Print On Demand Course For Beginners

1. Trailer: Print On Demand Course For Beginners: Welcome to the print on-demand course for beginners. In this course, I'm gonna teach you how to create your own print on demand products. My name is Melanie, I'm the founder efficiency design studio. I've been running my own business for over 15 years now. And I've also created my own online Etsy shop. In my Etsy shop, I sell both digital products as well as print on demand products. And so that's why I've really become passionate about this whole concept. I think print on is an amazing way to go, especially if you're just trying to figure out the market and see what's going to sell. Or maybe you have some ideas of maybe artwork you want to add to products or quotes, and I just want to test it out. This is a great way to start. So before I go any further, let me just quickly tell you exactly what print on-demand actually is. Print on-demand is when you take your own artwork or your own texts and you add it to a product that is already created on an online print on demand website. In my case, I use printed phi.com. They have a wide range of products to choose from and I can add my artwork to any of them when one of my customers buys one of these products, printed phi, we'll go ahead and print that one product for me. Package it up and they will ship it for me. The whole concept of print on-demand is all about one at a time. The benefit of that is that you don't have to produce, say, a 100 t-shirts or whatever the minimum order usually is. This Santa's a lot of money up front and also the concept of having stuck. I don't know about you, but I've ordered t-shirts in the past and then been stuck with about 50 of them in my basement and boxes. It's happened to all of us. So the concept of print on demand really eliminates a lot of the risk because you're creating your products online with no upfront costs. And so I'm really excited to create this course with you and show you how to create your own print on demand products. So that sounds like something that interests you. Go ahead and click the Join button and I will see you inside the course. 2. Why Printify?: Hi friends, welcome to the course. I am so glad you're here and I cannot wait to show you step-by-step how to create your own print on demand products. Now before we go any further, I want to give you a bit of a reasons as to why I like to use principal Phi.com prints if I.com is a really great print on-demand provider. And here's why. Number one, they have a wide range of products. You can have really selects from a, a different options and they really give you a wide range of selection. Number two, they also have a wide range of locations as to where they can physically print and produce and ship your products. This becomes very important, especially if you're creating products and having them shipped over borders. For example, I live in Canada and I sell to a lot of Canadians. Now a lot of the print providers are in America and a lot of other print on demand companies that do not have print on-demand partners or production partners in Canada. So to me, it's very important to find a print on demand provider, for example, that can also print physically over the border in Canada for me. The reason why that's so important is because of number one, the cost of shipping over a border is often more expensive. Number two, delays. Now over the last year and a half, I think we've all experienced a ton of delays, right? And for good reason, because obviously what's been going on in the world. However, when I realized that I can actually change the printer to be having things being produced in my own country. That actually helped me a lot. So say for example, you are living in America, but you also want to shift to Canadians or you want to shift to people in Europe. Finding a way to have your products produced in those countries can definitely help with the overall experience with delays and shipping times. The reason I really like printed phi.com is because of their customer service. Anytime I've ever had a question, I reach out to them. They are all over it to really make sure that I'm happy and to really just go ahead and help me to solve any problems. They have live chat available all the time, and I found it to be very, very convenient. I've gone on there many times and had conversations with real humans that respond right on the spot and helped me. Sometimes you just want to talk to a human and not a robot, you know, an amine. So I feel like that's really, really important to me. Now without any further ado, I'm gonna go ahead and show you how it works with prettified and how you can go ahead and create your own products. 3. How It Works: 5 Steps: Hi friends, welcome back. In this video, I'm going to share with you how it works and how you really go through the steps in order to create your own print on demand products with printed phi.com, there are five steps and I will outline them for you in this video. So let's go ahead and print a phi.com. Now obviously in order to join printed phi, you're going to need to sign up. But let me just go through and share with you how it works. So the first step in any print on-demand site, including this one, is to pick. Now pick means to select from over, in this case, 300 products, such as t-shirts, mugs, socks, home accessories and more. What I want to do really quick is give you a bit of a tour and show you how many products are actually available with this particular print on demand site. So let's go ahead, go to catalog. I want to zoom in and show you there are a ton of products. Okay. There's men's products, clothing, T-shirts, hoodies, sweat shirts, long sleeves, sports wear, shoes, even shoes are available here. And women, they have even more items because they also have all the things that they have for men including and also skirts and dresses, sportswear, pants, swimwear and shoes as well. Kids clothing and even baby clothing here. And they also have accessories and home and living. So let's see. The accessories are face mask, phone cases, bags, socks, underwear, hat, hats, baby accessories, mouse pads and other. This one I find really interesting for home and living. They have mugs, bottles and tumblers, Canvas posters, postcards, ornaments which might be interesting for Christmas season, coming up, journals and notebooks. That's actually one I've been toying with to test out for my own customers, magnets and stickers, home decor, which that tap the topic in general could have a wide range of other products. Bathrooms, Same thing, towels, blankets, pillows, and covers and pets. Now you're not selling pets obviously with your product designs on them, but there are pet products. So like I've said, they have a ton of different things. I think this is actually really cute. I want to show you this one how cute is that you can actually create your own designs and put them on a t-shirt for your dog. So I mean, they've really thought of everything and I've really been impressed with printing PHI for that reason. So now I'm gonna go back to this section here about how it works. So like I've mentioned, there's a wide range of products. And the first step is to go through those products and pick, so pick which item you would like to add your own artwork too. And then that is the first step. The second step in the process is to customize. They actually have a mockup generator, and I'm going to show you in the next video exactly