ready to go for you to launch a print on demand business. If you're still unsure about your niche, Then before moving on, I recommend you go back to the previous video lecture and work on the brainstorming activity to get one locked down. This is very important because before moving on, you need to have a niche in mind. Therefore, you can then begin designing the products for this niche. All right, so with that being said, now let's focus on the next step in the process of creating a print on demand business to launch with on Etsy, which is of course, our product designs. This is an integral and essential part of our business and a large part of it as well. Because our product designs will be the crux of our business and what we'll be selling to our customers in print on demand. And in the world of print on demand, we have two main ways in which we can sell products. We can either design the products ourselves from scratch or we can use presets that are already available. Now I'll be talking about the pros and cons of each. Then you'll know which one is better suited for you in your business. Let's get started. First things first, I will be talking about using custom designs. Using custom designs, what I mean by that is basically creating and designing the print from scratch, meaning that you'll be doing this yourself or that you'll be hiring an artist to do this for you. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. For my business bunny papa, I actually designed all of the prints for the products myself because I actually had a lot of previous art talent in my own repertoire. Now, not everyone has art talent or graphic design experience, and that's perfectly okay. A lot of people often say, oh, I don't have any art talent, I don't have any graphic design talent. Can I still design products or can I still design prints for the print on and products? Yes. You most definitely can. There's no problem with that. But that being said, let's dive into the first route that you might potentially be taking for your print on a mand business, which is using custom designs. Using custom designs for print on demand products has its benefits and also its disadvantages. Basically the pros and the cons. Let's get started by talking about the pros of designing your own designs for your products. Some pros include the following. You get to design whatever you want whenever you want. Indeed, if you are in control of your designs, you choose your own schedule, You choose the way the designs look like, and so forth. For example, if you're in the Chihuahua niche, you get to design Chihuahuas wearing all sorts of costumes, of all sorts of colors, and so forth. It's up to your liking and your discretion. That's one pro and then the other one would be that you're able to be more unique as your business will sell original designs. If you're designing the designs yourself from scratch or hiring someone to do so. Obviously you have the advantage that you'll be a lot more unique and that no other business will be selling designs like this because they come only from you, your mind, and your taste. Another advantage or pro is that you don't have to worry about another business selling your designs as you retain full rights to your own original work. I just talked about this, right? If you do decide to design your print on a man product prints yourself, you retain full rights to the work that you originally created. And of course you're protected from being stolen from or whatever on Etsy. You don't have to worry about that headache that, oh, a business stole my designs and so forth, because again, you retain your full rights. Another pro is that you don't have to design the design and the prints yourself. You can hire a freelance artist via sites such as fiber, which we briefly talked about before. This is also called outsourcing. Outsourcing your work. What I mean by this is that let's say again, as we talked about earlier, you don't have any art talent or graphic design experience and the like. That's okay. You can go on fiber and in fact, you can hire a freelance artist design your product prints for you. Let's go to fiber then. Let me show you what I mean right here on the search bar. If I go ahead and type in print on demand design and then press Enter on my keyboard, I can search for this term on fiber. Then you'll see that thousands and thousands of search results will pop up of services from freelancers such as artists and graphic designers that are selling their services. Them to be able to design your print on demand product designs and prints for you. As you can see here. If we scroll down, I see here, it says, I will do custom graphic T shirt design and merged design. Or if we scroll down, I will create T shirt designs for C print on demand, five star rating from this seller from as low as $30 if you're on a budget. This is really great for you. The great thing is that a lot of these services, and freelancers, and artists on fiber allow you to have multiple revisions if you're not satisfied with the work that they submit to you the first time, right? As you can see here, they do hoodies, shirts and sweaters and so much more. If you're definitely building a business that's selling these different types of products, you don't have to worry because on fiber you can find someone that is willing to design your product designs for you and you don't need any prior design or art experience yourself. On top of this, as you can see, it says here, it's copyright and trademark checked all of the designs that this seller will design for you. You don't have to worry about sharing profits with or worry about getting sued. They're completely yours to use for commercial purposes. As you can see here, the seller is offering five initial concepts, allows commercial use, and offers unlimited revisions. Which means that if you're not satisfied with the work, you can keep rejecting it or declining it until you're satisfied with what they've designed. Fiber is a really great website because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of designers and artists that are out there selling their services to business owners like yourself so they can design your prints for your print on demand business for you. Definitely keep fiber in mind when it comes to, of course, the custom designs route if you'll be taking that for your print on demand business. However, if you don't want to hire an artist or a designer to design your prints for your print, a band business for you and you want to design your designs yourself. But don't want to spend a lot of money on software such as Photoshop and the like. Then I recommend the free online tool that's called Canva. Canva is an online free graphic design tool that is especially useful for designing prints for print on a band businesses. As you can see here on the Canva website, all you need to do is create an account and that's free just by using your e mail and a password. And it says here, what will you design today? As you can see here, we have a variety of different categories. We can design popular designs or from marketing, or from gifts, for stationery, or for clothing, which is, of course, what will be most related for print on a man. Businesses. As you can see here, they have four different subcategories for clothing. They have hoodies, T shirts, tote bags, and sweatshirts. Now if we click Create Blank, for example, Create, Create a blank T shirt. You'll be taking to the Canva design tool which looks like this. They even give you tips and tricks to create a brilliant design on a blank canvas. That'll be the print on a man product that you'll be printing and shipping out to your customers in your business. As you can see here, it says the design will be printed on the front of the shirt. You can see a preview. Over here, you can see some tips like using a fontsize of 16 or above, so it's easy to read and so forth. We just click here, it says start designing. And it says here, start with the templates are fully customizable. Drag one onto the canvas, then you can add text over here or use the keyboard shortcut. Then you can also, of course, upload your own images from your own computer, right, and add them onto the blank canvas. And of course, you can also share and download your prints to social media. If you work in a collaborative environment with a team for your business, you can share these designs with them as well. Okay, so here is our blank canvas over here on the left side, we have a bunch of pre made preset designs here that we can just drag and drop onto our blank canvas. So that can therefore be our print or shirt or whatever have you. Now again, these are using preset designs. I wouldn't recommend this if you're using the custom designs route or method. But instead what I would do is just play around with the text or the drawing tool for example. Right, let's see, I want to undo this over here. I just click this back arrow. As you can see over here, I'm just using the different tools that Canva provides. Okay, again, Canva is a really great graphic design tool. It offers a lot for free that you can add to create and start generating your own custom prints for your on demand business. As you can see here, just add a text. I can also drag it around. Move it up, move it down, and so forth. It's pretty intuitive to use this design tool, this Canvaas design tool. But again, should you want to brush up on your canvas skills or tutorials online on Youtube, and you can also take a Canva course or whatever have you. But it's pretty easy, it's pretty straightforward, and it's free. That's the best part. There are paid plans that offer more, but the Canva free plan alone offers more than 250,000 free templates and offers its classic Dragon Drop editor for easy customization. Again, you need to learn Photoshop, you don't need to dollars on Photoshop or fancy graphic design software. You can just use Canva for free, which is an online tool that allows you to design any designs for any type of product. For your print on a man business. I definitely recommend Canva. All right, so now that we've talked about some of the pros or advantages of choosing to go for the custom designs route with a print on a man business. Now let's talk about the cons or the disadvantages of designing your own custom designs for your print on a man business. The first con is that it is sometimes harder to attract customers. This is normal because of