how to do this. But they have a mockup generator which enables you to customize your products with your own artwork. Or maybe a quote that you really love. Maybe it's a phrase that you always say to your kids, or maybe it's something like an inside joke that only you and your community of followers will understand. This is a great place to actually create your own products, whether you're an artist or not, or an illustrator or a graphics artist or not. Maybe you've never done any of those things and you just want to put words on a shirt, you can absolutely do that as well. The third step is to sample. Now this is a great step where you can actually order samples of the products that you just created. Now you don't have to do this, but I do highly recommend that you do this in order to really test out and see what the products are like. So say for example, you create a t-shirt with your artwork on it, and you're thinking of selling these in your own online store, it's really wise to actually order a sample. And the beautiful thing is that you get the sample at a reduced price. And I'll go through that in a moment once we go into that step. But that way you're only having to pay for the production of the shirt and not the retail price. And that's a really great way to test things. For example, my husband, he's a rock and roll musician, and he actually does this. He actually just ordered three different t-shirts on sample, and that was a great way for him to try them on, to take photos in them, and then to share it with his fans so that he can decide, is this something I want to add to my online store? Is this something I want to maybe use as part of my new album campaign and that kind of thing. It also lets you feel the products. So say you order hats or maybe dog t-shirts or whatever it is you're going to order. This enables you to actually physically touch and feel these samples and see is this equality that you are happy with. If not, maybe test a different one or different color or what have you. Now, the fourth step is to publish. Once you're happy with your custom product, publish it online for your store automatically. Print defies integrated. This is important print device integrated with leading e-commerce platforms such as Shopify at sea and Wix. And there's a lot more actually, there's a wide range and a list I personally use, ETC. It is literally like a click and you're done. It is so easy how to integrate with your online store. This is obviously something you are going to need in order to sell the products. So again, dependent on where you go ahead and actually create your online shop, you're going to then just click and actually integrate it with printed phi.com. And they will literally print your product for you and ship it out for you to your customer. Now the last and final step they have listed here is to relax. Now I know it sounds funny, but when you make a sale and your product passes quality control, it is centered production and thereafter shipped directly to your customer. So I know this is a funny step, but it actually is really true. Like I personally get printed T-Shirt sales all the time, and I love it because I am a graphic design studios, so I don't have to physically package up a t-shirt and go to the post office and ship it. I know that printed phi is printing it for me and I can kind of relax, let them take care of the whole order. And it's my label going on the order which is kind of nice, doesn't say print if I when it arrives to their house. And it's a really great way for me to relax, so to speak, work on other things. I'm also a mom. I have a young daughter. And so for me to have a little bit of that flexibility in order to actually have my products being sent out for me. It really, really helps me to keep other areas of my business and my life moving without having to think about it. So that's really how printf works. I wanted to give you an overall view of how it works. In the next video, we're going to start creating product. And this is where it gets really exciting. We get down to the nitty-gritty and actually start to create. 4. Pricing and Payments: All right, friends. Before we go any further, I'd like to break down the pricing for using printed phi. So first things first, you absolutely can use printed phi for free, which is great. This is the one I use. I do not pay any monthly fee to prettify and I love it. Okay, so free for merchants starting a business. And you can have up to five stores per account. And you can have unlimited product designs. So if you're like me, maybe you're just getting started out. You're just testing the waters and seeing what you think of this thing. You can go for free and then not have to worry about it at all. Now, if you'd like, you can go up to premium. Let me zoom in so you can see the details. The premium option is for merchants with growing sales, it's $24.99 per month, which is in US dollars, and it's build annually. So in other words, you're not, once you pay this, you pay for the whole year at a time. It works out to 2409 per month, but you're built every year. Okay. And it's up to a 10 stores per account, unlimited product designs and have a 20 percent discount on all products. So that's a bit of a perk. So say you are absolutely going wild with sales and you want to have up to 10 stores or more than this would be the option for you. Now, the other option is enterprise, which is for merchants with 10 thousand plus orders a day. Okay? This is for if your stores just going gangbusters and you are selling things out of this world as far as the amount of things that you're selling per day is just nuts, then this could be for you. It's custom pricing, which is interesting. So you have to contact them to find out what that pricing would be. And it would be unlimited stores per account on limited product designs up to 20 percent discount on all products. So that could be an option as well if you are just killing it and have a ton of different things, you can go to this page here to find out more is print phi.com forward slash pricing. And they will break down exactly all the different features included. So there is the overall pricing for using print defies wanted to go over that quickly for you guys just to make sure you're aware of exactly what you're getting into. Now if you're like me, I always like to know numbers out front. And so that's why I wanna go over exactly how the payments work with printing PHI. So let me just show you exactly what they say on their website. It's there's no mistake in it. All right. When a customer submits an order in your connected store, the store receives the retail price, which consists of the production place price, plus the profit and the shipping fee. After that, the order is automatically imported to print, defy, and send to production according to your order approval settings, which I'll go over with you in a moment. However, since Prince defied cannot pull funds directly from your sales channel, printed phi charges, you are linked credit card. So you have to have a credit card attached or your print defied balance with the production price of the product and it's shipping fee. So in other words, your customers buy from you and then you buy from them. So you buy the product from printed phi and then they print it for your customer. So you have to basically pay for it upfront. So that's how it works. Okay. So while we're on this page, I want to go into order approval settings. So