course, you're offering something that's unique, that's original. So customers might be hesitant at first to buy from your unique designs. That's definitely one thing that can happen, of course, not always, Not in every business and not in every niche. Another con is that, of course, art, talent or experience with drawing and graphic design is required. If you're going to design your own designs yourself and not hire anybody, you're going to have to need a degree of art talent or graphic design experience to be able to not only draw, but also, of course, upload the files onto image editing software and graphic design software online. A third con is that of course, brainstorming design ideas can take a while to come up with. This is definitely more time consuming and requires a lot more thinking and brainstorming. Another con is that if you're going to hire somebody such as an artist or designer to design your prints for your business, for you, it may take a while to find the right artist or designer that design your designs the way you like them or the way you have them in mind. Certainly, it'll require a lot of trial and error, especially if it's over the Internet to find somebody that matches your ideas for your products and your prints in your print on demand business. That's definitely another downside to hiring somebody. All right, great. Now that we've discussed the pros and cons of using your own custom designs for your print on demand business. Now let's discuss the pros and cons of the second option within your print on demand business in terms of designs, which is of course using pre made designs for print on demand. Pre made designs are different because these are designs that are already designed and created for you to just drag and drop and use. What does this mean? Well, this means that these designs have already been designed by somebody. They typically often don't have copyright associated to them. They're free for commercial use. But as we'll talk about in 1 second, there's a lot of advantages and disadvantages to this as well. Let's get started and start discussing this. Let's talk about the pros first of using Prem designs. One pro of using Preme designs is that you don't have to draw your own designs from scratch. This is pretty obvious. As I just mentioned earlier, these are designs that have already been designed. You don't have to touch anything. You don't have to customize anything. Should you choose not to? They're already there for you to just import onto a blank canvas, such as a blank shirt or a blank hoodie, or a blank whatever that you can then send to be printed out and shipped to the customer. Another pro is that it is fast and easy to dragon drop preset or pre made designs onto print on demand products. Again, for the blank canvases, all you do is one click Dragon Drop and import them onto the blank canvas. As we just saw earlier on Canva, which I just one click that preset design onto the canvas. That's all it took. I didn't even have to change or type anything. Another pro is that lots of print on demand partners offer hundreds of built in designs to use. We'll talk about this later on, but here's an example from the print on demand production partners of printful and Print Fine. As you can see, they have a bunch of pre made and built in designs that you can just drag and drop onto their blank canvases for their shirts, hoodies and so forth that you can then use for your print on a man business on Etsy. These pre built in designs are free to use for anyone that's using print or print F in this case for their print on a man products. That's very useful in time saving. Another prose that most of these built in designs from production partners for print on demand are free to use. You don't have to pay. They come built in into their service. All you do is dragon drop. Dragon drop one click. Lastly, of course, if you're going to be using PremA designs, then no design or art skills are required. All that's required is having a good artistic eye. Don't worry if you don't have any prior experience with design or drawing, if you're going to be using Prem designs. Now let's talk about the cons of using Prem designs. The first con or disadvantage is that there is a lack of originality and uniqueness in using Prem designs. If you're going to be using Prem designs, there are hundreds of businesses, thousands of businesses out there using the same print on demand production partners. You're going to imagine that, of course, a lot of businesses will also be using these same pre made designs. Which ties into my next con, which is that other businesses will likely be using the same or similar preset pre made designs that you are using for your print on demand business. Just keep this in mind. Everyone has a right to use the Prem designs everyone is entitled to. They're free for commercial use for everybody. You might stumble upon other business within your niche on Etsy. Same exact preset designs that you're using for your business, right? And there's nothing you can do about that, because again, they're using the same production partner as you, of course. They're also taking advantage of these pre made and pre built in designs that come with their service. So just keep that in mind. Another con is that you don't have complete control over the type of designs that you'll be selling in your business. Of course, it's pretty obvious if you're going to be using pre made designs, there is no way to really customize them. You basically are dealing with what you're given, right? So you don't have control over the type of design that you'll be selling as opposed to if you created it yourself and designed it yourself. This ties into my next con. There is a lack of customization options with using pre made designs. If you're going to be using pre made and preset designs, of course there's little to no room for customizing them. You're stuck with whatever you're given in terms of that. Lastly, but also importantly, presets are often generic and do not fit into any particular business niche. Yes, oftentimes a lot of the premade designs that come in with the Puna Man production partners or Canva or whatever have you are often generic. And they don't really fit into a particular business niche. You'll really have to work around that and try to customize it as much as you can in that regard. Or maybe you'll look out and find one or two or three that really actually fit into your business. But it'll take a lot of searching and that's also time consuming as well. Just keep that in mind if you're going to be using preset designs. All right, so in this video lecture, we've talked about the pros and the cons of using either custom designs or prime designs for your prints, for your print on demand business. I hope this helped. 10. Finding Your Print-on-Demand Suppliers: Welcome back. In this video lecture, we're going to be talking about finding your print on demand suppliers for your print on demand business on Etsy. By now you should have a niche or two selected and locked down for your business. And you should know what approach or avenue you'll be taking for your prints. Right, If you're going to be using your custom designs or if you're going to be using pre made designs. Now it's time to actually select and choose our print on demand partners, also known as our suppliers or our production partners. Now these print on demand companies will allow us to connect to various different production suppliers that will then be able to not only print our designs onto blank products, but also take care of the shipping of these products to our customers. So one of the greatest, greatest advantages of having a print on demand business is that you don't deal with inventory nor shipping your print on demand production partner deals with that. It's a huge relief and benefit because that way you don't have to deal with having stock inside your warehouse or whatever have you. And you don't have to deal with, of course, shipping and delivering the products. The print on demand company deals with that aspect. On top of, of course, printing your prints onto their blank product in case you were wondering what print on demand suppliers or production partners are. They are just printing service suppliers and they also ship out your products to your customers. Now with that being said, it's important to talk about which print on demand suppliers you should be using for your Se business. There are actually hundreds and hundreds of different companies out there that focus on print on demand. It can be a little overwhelming when you're doing your research for your T business and for your print on demand business. As well as to what you're going to decide will be your print on demand production partners. To avoid all of that headache and also time consuming research for you, I have compiled a list of the best and most recommended print on demand suppliers that you can use with Ets. I have attached a resource to this video lecture that lists the most recommended print on demand partners that work and are compatible with Ets. Not an order, but they are the most known as well. These different print on demand companies allow you a lot of great benefits that you can use with Ets. I'll tell you why I specifically chose these specific print on demand companies to work with your print on demand business. Me, as a business owner myself on with print on demand. I have used all of these and I know from firsthand experience that these are the best ones to use with Ts. Don't worry about having to do your own research with this. You've already done enough research with your niche and with your designs. Now is the time that I give you some of my personal recommendations when it comes to my print on demand production partners and companies that I've used for my business as well. I hope you utilize this resource and I hope that this helps. 11. Connecting Your Print-on-Demand Suppliers to Your Etsy Shop: Welcome back. In this video lecture, we're going to talk about how to integrate and connect our chosen print on demand suppliers to our Et C shop. In this video lecture, I'll be navigating you through the process of how to connect some print on demand suppliers that I recommended to you in the previous video lecture, such as printful and print ify to your shop so you can be able to use both simultaneously with your Tt business. Now, it is not a daunting process and it doesn't take a lot of time, effort, or energy really. There's nothing to be concerned about. But I still just want to take you through how it goes. Therefore, you have an idea of how this process works when it comes to integrating these print on demand production partners and their platforms to your business and shop. This is an important part and step of the process. That way Ts and your print on demand suppliers can work hand in hand together harmoniously. And therefore your business and your products are all integrated together. When you are selling on Ets, your print on demand suppliers get to work immediately once you make a sale. Let's go ahead and start off with printful. Printful is one of the print on demand suppliers that I recommended that you should use for your Ets business in the previous video lecture. The reason why is because it's such a great print on demand supplier. It's reliable, it's quick. And on top of this, the integration with Ts is quick and easy. Let's go ahead and get started. First things first, you need to have a print full account first. That is very important. On top of a, of course, having an Nets account set up and of course a business on Etsy set up. You also need to make sure that you have a print full account created in order to create an account. We just click here where it says, get started. We sign up with our email, but you can also sign up with Facebook, Apple ID, or Google. I'm just going to go ahead and sign up with my e mail. Type in my full name, then my e mail, and then choose a strong password. Okay. And then I agree to the terms of service and privacy policy and then you click sign up. Tell us about yourself here. You can just say sell online. Since you'll be selling online with Etsy. If you are an individual, you can just go ahead and say individual entrepreneur. What is the total revenue of your business? Again, we're just starting, let's just say zero. And since we're in print on demand, you'll likely be choosing clothing. But you also have other options such as kids in youth clothing, hats, accessories, home and living goods or I don't know yet, but let's just go ahead and click clothing. Okay? All right. So you just got to make sure you confirm your E mail address. But for now, our main goal is to just connect our print full account to our Es business. How do we do that? In order to do that, you go over here on the side where you see the Stores button here on the left hand tray, you click where it says Stores now it says here, Connect or Create your online Store. To start adding products, pick a platform for your store to create a new store. Choose your method. As you can see here, we have the Ets logo right there. We would click Choose Platform. From there, we would select Ets Marketplace E Commerce Platform. Then we would click Connect. Now I do recommend watching this video here that says, getting started with Ets made by Printful. Because it goes a little bit more into detail. Then I'll go into as to why you should connect both and how to garner success with printful and Ets. But the point of this video lecture is just to get both of those two connected. I won't spend too much time watching this video with you, but I do recommend that when you go through this process yourself that you do watch this video here made by Printful as it is very informative, right? Then we scroll down. It says here, step one, Authorized printful Es application. To get started, we need to connect to Ts by clicking this red Connect to Ts button. Let's go ahead and do that. Now we're on Ts, the website, and it says an application would like to connect to your account. Make sure that this is your e mail, of course, and that it's printful. Then we just read all of this and we consent to all of this. In order to do that, we click here where it says Grant access. All right, so now we're in the process of connecting printful to Ets. Then you just connect it over here by click and continue. Then where it says here, confirm connection. You click the red button that says Connect store to your C store E mail, Walla, just like that. Your C shop and your print full account are now connected. What does this mean? Well, this means that you can now create and add products here on print full. That will simultaneously be synced to your shop, your customers to buy once you completed designing them and uploaded them. If I click Add Product here, I would be able to start designing a shirt, a hat, sweat pants, whatever have you, adding my designs on them. Choosing my name, choosing the sizes, the colors, all these variations. And then when it's I click Publish, those will be synced to my Etsy shop as well at the same time. As soon as I do that here on printful, of course this is important because if you're going to be using printful, you need this to be happening instantaneously on the spot. Now of course, sometimes glitches may happen and products may not sync. It's important that you always toggle here. This important, not synced products from Ets selection or option here in case you do have any products listed here in printful that have not been synced to Ets. Sometimes that happens, it usually doesn't, but just make sure that you are aware of this, okay? Now, by just clicking at product, you will have added a product on printful that will be uploaded to your Ets shop. In this case, my shop, John's shop. They'll be synced simultaneously. Just like that, you've connected printful and Ets together. The next print on demand supplier that I'd like to walk you through connecting to Ts is print F. This is another print on demand supplier that I highly recommended in the previous video lecture. One of the reasons is because much the connection to Ts is easy and swift of mint. In order to connect printifi to Ts, you must first have a print F account created. In order to do that, we can just click here where it says Start for free. To create an account, all you need is an e mail and a password. So I'm just going to go over here and type in my e mail and then pick a good password. Do this capture and then click sign up again. Just answer this little questionnaire print if I wants to know your purpose for, of course, using them and registering with them, you can just say I have my own e commerce store to start my first online business and how to get started. Again, this is up to you, but let's just click here. I'm just exploring. And then we'll just type in here, John, and then click next. And now here we have the option in the middle, connect your store to print. Fine. Why wait? Connect your sales channel in a flash and start selling. Now, this is where we need to be focused on first. Okay, order a sample. Get a real life version of your products to check the quality and design is something we'll talk about in the next section of the course. This is something that's very important. But before we can even get to ordering samples of our products for quality inspection, we must first connect our Ets shop to print of Fi. We'll click here where it says Connect Your Store. Now how do we connect Ets? Well, here where it says Add New Store in the upper right hand corner, we click that. Then we see here Ets, it says already have a sales channel connect your store. Now choose a sales channel below to connect your store. We'll click here where it says Es. Again, much like printful, this window should be familiar to you now, right? An application would like to connect your account. Make sure this is your e mail. And then it says here, the application, print Fi, is trying to connect to your account, Of course, in order to grant them access to all of these things, you click down here, this black button where it says grant access. Let's click it now. It says Gratz, you connected in Etsy store. Check out this article on how to start selling. What I like about printf is that much like Printful. Which had that video that told you about the perks of connecting printful to Ets. Printifi has an article that tells you specifically things about selling with Ets with using the Print Pi platform. You can definitely peruse through this article on your own when you're doing this step yourself. And it'll tell you more into detail step by step, what you need to do or what you can do using print and Ets together. But much like printful, this works in that if you design a product on printf and you publish it, it'll automatically sync to your Es. That's the great thing about both printful and print fi as well. I definitely recommend cruising through this article once you're going through the step yourself of connecting your Etsy store to print F. Okay, just like that, you have connected your Etsy store to your Printf platform. In order to start creating a product, you just click here where it says Browse Products and then you can start designing again, a shirt, a sweater, phone case, whatever have you give it a name, give it a title, add the variations, your designs onto it. And then start publishing products with or printful. But in this case print if to be uploaded onto your shop. The next print on a multiplier that I'd like to walk through with you to connect to your Es shop is AOP plus another print on demand supplier and production partner that I recommended in the previous video lecture. The great thing about this print on demand supplier is that much like printful and print, the connection to Ts is simple and fast. Again, much like with the other print on demand suppliers and their platforms. You also need to have an account created with them in order to be able to use them and then connect them. But as you can see here, it says sell on Ts. We can just click this button directly. It takes us to print on demand with Ets, which allows us to just create and sell custom products with just one click. Indeed, much like with the other print on demand suppliers, any products that you design and create on AOP will be synced automatically to your C store if you have them connected and integrated. Of course this is also great because they give you a lot of information about what you can do with Ts and AOP together, along with shipping and all these other perks. In order to do this, we must first of course, have an AOP account created. Let's go ahead and do that first. Before we can of course do this, we must connect and log into S. The button that I click was connect to T now. Now let's click this button that says Connect Log into Ts. Again, this familiar screen pops up on the C