when does print if I charge for an order, print if I charges merchant, merchants, which is me and you for orders only when there is sent to production. So when an order comes in, if you have all of your settings set to automatic, for example. And I'm going to show you this on his page. But if you have all your settings set to automatic, like to have everything automatically go to production, which is the standard default, then you will be charged right away. But if you change your production settings, then your order will have to wait until you approve it. As per the default settings, orders will be sent to production 24 hours after they had been imported or been created. That's really important to know about, okay? The default is automatic production, okay? However, these settings can be changed and your printer phi account and can be different for each of your stores. So order approval options are manual, automatic, and our automatic in 24 hours, which is the default or automatically at a certain time every day. Now you can actually choose your preferred time When the orders will be sent to production. So say for example, every day you want them to be sent to production at four PM, that might give you the whole day to kinda just check over your orders, make sure everything is okay, and then let them go into production at four. Okay, so that could be the way you do it. Now based on the options you choose, there'll be a window of time before the order is sent to production within this time, the order or any of the ordered products can be edited. 5. Let's Design Your Product!: All right guys, now we're getting on to the fun part where we get to actually add artwork to our design. So the first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna click on this button on the right-hand side here that says add your design. What's going to open up here are four new options. The first is custom text where you actually type words onto your t-shirt. The second is my device where I can go on and find my own illustrated file or my own PNG or JPEG file. Now that could be something that is created illustrated. Maybe you're a graphic designer or illustrator, you can actually go ahead and do that. You can also grab an artwork from your Dropbox. So you can go there and do that. Or you can actually download one from Shutterstock. Now this is high-quality images at images for free and pay for the image only after you sell, starting from US dollars, ninety nine cents per image. If you want to learn more about that and you could do so here. So let's go to top option here and click on custom text. Now what comes up is just the word hello. So let's say I wanted to use that word and I wanted to change the font or make it larger. There we go. So I can actually make it larger and smaller, as you can see that as I make it larger and smaller, it either crops out of the print area or within the print area. This kind of dotted line around this area. This is the area that I can print within. So if I make my word too big, obviously, that's all that they're going to see on the shirt, which is not really what I want. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make it smaller so that it fits. Now if I want to change the thoughts of the shirt, I could go down here and I can add font. Okay, click on Roboto. I can change it to any other thoughts that they have inside of here. As you can see as I'm clicking through, they're all changing. So let's say I want to use that font and I want to move it up. And this is what you can do too. You can just click it and move it. One and put it at the top your shirt. You want to put the bottom. You may be want to kind of do something specific with that. Okay. Now I can also clone the layer by clicking this little button over here, it says Clone layer. So let's say I want to have a shirt that says hello, hello. I want to have it say something a few times. Okay, so let's just say anything I click on, I can edit. So it's actually kinda cool. You can actually change things. Let's say one of these, I want to change the color on, I can just go over here to color. Click on color. And I can change it to any color I like. So let's say that's my amazing, wonderful shirt design. It's kind of odd right now, but you get the idea. Let me just zoom in so you can see it. So I've changed the font. I've changed the colors, I've cloned it to have more than one. I can also kind of put a phrase in here if I want, I can tap it down, I can move it up. I can kind of do lot of things. I can even overlap them if I want and make it look like a shadow, which is kinda cool. That might be a fun option. You can really play here and actually design something. That's the cool thing about this custom text. If you know a few tricks, tips and tricks here like this. Now it looks like I have a shadow on my shirt. That's kinda fun. All right, so as you can see, there's a lot of options to do here. Let's see, I really like this design. Then I would just click on the Save product. So once you have created your product, it'll show up in this list here, and it'll give you the option to either publish or edit listing. What I encourage you to do is to not published yet, but to edit your listing and I'll tell you why once we get in there. So I'm gonna click on Edit listing. And here you're gonna see your product that you just create it. So in my case, I have a shirt that says hello on it in red with a black shadow behind it. I can either, either have the front of the shirt shown as the image or the back. Now in my case, my back is blank. You can always add things to the back, maybe other text or an image. But in my case I'm going to keep it blank. So that's going to be the front. Select title image color is in white. Okay, now, let's go back here. Just because I haven't selected any other T-Shirts, I only selected the white t-shirt. And this is now where we add the description. So your title, this, this is something you can change right now, just as unisex heavy cotton tea, which is not a very cool name. You might want to put in titles plural, that have to do with what your customer is already looking for. Those are also called keywords. So for example, you can put things like hello, tea, hand, letter t, positive T. You know, things that are like what your actual customers going to type into Google. Those are called keywords and they're going to be listed right here, okay? And for your description again, you're going to use your keywords again in sentence form and your description. As you can see, there's already description here and I'm not going to delete that because that is the description that printed phi has given me. I like to use everything possible and not delete things because there is information inside of here. So that it's kinda more like construction information as far as the fiber content. It says here about like 5.3 ounce yards. You know, it's it's the kind of technical stuff that people may or may not want to know. But it just kinda nice to have it in case. So I always tap that stuff down and then I input my own description here. So I'm not going to go through that right now because I'm not going into SEO in this course. But basically you're going to use the keywords that you've included up here. You're going to use them in sentence form. So you could say something like, you know, great gift idea for your students are great Mother's Day gift idea. T-shirt is unisex fit. You're going to actually describe your product