website. An application would like to connect to your account. Just make sure this is your e mail. And of course that the application is the one that we're trying to connect, which is AOP as print on demand drop shipping. In order to give this and grant access to this print on demand supplier, we must click this black Grant Access button here on the bottom. Let's go ahead and do that. There we go. We've now connected the AOP platform to Ets. Now we can start with the product generator to drag and drop our designs and create our products. Of course, this is pretty simple. You just click the arrows, you pick the products you want. They have a slew of different products, Shirts, tote bags, flip flops, pillows or whatever have you. Once you publish the products, they will be sync simultaneously to your C shop. If I click design, now of course I'll be in the AOP platform which allows me to start creating a collection of products and so forth. Okay, this is how you connect your C store to these print on demand suppliers such as Print of Five, Printful, and AOP. This process is pretty much the same for other print on demand suppliers that I also recommended but didn't mention in this video. The process is pretty much the same. You just have to make an account and then click connect Ts and then of course give that print on demand production partner or supplier the access to your C shop. Therefore, they can be able to upload products, sync the products, and of course have those products available for your customers to then buy and for you to sell. I hope this video clarified how you can connect print on demand suppliers and their platforms to your C shop. And integrate both platforms in order to begin selling using your C business and also the print on demand suppliers platforms. I hope this helps. 12. Ordering Sample Items: Welcome to the next section of the course, setting up your shop for success. In this section of the course, we'll be covering various ways to set up our shop for success and hit the ground running. As we launch our C shop, we want to make sure that we are already preset for success and not failure. In this section of the course, I'll be covering the different ways that you'll be able to do that using C itself. On top of that, other tips and recommendations that every print on demand business owner should know now that we've set up our shop on Es, gone through how to create our first listing and also worked on how to connect our desired print on demand suppliers to our C platform. It's now time to talk about something that we were briefly introduced to in the previous section of this course, which is ordering sample items. As you might recall in the previous video lecture of the previous section of this course, we saw how one print on demand supplier asked us if we wanted to order a sample item. You might be wondering, well, what is the point of ordering sample items? Right? If I already know that these print on demand suppliers are trustworthy, they're highly recommended. What is the point of ordering sample items? Well, even though they are highly recommended, print on demand suppliers that guarantee high quality prints and products, obviously nobody is perfect. Right? And if you're a new business, it is extremely important that you have products that look and arrive the same exact way, right? You don't want to mislead customers because that means early on you're already creating mistrust and not being a reliable business. Think of this hypothetical scenario. You're online shopping, right? And you see this sweater that you really like. It looks great, You love the color, you love the design. Boom, you go ahead and order it. Then it arrives, and it is completely different. It looks nothing like in the pictures. And you're left astounded, disappointed, and annoyed, and are asking for a refund. Now, do you think that's good for your business? Of course not. That is not good for any business, especially a print on demand business. By ordering sample products, you not only test the quality of the print, also test the quality of the product itself. And you get to inspect both at the same time. One of the main reasons why it's important to order one sample item of one of your designs or print is for, of course, quality control and inspection. You want to make sure you are your first customer before other customers actually start buying from you. That way you have the peace of mind that the products you have listed on your shop are legit and arrive as they appear online. We all want to make sure that our prints and our products are both high quality and accurate. Extremely important in a print on demand business, which is purely driven by the quality control of products. This is extremely important for your SE, business as well. You want to make sure that your customers have that peace of mind that when they click and order from you, the product that they'll be receiving at their doorstep looks exactly as they saw it online. In addition to this, another great thing about ordering sample products is that you also get to wear them yourself and then take pictures with them or also just model them. Then you can use photos for your listings on your Etsy shop. Let me show you what I mean. Let's go back to our shop, our sample store, and let's take a look at the product listing that we created in the previous sections of this course, the generic white shirt. What do you think is the problem with this? Well, the main problem is the image, right? This image is way too generic. It has no personality. It's just completely devoid of anything original or unique. This is a problem because this doesn't make your listings eye catching and appealing. You must have listings that potential buyers eyes. One of the best ways to do this is by ordering sample products and then wearing them yourself or hiring models to wear them for you in my business bunny. Papa. If we scroll down and take a look at some of our listings here, you can see that I have very personalized product images such as this one. The four face masks bundle set in this one I actually ordered the masks that I designed myself with the print on demand supplier and then shipped them to myself as a sample item to check the quality and the print itself. Then I got creative and used these to show them off to customers. So they can see that these face masks actually come as they are seen online. They are completely accurate, the print is accurate, and the quality is also great. You want to make sure that your product listings have these type of quality images associated to them and not generic stock photo type images. Additionally, through the power of print on a man, suppliers themselves, and advanced technology, they also have plenty of their own stock images that are very customizable, which are called mock ups. Mock ups are basically sample images that are taken that can be used for any design. For example, this Santa bunny Christmas tree ornament. This picture is a mock up. I didn't actually order this ornament, but it looks like it does. And I hung it on my Christmas tree, doesn't it? But actually I did not. It's an artificially imposed photo with my design on it. Yet it looks convincing enough for customers to actually buy from if you are, for example, on a budget, or you don't want to order a sample for each and every item because you don't have the money or the time to do so. That's completely understandable. Just know that you can use these images which are called mock ups and many print on demand suppliers including printful and print. If I offer these mock ups, that you can then upload onto your Etsy listings for your shop. I've done this for quite a few of my listings on my bunny papa shop, for example, the face masks this lady wearing. My face mask is of course also a model that was artificially imposed upon with my design. The only downside to using these mock ups is that since they're free to use, that means that every business owner that uses the print on demand suppliers that you're using with C can also use these same mock Ups. Customers then begin to realize that, oh, everybody is just copying and pasting and imposing their design onto stock photos that are a bit more customizable in mock ups. Again, it's not the best solution either, but it's the next best thing as opposed to having just a generic image like this, which is completely devoid of any personality or any detail. Right. It's important that you have plenty of images in every single one of your listings in your Ts shop. And one of the best ways to achieve this is by, of course, ordering sample items of your products. Just keep these two things in mind when it comes to ordering sample items for your products that you'll be selling to your customers. Why should you do this? Well, number one for quality inspection control purposes and number two for taking images of these products and model these products on your listings in your Ts shop. And give your store a bit of more personal touch, right? Because again, it's all about the customer's perspective. If you're a customer yourself, would you buy from a store that only has one generic stock photo image of a product? No. It seems sketchy, it doesn't seem trustworthy, and you'll probably receive some weird or random thing in the mail when it arrives. Right. But if you see a shop that has plenty of photos of the same product and so forth, you're more inclined to buy from it because you can see that, oh, it is legit. There's a lot of people modeling this same product and so it gives you more confidence and trustworthiness. So this is all about viewing it from the customer's point of view, right? So keep this in mind as to why you should order sample items for your print on demand products. 