here, okay? Now, variance, variance is going to be the actual sizes. And a variance could also mean color variance or the differences between the product. Maybe you're offering this t-shirt in black, white, and pink. Okay. But in this case I have it all in white. So I'm going to go ahead and just change that. Now what one thing I want to point out to you here is the sizes, as you can see down the left-hand side here, they're all the sizes, the color of the t-shirt, all white. Now the cost, this is where it's going to start to differentiate. The cost of print a small is only $7.51, but the cost to print a 50 Excel is literally double that cost, so it's $14. Okay? So print defied gives you a potential retail offer. Now you could keep this, but I don't recommend it because let me just show you why. Let me zoom in. The cost to make this product is only $7 or is $7.51, but the suggested retail price only $12.52. Not a lot of profit, especially because of the fact that you are spending your time. You're, you're gonna have to just be involved in actually running this business. I don't recommend that at all. So I would recommend that you actually increase your profit. Because right now your profit shows us only $5 by clicking on this line here, it actually opens it up. You can also click on these arrows. And you can actually increase your profit margin. Now without getting too technical on you here, you're basically going to change either the profit amount or the profit margin percentage. I like to actually know in dollars and cents how much money I am making on every single product. So I actually changed the profit dollar amount. As you can see, it's in US dollars. So even though I'm from Canada, my orders are going to be in US. Okay. So I don't want to just make $5 per shirt. I probably want to make at least $12. Okay. So that takes my t-shirt up to 1951. Now, you're going to have to think like, you know, really what will be the profit margin you want. But I would at least make sure I'm a teacher and sale, you're making around $12 or more just because of the actual time and energy it takes you to create these. I think it's way more valuable to actually add more value. Now people are used to paying around $20 for a t-shirt. So 950 one. Not too bad. If I wanted to, I could do $13 and bump that up to $20 t-shirt. Okay, so that's how it works. You're gonna do that for all the sizes. You use these little arrows on the right-hand side to change the profit amount. Okay? So for medium, I'm going to do same thing. I'm going to go down. Okay? And I'm going to change my profits to, let's say $13. And I do that all the way down large $13. Okay. Just use those little arrows on the sides. As you can see, my profits are going up. Excel, I'm gonna do that all the way down. So let's say I did all of that. It's saying product visibility and store, Haydn store. Now what it means by Haydn store is don't publish it yet. Maybe keep it as a draft instead of a published item. And then at the very, very bottom it says create new shipping profile. Okay. Now let's say we go ahead and do that. What it means is it's going to actually create a shipping profile inside of your online shop that's going to be called printed phi. And what that means is printed phi as taking care of all the shipping and they decide on the shipping costs rather than you. And I decided, oh, I think it's an a cost $3.5 dollars or $8. So you know, I mean, so it's actually allowing printing PHI to determine the shipping costs. So let's just go ahead and publish this. I'm going to show you what happens in my Etsy shop. So click on Publish. And right now this T-shirt is being published inside of my Etsy shop. Now I'm going to delete this after it, but it's not at all the style of what I saw, but I'm just showing it to you for this example. And that way you can understand kinda the process of what happens. Now once this is published inside of my Etsy store, I want to click on this button that's called C in store. Now it's taking me to my Etsy shop where I can actually see how it's going to look inside of my store. Okay, So here we are. I'm in my vision cities store. And it's just called unisex heavy cotton tea because I hadn't changed the name yet. This is the cost. Okay? And because I didn't change all of the pricing and this select an option. It's basically asking me for sizing. So right now it's set to exile. What if I change it to a small? The price changes. If I change it to a medium, the price adjusts. So this is why it's important to adjust your pricing inside of printing PHI. Because I had not adjusted pricing on Excel, double XL, three XL for Excel file the Excel. These are not my own custom pricing and they're going to go really low because I did not change that information. Okay. Now down here in my Etsy shop is the description that was already included. I could have added more description and I highly recommend that you do describe the product more, describe who it's for. Put your keywords in here and so on. That's really important process. I can also add more images to it if I want, I can go up to my Etsy shop edit tool. And of course this is going to be different depending on where you sell products. I'm just wanting to show this to you really quickly for all the Etsy sellers watching. As you can see, I only have one image added here. I can add more, I can get more options here. Maybe I can order a sample photograph myself wearing it, for example, or I can actually show that there's other colors available. They would be listed here, okay. The whole point is to show as many images as possible. I can add a video with an Etsy. I'm not gonna go into too much detail here. Obviously this is where I would change. My titles. Include keywords that buyers would use to search for your item. Etsy is kind of it's like you started to create the listing for me, but I could fill in way more details. So I slept. I choose a scale, choose primary colors, secondary color. What kind of clothing style is it? I can actually describe the clothing style here. So you still have to complete the description of your product inside of your store. Now I know this seems like, wow, Melanie, this is a lot of work. Well, it might feel like a lot of work, but when you do it once, it's actually going to get easier and easier. And you only do this whole process one time. And then as you make sales, you don't have to anything. So it's actually not too much of a big deal. You can select your holiday. It's, it's associated with the sleeve length neck line and so on. Again, I can add more description text here if I want to. And here's where I wanted to show you production partners. Now, depending where you sell, this is going to look different for you. In ETC. The production partners are listed as such right here. These are my production partners. So in this case I'm going to select Print defy my tags again are my keywords and the materials I'm going to find out what was the material again and that shirt. Oh yeah, I was caught and I'm going to add cotton here. And as you can see down here, all my pricing is listed. I can adjust pressing here if I need to, and it'll all reflect with an apprentice phi. And as you can see, shipping information, it's already done for me. Look, they've already added shipping options. It's connected to print defies, heavy are unisex, heavy cotton tea. And they are the ones printing it and fulfilling it for me. So it's really great because they do all of the production and fulfillment for me. Okay. It shows me the pricing of the shipping and the total price included here. Okay. So that's how it would look in my Etsy shop. I wanna go back over to print device and continue showing you guys more. Before I leave Etsy, I want to show you what happens once I've created a product from Prince of ion linked, it's my Etsy store. It actually shows up inside of my Etsy store automatically. So after I've made any changes inside of FC, it'll actually show up here right under my all items. Okay. And it'll be the newest item in my shop. So just like that, it's been added, people can start buying it right now. So let's go ahead now and go back to print a phi. And I want to show you how to add your own artwork from your computer. Alright, now that we are back in printed phi.com, I'm going to show you how to add your own artwork from your computer or your device. So first things first we're gonna go to my store and then click on add product. Okay, So this is the page we were on before. And now we're going to go to unisex heavy cotton tea. Let's go to that one again. It's been a tried and true t-shirt for me, so let's stick with that. So let's go back down to. And Swift pod again, because that's what I love to use. And now we're going to click on add your design again. But remember the last time we added custom text, in this case, we're going to do my device. So now I'm going to go ahead and find a file to add to my t-shirt. So I'm going to search my computer and see if I can find a t-shirt design. Okay, So I have found a t-shirt design that I want to try out. It says, But first coffee at the coffee mug. And this is on literally well for me as a print. So let's say I want to try this on a t-shirt. I'm gonna go ahead and click on it. This is a JPEG file, and I click on Choose. So as you can see, it has a white background. So this might be smart for me to actually uses on a white t-shirt. Now, let's say I was happy with how that looks. I can go ahead and save this product right away. What would happen is because the white background and a white t-shirt, it's going to basically blank out itself. However, this is not really going to work as well if I put it on a coloured t-shirt, let's say I do black. So that's where it transparency would come in or a PNG because this is a JPEG, it has a white background. Now in this case. And so that may or may not be the style of actual art that I want to use. So let's say, for example, I want to try something else. This is not going to work for me and I want to maybe try just a PNG file instead. I'm going to go ahead and delete this layer and get rid of that artwork. And I'm going to add another design. Click on my device again. And I'm going to find one that actually has a PNG file. So I found a definition art that I created called Mama bear. It's sort of a funny, humorous artwork that I actually like to add two shirts right now you can't see it because it's in black. So I'm going to get rid of that one. I'm going to uncheck the black. And now it's on white. Let's say I want to try it on a, Let's say a pink shirt. Now as you can see, me zoom in here a bit so you can see what's happening. This is a definition kind of graphic with font that I've chosen. I can, oops, it is. Let me scale it. Well, I'm zoomed in. I can scale this artwork to make it larger or smaller. As you can see, there's no background image or color. It's sort of like a see-through background. And that's what a PNG file is. So this is something you can export. Maybe I created, I actually did create this in Illustrator, Adobe Illustrator, but I exported it as a PNG. So that's why this has no background color. It's not white color or black color is just it's just see-through. So that means it's easier for me to change the color of the T-shirt. Okay. So let's say I wanted to try a different color. Maybe I want to try green or I want to try yellow. Now I can try that, right? So depending on what you want, you can actually go ahead and try different things. If I wanted to, now I can click on Save product. Let's go ahead and do that for fun. And I would then go through the exact same process that I just went through with this other t-shirt that said hello on it. Now because of time and because I don't want to waste your time, I don't want to go through that entire process. Again, it would be identical, the exact same process. And I'd be filling in all the same information I just showed you. So if you need to see that again, you can go back to that section. But that's basically what you do if you want to add a product and create it with your own artwork. So again, you have the option of a JPEG or a PNG file. Now I could also add another product, let's say a sweat shirt for example. And let's say I want to add adder. Now let's say we want to add something different. We want to add it from our Dropbox. I would basically be doing the exact same process I just did with my device, except I'd be going through my Dropbox folder. So if you have a Dropbox folder, you can find your file there. And for Shutterstock, you'd basically be going to Shutterstock.com and downloading an image and using it that way. Okay, you can actually learn more about that here. I'm not gonna go into the details of that one. I wanted to show you how to use custom text and your device or Dropbox. So that is how you actually add artwork to your products, as well as how you actually add your products to your online store. 6. Choose Your Product Printer and File Formats: This video, I'm going to show you step-by-step how to create products using printed phi.com. These are going to be printed on demand products. The first thing you're going to need to do is to sign up to print defy.com if you have not done so already. So you can actually just go to print a phi.com and sign up a username and password. And we're going to start the process. Now I've already signed up and actually become a customer of theirs already. So I'm gonna go to my store. Now obviously, if you're just starting out, you're not going to have your store connected yet. That's really the first step you're going to need to do. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna go up to my own store and just share with you how you would connect your online shop in order to get started. So let's click on here on the top right-hand corner where mindsets vision city, because that's the name of my Etsy store. Right now it says connected. Now if I were somebody who's just getting started out, have to go up to the same area here and say manage my stores. And in this case, I'm going to act as if I don't have my store connected and I'm going to click on add new store. If you have not connected to anything it, this is obviously going to be blank. So click add new store. And this is where you connect your store. So maybe you already have a Shopify store or an Etsy store or Wix, WooCommerce, eBay, press a shop, big commerce or API, whatever it is that you use, then this is where you would do that connection. It's as simple as pressing the connect button and following the prompts, and it's very, very easy to do so. You'll also notice that maybe you're getting started and you don't have any shop yet. It actually says don't have a shop like a Shopify account sign up. So you can actually sign up for your Shopify store right here. So they make it really convenient and they have that available for all of these different platforms. So it's really important to do that. Like for example, eBay