13. Using Etsy Ads: Welcome back. In this video lecture, we're going to be talking about a powerful tool that allows you to set up your shop for success on Ets. It is known as Etsy ads. We've previously been exposed to Etsy ads in the previous section of this course when we were going through the Ts shop manager, right? But let me now explain to you why Etsy ads are so great and also recommended by me for you to use. If you're a new business owner and you're a new shop on Etsy, obviously you're just getting your foot in the door. Your whole mission is to try and get customers right. To build a clientele, build a customer list. Of course, if you don't have the connections, the followers, social media impact or whatever have you to be able to promote your business on such platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube and these other places. Then how do you get your name out there? How do you build this brand recognition? Well, you can do so effectively and cheaply actually by using Ets ads. Ets ads are a great way and a cheap way to bring in views, clicks, likes, and even sales to your business from a budget as low as $1 a day. If you can imagine, that's why I highly recommend using Es ads. Because unlike ads on other platforms, Es ads are very cost effective. You don't need to spend more than $5 a day on them. And they will bring in the results. Trust me, I've used them myself in order to be able to start using Ts ads. Let's first go into the Ets shop manager. We're back in our Es Shop Manager over here where it says Marketing on the left hand tray, right. We click where it says marketing. Then you see the Ets Ads Selection, which is the second button under marketing. Let's go ahead and click it. It says, Reach more buyers with Ets Ads. Ts ads makes your items more prominent in Ets. Search on category pages, and even on other listing pages. You're in control of which listings you promote and how much you spend. Yes, this is all true. Basically, Et ads promote your business and your products for you while you're asleep, right? With a low budget of only $1 or $5 or even $10 a day. That's why these are so great, because you can get a huge boost through using these Et ads. You're in control because you can decide which listings of your, such as which products are promoted and how much they're promoted. This is based on your daily budget, right? You're in control of this as well. You're in control of the growth, the visits, the clicks that your shop receives. Of course, which products of yours you want to promote. It says here that ads can increase visits and also expand your reach. This is crucial for a brand new business on Ts. In order to get started with using Es ads, we would click here. This button that says get started. Then how would Es ads best serve you? What is your top shop goal right now, since we're just starting off, We will say increase visibility and awareness. Then click Submit. Now it's asking us to set our daily budget. And like I said before, you can start off with as little as $1 a day as your daily budget, so you don't have to break the bank in order to use Ts ads. You can literally spend $1 a day and be able to expand your reach on Tz tremendously. Ts is visited by millions and millions of customers each month. Imagine you can actually get a slice of that pie, a slice of that exposure to all of those millions of people visiting the website, the C platform, with as little as $1 a day. You can also, of course, choose $5 a day if you want to spend a little bit more money or have a bigger budget or go up to $25 a day. Though, I do not recommend this, especially if you're just starting off. Since we're just starting off, we want to start off small or low. I would typically recommend $5 a day. That puts us right in the middle and allows us to be able to promote our products but not break the bank right. As we are a brand new business, we want to make sure that we want to not go into debt, but actually at least break even when we start off on Etsy. Then you would click, for example, $5 a day. And then click where it says Start advertising. Okay, so then you would see here, for example, your Es ads performance, right? It would tell you how many views, clicks, and orders you've received from Es ads. And then the total revenue versus the total spend. You always want the revenue to be higher than the ad spend for obvious reasons. Because then if not, if you have a higher ad spend than revenue, then you're in the red, AKA you're in debt. But again, that's highly unlikely with C ad since they're so cheap. As I've told you, as you've seen, you can start off with as little as $1 a day in ad spend. But of course, if you're not seeing the results that you want or the return on investment that you desire, you can always stop using C ads or lower your ad spend. You definitely have control over this and can stop using Ets ads anytime you want. It is not obligated nor are you constricted to a month to month basis. You can start and stop whenever you want using C ads, okay? So here, for example, would be the results that the Ets ads have brought to your shop. And of course, you can compare it to previous months, previous periods. And of course, since we only have one listing on our shop, we're only promoting that one product for $5 a day, right? We can click here where it says, Manage Our Budget to be able to change that $5 a day to either a higher or lower amount daily of how much we're spending in Ts ads. Of course here they also have more information that you can read on your own for C ads. But I just would like to tell you the basics of this. If we scroll down, we can see our advertised listings. Here's where we have control to be able to manage which listings of ours we want to be advertised or not. This is important because, for example, if you are near the Christmas season and you want to promote your Christmas product line, you can create an Etsy ads campaign that is only promoting your Christmas related products. Right? Therefore, only those products would be thrown into people's faces. That would increase your chance of getting a slice of the holiday Christmas sales boost. You have to also be wise when it comes to using Es ads. Don't just promote any random product of yours or just promote everything. Be selective about what you want to promote from your business because again, with every single product promote the dollar or the $5 are divvied up for each of those listings. Basically, it's important that you make sure that you leave room in the budget of the daily ad spend or the products that you think are the most promising or your best selling ones or the ones that you think will do the best, right? Of course, anytime we want to start or stop promoting one of our products, we would click here where it says Add on or off. This little toggle basically lets us start or stop promoting a certain list, AKA product with Ets ads. By toggling this off, I have now stopped advertising for this listing as it said there. Got it. Advertising is now off for this particular listing. And now it says here, not advertised with Ets ads. You're in control of what you want to be advertised or not. I have used Ets ads extensively for my own business bunny papa. Therefore, if you're starting off a business with Etsy, I highly recommend using Es ads. Because they're not only cheap, but they're very cost effective. And you will see results even if it's not necessarily a sale. You will at least garner likes and views. This is important because the more exposure your shop gets, the more customers begin to recognize you. Remember, it takes a customer, I believe, about 20 times, if not more, for them to be exposed to a product before they actually buy it. Imagine it is a lot. Therefore, you need to make sure that you're exposing yourself to your same customer base, which is your niche. And this is why it's also important to have a niche, which ties into what we talked about earlier because these same customers will be the ones that will be repeatedly exposed to you and then become familiar with your business. And why is this important? Because then that builds trust, right? That builds name recognition, brand recognition. Think about all those companies or businesses you buy from. You know them because they're shoved in your face. You see their ads on TV, online newspapers, everywhere. Right? Then they become a more reputable business because you've seen them before, you've been exposed to them before. That makes you more aware and familiar with them. That same concept applies here with your C online print on demand business. I definitely recommend using C ads. You don't have to break the bank or go over budget or go into debt. Using C ads, you can start off with as little as $1 a day. To use these ads, you should start off small. That way you can test and experiment which of your products are resonating with customers and which ones are not. Then you can toggle on and off the listings that are doing well and the listings that are doing not so well. Of course though, I don't recommend doing this on a day to day basis. Give it about a week or two before you start playing around with which product listings you're hiding or showing to people as you're promoting them. Because again, you need time to generate this type of data and information as you've seen in the C shop manager. All in all, I definitely recommend using Ts ads for a brand new Ts print on a man business. 14. After Receiving Your First Sale: In this video lecture, we're going to talk about one of the most exciting and memorable milestones that any business owner can achieve that is receiving your first sale. This is a moment that is marked in every business owner's memory, right? When you received your first sale from your first customer ever, you remember what product it was? Even probably the name of the customer, right? And you thank them profusely because this is showing that you are headed in the right direction. That your just beginning to bloom. You're promoting your business correctly using its ads. You've been ordering samples of your products and then modeling them. You've been uploading your listings and adding all the details, all the images right to give and build trustworthiness toward your business and so forth. You've been doing all the necessary steps to hit the ground running and launch your business successfully and start garnering sales now that you've achieved your first sale. This is just a beginning. Although this is a great milestone to achieve, there's also plenty of questions to now begin asking, such as, what did you do right with this particular product listing that made it your first sale? This is an important question to ask. What is it about this particular product listing that made it the first successful one that got you a customer in the first place? You should be asking yourself this question and then you should use this product listing as a model for your other product listings on your at shop and as a model for your future product listings in your at a shop. Use this product listing as a template for your other products. You not only build