don't have an eBay seller account. Learn more. So they're kinda making the process a little bit easier for us if you're just getting started. So because I already have mine connected, I'm going to continue. But that is definitely an important step because once you've created these products, you need them to be able to show up somewhere to be purchased. So let's go to my store. And this is what the backend looks like when I have my own products listed. Now, I do graphic design and illustration. And what I've done is I've actually created artwork that I've added two t-shirts. So for example, let me just show you one of mine. Okay, we can do hard things. This is a t-shirt I was testing out and I am in the process of launching. And so I've actually added the artwork to this t-shirt, integrated it into my store. And there's a wide range of different ideas you can do. You can do sweaters. I've done all kinds of different things. A lot of mine are quotes and I find that those work really well. And so it's actually been really, really fun to try. Okay, so this is the kinda stuff that I do. But in your case, you might want to add a graphic design and maybe kind of illustration work or whatever it might be. So let's say you want to add a new product to your store. You're going to click on add product on the top right-hand corner there. And this is where you get to choose what product you're going to add. As I mentioned previously, there's such a wide range of products. You can go up here to this green button that's called catalogue, and you can actually scan through them, look at all the different options. Look at the variety of different men's clothing, women's clothing, kids clothing, accessories, home and living. I mean, the possibilities are really endless. Now for me, I usually go ahead and I print t-shirts as you can see. So I'm going to stick with that for this demonstration. I'm going to click on this unisex heavy cotton tea. This one has been good. It's the golden 5000. And you can see all the information are kind of listed underneath. And this has actually become really, really easy for me to go ahead and add products this way. So let's go ahead and use one that I've used before, the unisex heavy cotton tea, golden 5000. And we click on that. And I'm going to go through the process of actually adding artwork to this shirt. Over here. They will give you the description kind of images of the shirt. They'll show you how they fit on a female body and also on a male body. Okay. This is a unisex shirt, so that's why they're including both men and women as the models. And you can actually read the information is the a 100 percent cotton shirt, medium fabric and so on, classic fit here we label and so on. You can click this button to read more. It's really important to choose who's going to be printing these. And all the print providers that you can select from are listed below. Now I want you to notice a few things. Number one, the location. If I zoom in here, each print provider has a different location. This one demoted t is in the United States. Monster T or monster digital, United States. But guess what? Ph print Notre and they're actually in Latvia. Now, that might be really important information depending on where you're wanting your products to be printed. There's also print Geek, which I think is a really funny name, and they are in Canada. Okay, so depending on where you want your products printed, I believe they even have oh, here we go. Tee shirt and sons. They are in the United Kingdom. Textile, drug Europa, that's in Germany. So again, depending on where you're located, where you want your products printed. Most importantly, it's where are your customers, what is going to be convenient for them so that they can receive the orders in a shorter amount of time. Like I said before, if you avoid having your products to be shipped over the border, then that's going to lower the ship time a lot. When you lower the ship time, our customers are genuinely much happier. Okay, that's one of the things that, and the actual product quality. Okay? So let's say for example, I'm going to go with, this is actually a provider that I really like. A lot of my customers are in the USA. So I oftentimes print with Swift pod, Kay, Swift quad. Let's just examine them for a sec. I'm going to zoom in to their information just so you can see it a bit better. So they are located in the United States. Their pricing from US dollar is $7.27. So that is the cost of actually printing that item. Now the first thing you're gonna notice is wow, that's a lot more than printing, say a 100 shirts at a time. You might say, oh my gosh, Melanie, I'm not really sure I want to do that. Well, the thing is that if you print one item at a time, yes, the cost is several dollars more in general. However, you can set your own prices. So that's first thing first that you can set your own prices with Prince defied and you're not having to carry stock now. So you print a 100 shirts at 450, right? And that's going to be $450, right? So depending on your budget, I think this is still a better option because you're only printing one item at a time and there's no upfront costs. So that's usually how I kinda justify the fact that I'm printing a higher priced item one at a time. Number 1, I can set my own prices so I can actually bump my price up a little bit if I need to. Number 2, it's printing it one at a time. So I don't have to worry about the cost of carrying really expensive stock and making sure that they all sell. Okay. Shipping costs on this item is $4.80. That's just ship it inside of America. Okay? Now average production time, this is important thing to note as well, is 1.81 days or business days. And the print area is two-sided, front side and backside. That's the option. You get the sizes from small to five XL. So again, that's important information. Maybe if I needed an extra small, then I wouldn't go with this printer because they don't have extra small. They start at small. Okay, So this is the kinda thing I always look for when I'm deciding on my print company. And the last thing you want to think about is colors. What color options do they offer? Well, apparently these guys offer 31 color options. So they offer a wide range of neutrals. It looks like they've got some nice, nice bright colors. They've got black, which is a really popular shirt color. They've got lots of different colors. Some graze it. Let's say they've got some Heather colors which are kinda like the specular grays. So for me this is a good option because they have pastels, I have brights, they have neutrals, a black and white. So for me this is a really good option. Plus I've been using these guys for about a year and a half now. And honestly, I've been very happy with the production quality and speed. So the next step would be to click on start designing. So this is our mockup generator where you're going to actually create the design. So let's have a real quick chat about the actual file formatting that is needed to bring in your own artwork off of your computer. So print file requirements are JPEG and PNG file types supported. So even if you create an EPS in Photoshop or you create an AI file vector in Illustrator, no matter what you have to export them as either a JPEG or a PNG. The difference between a JPEG and PNG is a JPEG is not transparent background, whereas a PNG is, okay. So say your artwork is, has areas that are transparent. So maybe you want words