consistency in terms of your and product titles and branding and so forth, but also so that way you can also garner sales with those other products as well, right? It's important that you keep this consistent. If this product listing was the one that got you your first sale, that means that this product listing is in good standing. It has all the needed images, it has all the correct keywords and details and product description to make a customer feel comfortable enough to click that. By now button, you must be always aware of this. That from the customer point of view, what did you do right with this product? Why is this product a home run? Basically, after achieving your first sale, you just must make sure that you use this product, specifically this product listing, as a template or model for your other product listings. Of course, this is also a time to get excited because that means that now your business is just beginning to bloom. You are starting to achieve a clientele, starting to attract customers and starting to attract sales. Even this is always such a great and exciting and beautiful heart and moment of being a business owner which is achieving your first sale. Just go ahead and congratulate yourself and remember you product as a template model for your current products on your shop and for your future products on your shop. I would even have this product listing saved as a Word file or a Google Doc file. So that way you can always come back to it, save it there, paste all the text there, and use this as a model and template for your other products as well. That way you begin to build basically a profile for what a successful product listing looks like in your head and specifically for your business. Because again, what works for one business may not work for another for your business specifically, it's clearly this product listing that garnered you your first sale that's working for your business in particular. Again, congratulations, It's always an exciting and happy moment after receiving your first sale. 15. Cultivating a Unique Shop Brand: Welcome to the growing your shop for success section of the course. In this section of the course, I'll be giving you some tips and recommendations that will further help grow your shop for guaranteed success. And launch you even further into the stratosphere. Or farther, I should say, for at sea success with print on demand. In this video lecture, we're going to be talking about something that we've already briefly touched upon in previous sections of the course. That is of course, cultivating a unique shop brand. Why is this important? Well, think of all of the businesses and companies that you know. You can recognize them from their logo alone. Think of how impactful that is that a business has been so branded into your head that you can recognize them from just looking at their logo. You don't even need to go to the store, you don't need to see even their entire full name. Just the logo alone tells you what company it is. This is something that you should be aiming for with your C shop. You should be working on cultivating a shop that's very uniquely yours when it comes to not only the name but your logo. Your look thing is that some print on demand suppliers even let you add your shop logo to labels of clothing items such as shirts, sweaters, sweat pants, and so forth. You can even add your shop logo to these print on demand products on the label or the tag. And this will help your customer remember, oh, I actually bought this from this store, let me go see if they have something else that I like so I can return and buy Again, cultivating a unique shop brand also makes your customers feel like they are really being appealed to customers within your niche, the subset of customers that you're trying to appeal to. It makes your business feel well nested into the niche that you're desiring to basically target. This is important because it makes your shop cohesive and also appealing to that particular type of customer. Think of, for example, the niches of vegetarians, right? They would sell meat products because that doesn't appeal to their customer profile. Think of it like this with your business. What are you selling and how are you selling it and how are you making these designs? How are you making your shop stand out and be unique within the niche? Because remember, there's plenty of competition out there. What do you bring to the table in this niche, to customers that other shops and business owners just can't provide? Right? These are the type of questions that you should be asking yourself. It's important to think about this amidst all the competition that is out there on Ts. So make sure to try to make your shop stand out. And try to create a logo that's memorable, unique, and one that you can apply anywhere. And I actually suggest and recommend that you apply it on the labels and tags of your products, whether it's on clothes or souvenirs accessories, whatever have you. Just to make sure your logo is always there somewhere. So that way customers can begin to build that recognition inside of their heads that, oh, I know this business just by looking at their logo. They're from Etsy and I've shopped there before. Right? That's very important to have a unique shop brand and to cultivate one as well. 16. Expanding Your Product Line: Another great recommendation to help grow your shop for success is to, of course, expand your product line. This comes pretty naturally over time. As of course, you won't be stuck with just one product listing or else you'll be limiting your business severely. Right. As your business grows and time passes by, you'll naturally be designing more designs and uploading more product listings onto your shop. But of course, how should you go about this, right? Because this is also important. You can't just branch out into 1 million different categories. Especially if you're already finding your lane within your niche, right? For example, your sweaters collection is selling. Well, why would you go ahead and mess with that? By introducing random things such as cups or mouse pads, right? These might not even be successful and irrelevant to your business. You want to make sure that you grow but grow responsibly. Grow in a way that's actually relevant and connected to the already winning products. The home runs, the ones that are already selling, the ones that are already doing well. Right. How do you do this? Well, of course, you can replicate or duplicate your designs by adding slight variations to something that deviates from the main design, but comes in a different color or maybe in a different style that's just a little bit more different. Think of also, for example, when it comes to gendered products or also products for kids. Right? You can add these same designs but in different sizes and shapes. That way this gives customers more choices while also covering more ground and expanding your business presence while not straying too far off the path. Right, it's important that you expand your product line because at the end of the day, the more product listings you have, the more customers have to look at and buy. Additionally, I recommend of course, having seasonal items, items that are exclusive to seasons that can only be purchased during a certain season. This makes these items, of course, feel exclusive and that customers must urgently buy or else they'll miss out and have to wait next year to get them again, for instance. Right, of course, I'm referring to Christmas line, a Halloween line, that type of branding. If you can incorporate it into your business, that would be also really recommended. I've done this for my business bunny papa since obviously my business bunny papa deals with rabbit. One of the most pivotal my business was Easter because of course, Easter bunnies, right? So think of it like this with your business. What's relevant to your business? What time of the year is most relevant with your business? Think of it like that. How can you weave what's already a sales boom period into your business and incorporate that into your business. Definitely think about that as well when designing your products and also the time of the year. But just be aware that if you're going to be using seasonal items to always have reliable print on demand suppliers as of course the stock tends to run out pretty quickly, right? So just be aware of that. You don't want backlog orders, delayed orders because then they'll all have to get canceled. And that's not good business practice or policy and of course will leave you with a ton of bad reviews. Just keep that in mind. Of course, expanding your product line is important, but to do it organically, responsibly, and also of course, in a way that's relevant to the theme of your business. 17. The Magic Number of Product Listings: In this video lecture, we're going to be talking about the magic number of product listings on Etsy. There's an unspoken rule that there's like a hidden magic number of product listings that you should have before your business really starts picking up. But that's not necessarily true. This ties into the previous video lecture when I talked about expanding your products and product line, right? You want to make sure that you grow your business organically. Don't throw anything out there and just pray for something to stick. You want to make sure that you are creating designs and also uploading and publishing products that customers within your niche are actually willing to buy. And this is based on trends and similar businesses to yours, right? Don't just sell anything for the sake of having products published on your shop. And think that by having lots of listings that you're all of a sudden going to get lots of sales on the opposite. It can harm your business by seeming unfocused and all over the place. So there really isn't a magic number of product listings. But I do recommend that you at least have the early set goal of 50 product listings. And you might say, oh, wow, that's such a high number. But really, if you think about it, it's not because you can duplicate your product designs onto many different variants and products. For example, sweaters, sweatshirts, T shirts, tank tops, blouses. Right, You get the point. That's all within the clothing category. By duplicating your designs onto all of these different variants, customers have a lot of options and can also buy for their loved ones as well and so forth. Really, 50 is not that high of a number. It is a quick way to get there as well, of course, by implementing the same design, different products. And make sure that the design you're implementing is the best of the best. And the design that's selling, of course, right? You don't want to print or duplicate a design that isn't selling well onto many products, because again, there's probably a reason it's not selling well. Always choose your best and best selling designs to replicate and duplicate. And uses a model for your business to implement on other products to expand your number of product listings on your C shop. After all, more product listings equals more views and exposure. And more views and exposure means more clicks and more clicks means more sales and customers. But just remember, you want to have enough product listings to be findable, but not too much and all over the place to seem overwhelming and confusing and unfocused to a customer. 