on your artwork and you've designed them. Maybe you've done hand lettering, for example. And you want parts of that graphic to be transparent, then you're going to export a PNG, okay? If you don't care about that, you don't need areas to be transparent. You can export a JPEG. The maximum file size is 50 megabytes. Now, 50 megabytes is really huge file, so you probably won't need that much, but that is the maximum. The recommended size is 36, 92 by 4800 pixels. So that is the actual pixel dimension size, maximum resolution is 23000, 23000 pixels. So there you have it. Those are the actual file requirements. So again, if you are creating this file on your computer, those are the file format requirements. Now, just because this is a really big topic and I want to make sure that you don't create something and are not able to bring it in. I want to go over this export and file formats in a little bit more detail. I know that I'm being a little bit finicky here, but trust me, you'll thank me later. So first and foremost, the export settings are PNG for transparent files, designs, and export settings are JPEG for designs without transparency, I've already mentioned that images should be 60 to 80 percent quality. So in other words, depending on what size you're going to be printing on your actual t-shirts. Make sure you're not going to have to size them up too much, okay? You can size them up by a little bit, but you don't want to size them up too much where it starts to become pixelated. It says right here on the printed phi website that they accept JPEG files with either RGB or CMYK color space, but their system will convert the artwork to RGB. Now this is different for us designers out there like myself who are used to submitting everything as a CMYK. This is different because in this type of a process It's more of a digital print out and it is not being screened printed. So it's a different whole format for printing. So it's going to be an RGB and they've removed the profile for internal operations. The PNG format limitation is that it can only be in RGB, so you don't need to worry about that format. So this is only applicable if you are submitting jpegs. If you're submitting jpegs, you can submit either RGB or CMYK. If you're submitting a PNG, it's only going to be an RGB, so you're fine. Again, I've mentioned this earlier, but vector file formats, if you create an artwork in Adobe Illustrator or chorale draw, That's a popular choice for merchants. But with vector approach, the shapes created are easily scaled with their original clarity and quality. Vector images must be exported in the raster file format, which means you're safe to work with vectors and then listen guys, you must explore it to JPEG or PNG. So as I mentioned earlier, you're not going to be uploading an AI file, or an EPS, or a PSD. You're only going to be uploading a JPEG or PNG to this platform. 7. Ordering Samples: Hi friends. In this video I want to show you how you order samples of the new products that you've created for your store. So under your mind Store tab, you're going to go ahead and see all the different products that you have listed. So as you saw previously, I created a few products within the course just for your examples. So if I want to go ahead and get samples made so I can see the products before I have them sold, I'm going to click on get samples. Now it gives me a list of all my products that are eligible for me to have samples made. As you can see, there's a wide range of things that I have in my store. And I can just choose which one I want to have made into a sample. Let's click on, for example, this new t-shirt I made that says hello on it. We're going to just follow that t-shirt all the way through. And we're going to click on this little arrow over here. Now it's asking me what size I want to order. Let me zoom in here. It's very small. It gives me a list of sizes like an order of small, medium, large XL, double XL, and so on. Let's say I want to order a large, I'm going to click on the arrow that goes, It's kinda grays as you go over it. Click on large. It's telling me that the cost of ordering that sample $7.84. So if I want to go ahead and order that sample, that's going to be the cost to me. So let's say I click on that. So my subtotal then is $7.84. Next, I'd have to go on to shipping and also pay for the shipping on top. Zoom out here. So say continue to shipping. And now I'd have to go ahead and put in my information as well as my e-mail address and so on to confirm it. So if I say Continue, now it's giving me a summary of my order. And it's actually going to give me the full total costs for one sample. So it's going to be $7.84 plus the cost of shipping, which is $8.50. Now I understand where you're going to say. You might say, Wow, that's a little bit expensive, Melanie, I don't know how I feel about that. Well, I know it's a little bit more than maybe we want to pay, especially for shipping. But keep in mind that this is shipping over the border to Canada. So for anyone in America, this will be way cheaper, probably a few dollars. And it's also going to be shipped right over to me. It's going to shake, saved me so much time later. If I don't like the product and then I have customers that want refunds and things like that. So I want to avoid all that pain by actually getting one sample made. Sure it might cost me $16 and 34 cents for that one sample. But I find that worth it in the end because I know then the exact quality and production value of what I'm actually offering and my store. So that is how you order your own samples of your products. 8. Customizing Production Settings: If I want to edit any of my production settings, I'm going to have to do that in my actual store. So I'm gonna go back to print a phi.com. And I'm going to click on the icon in the top right-hand corner that looks like my store. There's a drop-down menu that comes up and I can go down to manage store settings. I'm going to click on that one. So now it's going to open up another page where I can actually change the settings. Again, I'm going to click on this little gear icon. So now that I'm inside of my store and I want to change the information regarding my production. I'm going to click on the left-hand side here that says preferences. Now this is where it gets a little bit interesting and I want you to watch very closely as I'm showing you, how do you actually change your production settings? Now first things first, in case of an item from your order is currently out-of-stock, discontinued or cannot be fulfilled by the selected print provider due to temporary unavailability, we can route your order to a different print provider. Additionally, orders will be routed when print providers experienced significant fulfillment delays. Now, order routing is something that I need to talk to you guys about because during the time, especially during COVID, for example, there were significant delays in different print providers. It wasn't their fault, it's just the nature of the pandemic. So I actually turned on routing for my store at really helped me to keep my store running. What that means is that if, for example, something is not available or is on backorder and you can't access it or your printer can't access it, then they're going to automatically reroute your order to the nearest printer or the printer that has the quickest option for your product. This makes the entire process keep moving no matter what. And it actually