18. Building Customer Relationships: In this video lecture, we're going to be talking about building customer relationships. Obviously as a business owner, this is very important, especially if you're just starting out because you want to hit the ground running with a great reputation. You don't want to start off sloppy. You don't want to start off with already having delays or product issues, or selling inaccurate designs, something that we've already talked about. You want to make sure that you're very professional, that you're very patient with customers, that your designs are accurate, that your products are high quality. Which is again why it's important to order sample items first before actually selling to customers. Of course, you always just want to make sure that you're in contact with your customers, build relationships with them. Why? Because on Es, the customer is extremely important, they are always coming back for more. In fact, if you didn't know this, Es actually sends codes to customers that have bought from you on your behalf to come back and buy from you again, they do this through e mails. Imagine they get a discount code in their e mail for your shop to go back and buy from you. Again, Etsy does this for you and you can also, of course, do this yourself manually. That way you start building a customer list that's always returning to buy from you. That's always great for business to have basically a set of customers that are always buying from you, coming back for more because it can't get enough of your business and your products. That's basically any business owners dream. But in order to get there, you must of course, build these customer relationships by having product listings that are well thought out, well designed, having lots of pictures, models your products as well, and having great designs. And also being neat and cohesive with your business, really appealing to your niche and your customer profile, right? Always make sure to build customer relationships as well by messaging customers about their order, right? When your customer places an order, always send them their invoice via message, right? And you can even add a sweet little note there saying, thank you so much for ordering from us. That's what I do with my business with bunny papa. I always make sure to send my customer on their invoice through the Ts shop managers messages and there you can directly communicate with your customers and update them their status of their order right from the time they placed it to when it's getting designed and shipped out by the print on demand supplier that you selected to the time it hits their doorstep. You always want to make sure that you have this type of communication with your customers that way they know every step and every point of where their product is. This will not only create a great relationship with your customers, but also builds great communication and will leave you with great reviews and have them coming back for more always. Of course, make sure to discounts in sales periodically because of course, this also incentivizes customers to buy from you. So having a 15% off sale, for example, or a seasonal sale, for example, is always a great way to get a sales boost and improve your customer relationship and also the size of your customers. Also on top of this, I want to mention that always, of course, make sure that the print on demand supplier you're working with isn't facing any problems. This is extremely important. I mentioned before that sometimes during the holiday season, some print on demand suppliers run out of stock really quickly. Right? This creates delays, also known as backlogging, in which your customers have to wait much more than anticipated for their products. Again, this is very bad because if your C shop is saying that they'll get their product within a week and it's taking three weeks, your customer is not going to be happy. They're going to be messaging you saying, where's my product? You know what? Just go ahead and cancel this order because it's not going to arrive in time for my loved ones or for the holiday season or whatever have you. And this is very bad because that's going to leave you with bad reviews and of course, tons of refunds and you're not going to be making any money. Right? You'll just be in debt at that point, it's very important that the print on demand suppliers you work with are always reliable and that you work with many reliable ones. Not just one, but many reliable ones. That way if your plan A doesn't work out, you have plan B to rely on or fall back on. Right? That's why it's always important to work with more than just one print on demand supplier. Because in case one of them runs out of stock, there's always the other one there to fall back on. Okay, please remember to always be professional and ship your products in a timely manner. And sometimes this is outside of your control because again, print on demand supplier deals with shipping your products out to your customers. That's why it's very important that you always make sure to routinely check your print on demand suppliers stock, right? If they're low on stock, start using a different print on demand supplier. Because that way you'll avoid headaches and future problems with orders being delayed or backlogged and your customers not receiving their items in time. I hope this helps. 19. Other Things to Know: Welcome to the Managing Your Shop for Success section of the course. In this section of the course, I'm just going to talk about some frequently asked questions and also other tips and recommendations that you should know to basically continue the success that you're receiving with your Etti shop in the long run. Let's go ahead and get started by talking about other things that are important to know, and answering some frequently asked questions. A lot of first time business owners may find themselves feeling a bit insecure when it comes to their product designs. I often get asked, well, how do I know if my print design for my products are any good? Well, what I always say is take a look at your niche. Is there already a phenotype or basically a stereotypical looking design style that sells a lot on Etsy? Think about this. Go ahead and look on Etsy. For any related businesses that are selling designs in your niche, think of them and look at them. Are they objectively similar in quality to yours? Can't answer that honestly then no, your designs are probably not there yet. And that's okay because sometimes it requires trial and error to get a winning design. That's a home run, all right? Of course. Always make sure to compare yourself to other businesses that are doing well and successfully, but make sure to not copy them. I can't stress this enough and it's pretty obvious, right? You can be inspired by them, but you can't directly copy them. Because of course, that's copyright infringement. Your shop will get shut down. And it's also very unorriginal and shows a lack of creativity. You must have the imagination to create product designs that are of course unique. And if you don't, you can always find somebody on fiver or a freelancer, artist or designer to help you create and make that vision come to life when it comes to any particular design. Now, sometimes new businesses find success by replicating these type of designs that are already selling well. But what I always say is that this is not a good idea because again, you're not guaranteed that success forever. What's better is that you add your own unique spin to make your designs uniquely yours. That way no one can copy from you, and if they do, they know that you're the original creator that brought that design to the table. Anyway, again, people won't buy from the copy, they'll buy from the originator, and that'll be you. In any design, always try to strive for originality, even if it's a little unconventional. It's better to be that way than to just copy a design and be a generic shop that's just duplicating designs from other people. That's not a great business model and it surely won't last because Etsy will take it down eventually. On top of this, people will see right through it. Just keep in mind that Etsy buyers are so used to the typical designs that they see on other places that they want something original, something that's new, right? So always make sure though that even if you don't see overnight success, that is completely normal and that is actually okay. You won't see overnight success most likely. It takes time to build traction and garner views and exposure and name recognition and then start building a client list and getting customers and sales. I know from firsthand experience, because this happened to me with my business the first time I launched my design from my business bunny papa, my first design was not selling at all. In fact, I think I only got one sale from that entire line. I went back to the drawing board, started from scratch, and then I made my home run winning design that is now the staple and classic design that I duplicated on so many of my products with variations. For example, the bunny that I have here on the screen. I created a variation of this bunny by adding one with spots, one that comes in different colors, one that's wearing a Santa hat, one that's wearing a Halloween costume, things like that. It basically grabs the focal point of my design with some variations attached to it to give customers more options and also more different opportunities to purchase from, get frustrated. It's okay, You'll always be working towards better design anyway. It's very rare that you hit it on the first try. In fact, very little people do. Don't worry. Always go back to the drawing board and keep on building and creating new designs by creating new and unique designs. Eventually, people will appreciate this and come to see that it's only available from your shop and start buying from you. It's important that you keep introducing new and original designs to the market to further cement your business as trustworthy and reliable. Of course, make sure to order a sample product and model your print so that way customers can see that. O. This business isn't scammy or amateur. They have a legit thing going on here and their designs are actually accurate as to what they're showing online. Always make sure of course, to do that as well. Another frequently asked question that I get is a niche within a niche. Is that All right, well, what is a niche within a niche? Remember, we talked early on that it's important to not be too specific because then you have a very, very slim and narrow customer base, that you almost have no customers at all existing within that. But what a niche within a niche means is, for example, a business that only sells one specific thing. And in that case, it is perfectly okay to stick to a niche within a niche. For example, establishing a card making business or a shop specializing in this. Think about, for example, American Greetings. They are a reputable and best selling card making business, right? Why they only sell one thing, cards, greeting cards. But if you actually think about it, they don't just sell cards. They sell experiences. They sell a variety of different cards. They sell cards for birthdays, graduations, weddings, general, congratulations, anything really. They have a card for any event or special occasion because they're giving their customers so much variety within that particular niche of cards, they are successful and stick to what they're good at. So they don't even need to expand into other irrelevant things that are not relevant towards their business, such as glasses, or mugs or shirts. Why? When their home run products are already doing so well. And they are still offering a variety of different designs through different occasions that a lot of people celebrate, such as, for example, Christmas or a wedding. Right? So, for example, if you only wanted to business that sells beanies and beanie hats, what I would do is actually incorporate that word beanie into the name of your business. For example, John's bunny beanies, for example. If I try to be a business that only sold beanies for people that wanted bunny designs on them. Now perhaps this may be a little bit too specific, but this is just a general example. You want to make sure that if you're going to stick within a niche, within a niche, that you actually do it in a way that's still sizable and has a customer base that's big enough to actually make profit from. And obviously run a successful business with a name like John's Bunny Beanies. Lets your customer know straight out the gate what type of business you are before they even land on your shop's page. Right? And this is important because it's not only convenient for the customer, but it also makes them easier to find you in any search results. Yes, it is perfectly fine to stick to a niche within a niche, as long as that niche within a niche is still big enough to have a successful and profitable business with. Another frequently asked question that I often get is, is it okay to ask customers to leave a review? Yes, this is perfectly fine on Etsy. The difference is that you obviously can coerce them or try to make them say only positive things about your business that is definitely wrong and fraudulent. But you can definitely say, thank you so much for ordering from us, Please leave a review once receiving your product, we would love to know what you think and so forth. This is really good to incentivize your customers to leave reviews, because the more reviews that you get, the more your business actually becomes reputable and trustworthy. As other customers or potential customers rather, can see and read these reviews before they actually go ahead and purchase from you. In fact, think of when you go and buy something from let's say, Amazon, You always check the product reviews, don't you? Of course. Straight out the gate, if you see a bunch of five stars or 4.5 stars, you say to yourself, okay, this is a good product, I'm going to go ahead and buy it. Whereas, for example, if you see another product and it has no reviews or a little reviews, you might think twice about ordering that product, right. Because you're not sure if it's actually legit or even great at all because it barely has any reviews. It's the same with Ts. A business should have a lot of reviews. Asking your customers to leave a review is definitely a okay. You just obviously can't try to influence them in what to say. You can only ask them to leave you review if they'd like. But you can't force them to leave you one, nor can you punish them for not leaving one. Nor can you coerce them into saying only positive good things because that is against C policy. Some other good things to know when it comes to managing your Etsy shop for success is to always analyze your stats. Always check your Es shop manager. Always check how your business is doing. How many views are you getting on your products? How many views is your store getting? How much are your sales incrementing from the past month? Are they at all or are they stalling right? Always make sure that you are using the Etsy shop manager and its tools to actually manage your shop. That's what it's there for. So I always recommend that business owners always check this daily just to see in case there's any news, any updates. A customer might have messaged you and you might have missed it, right? That's always important because you want to respond to things in a timely manner or maybe a product ran out of stock. That's also something you want to address really quickly. Definitely, definitely, always analyze your shop manager on Ts and analyze your stats because you want to see if your business is growing or not. Then if it's not growing, then what should you do? Maybe you should add to your C ads budget. Maybe you should add more product listings. Maybe you should restructure your listings. Maybe you should replicate more of the products that you're selling really well and take down the products that are not selling well. Things like this are very important and you can do all of this within the C shop manager. Definitely analyze your stats. They're very informative and also interesting to look at to see how your business is growing on a week to week and month to month and even year to year basis. Lastly, I want to say that patience is the ultimate key to growth. Please do give up. Fast having and owning a print on demand business with Ets is very rewarding. But with that reward must come. Patience. As we all know, patience is a virtue. Like I said before, it's very rare to have overnight success. You most likely won't have that. Don't expect it. It takes time, it takes months to start carving out a lane for yourself on Ts because Ts is so popular, there are already so many businesses on there and so many new businesses that are opening up every day. Though, this should not detract you or stop you from opening yours. In fact, it should motivate you because that way you can tell yourself that you can get a slice of the pie. You can get a slice of that Ets economy, basically because Ts is visited by millions of people each month. Imagine when you upload a product to Ets, it gets indexed and published onto Google, onto Bing, onto other search engines. The reach is vast, and you don't even have to spend that much money to promote your products. You actually don't even have to spend a single cent because Ets already does that for you. When a customer searches for a search term or keyword that one of your product listings contains and that will be picked up, Just remember, not all good things happen overnight. It takes time and you will be rewarded for your patients over time. Trust me, I guarantee it because that's the same way with my business. I had to wait for it to grow. And also keep on tweaking things and modifying things, adjusting things here and there in order to actually start building a customer list and also garnering sales. So just be aware that patience is key to owning a print on demand business with T. You also, of course, need patients once you're dealing with customers, right, In case there's a incorrect address or they ordered something by accident or they want to refund or they're asking where their product is. Right. You have to be professional. You have to respond in a timely manner and you also must have patience for these type of things. Patients really is something that I really do think is perhaps the most important thing to have if you're going to own a print on demand business with at all. Right, so that's about it for this video. I hope that the information in this video and the questions that I've answered have helped clarify some things and helped in general. 20. Conclusion and Thank You Video: Hi and welcome to the thank you and conclusion video of this course. First and foremost, I'd like to thank you again for participating in my print on demand with Etsy for beginners course. It truly means so much to me that you selected my course out of all of the courses that are out there. Now I'd like to congratulate you for completing this course and making it this far. You are now equipped with all of the skills and knowledge that is needed in order to successfully launch a print on demand business with Ets, One of the best platforms online to sell and grow and have a great online business with. I hope that you found this course valuable, insightful, and useful in your journey to launching your very own print on a man business with Ets. If you could please leave a review, I would very much appreciate that. As it not only lets me know if you like this course or not and found it useful, but it also lets other potential future students know this as well. But again, I'd just like to congratulate you once again and wish you the utmost success in your future endeavors. Have a great day and take care.