helps you. In the case of, for example, during the pandemic when everything was slowed down and products were on backorder. So you can select to either do not route my orders we see here, or replace orders automatically. So we will deliver the exact product match from another provider if possible. If the exact product matches now isn't unavailable, the product will be submitted with an alternative product that is closest and quality, color, and material. If no exact match or alternative products substitute is available, the order will be put on hold for your approval. So if they can't find something that is pretty much identical, they will place the order on hold that you can go ahead and select what to do next. If the cost of the cheapest alternative exceeds the maximum additional cost, the order will be placed on hold for your approval. Again, if there's any additional costs involved, you'll be placed on hold. So you do need to check in. It's not completely passive this process because yes, you do need to check in from time to time, especially if you notice that an order has not gone out in a while and it should have gone out. You want to check in to make sure additional settings that you can place. Our maximum additional cost per item. This the maximum, maximum additional costs you're willing to spend for item for routed orders. So up to $2, that's what I have it. Minimum of $2, you can actually increases if you'd like, use only exact product matches. So only the exact product match is in brand model and color will be used if not available, if unavailable, the order will be placed on hold. I personally have selected this button because I do want to keep it exact. So somebody see something on my store, I want them to get that. I would rather be notified and it hasn't been put on hold if it's not available. Okay. Order approval. You can have it set to automatic, which it's just the default is going to be automatic in 24 hours. You can also set it to automatically one hour or automatic in a certain time each day. Now, some of you might be wondering, wait, Melanie, why do you have it set to manual? Well, I'll tell you why. Manual orders are sent to reduction after you've clicked send to production in the order panel charges per order. Okay. Now the reason why I have it set to manual is because during COVID, I had some orders that were going to Canada from America, taking like months to get there. And of course my customers were getting upset, so I had to figure out what in the world do I do. And so I contacted printed phi and they were very, very gracious and they told me what I needed to do was to set it to manual and send to production only if the order was in America. So in other words, if my printers in America, I send the production to America. If I printer is in Canada, I my order was coming from Canada. I send it to a Canadian printer. Okay. And I'll show you how to do that in one moment. Now let's go on here for a second. I will get I will get right back to this manual, non-manual thing. Order View settings, show all orders and to keep that on. I choose which orders display on the my Orders page show all orders. Okay. Tracking notification. I like to know that as soon as as it is available. I would say keep it at that one because you need to have tracking information right away. Automatically send delayed orders to production. Okay. Again, I set that to manual. Send orders to production manually. Okay. I said that because again, I was having a problem being a Canadian having orders, trying to cross over the border. Now if you are living in America and your customers are all based in America, this section really doesn't apply to you, so don't worry about it. But if you're like me, maybe you live in Canada or Mexico or you, or you live in, say, the UK or in Germany or a different country, maybe are in Europe, then this does apply to you. So I would listen closely. All incoming orders are shipped, shipping restrictions apply, will remain on hold. You can manually send orders affected by shipping delays to production in your order details page, you cannot send orders that are cancelled due to shipping restrictions to production. So in other words, once an order has gone to production, you cannot change it. It's going to be produced in the place has been set to be produced in and then it will be shipped out. One of the problems I experienced during the pandemic was that when people ordered my products from outside of America, they experienced significant delays. Some of them had to wait even months to just get their t-shirts. So this is super challenging and frustrating for me as a business owner. And so I contacted printed phi and they gave me another solution. What they said is it to do is to actually set up extra copies of my products. So that, for example, if somebody ordered from Canada, I could set that product to be printed in Canada. So I'm gonna show you exactly how I did that. So let's say, for example, I want to do another copy of this mama bear t-shirt that I just showed you earlier. So maybe this is the shirt I want to get printed, but because it's being printed for a Canadian customer, I want to make sure it can be printed in Canada. What I'm going to do is I'm going to set up a new product. So I'm gonna go to Add product and I'm gonna go through the process to create that product again. But before I recreate that product, I'm going to make sure that I'm printing it on a Canadian printer. So I'm going to find a printer in Canada. This one's called print geek, and it's got 9.9 rating. It's a very good printer, and I'm going to select that printer. So the only challenge here is making sure that they have the same color that I need, in this case gold. And I'm gonna go from there. So click on start designing. And I'm basically going to recreate that shirt to be printed in Canada. So add design. My device, gonna put the mama bear shirt again. And I'm going to select the color that I want, which is going to be a goldfish kinda yellow color. And I'm going to take off the wakes. I don't want white US, uncheck it. So let's say I'm happy with that. Might make it a little smaller. Okay. So let's say that's the one I want and it's all set and it's pretty much exactly like the other one was. Then I'm going to say Save product. And now it's going to save it, but it's not going to publish it. So now I've got two different options. So I've got one that is printing in Canada, as you can see here, and one that is printing in the United States. So when the order comes in, I currently have my production settings set to manual. That means it's going to place this shirt on hold until I come and check and decide which one it's going to print out. Now when that order comes in, then I would just go ahead and select which one I want to print, and then it'll be printed and shipped from the right location. Now, one thing that you'll notice though, is slight changes, right? Depending on where you print. As you can see, there's a slight difference in color here. So these are kind of things you have to think about as you're creating your products. But this is one way to kind of get around one of the challenges I experienced during the pandemic, but just something to be aware of. And this is a way to get around that. 9. Ongoing Support: Now before you go, I wanna go over a few small other details that you may run into while using printed phi. Now first of all, once you go into my stores, you're gonna see a list of the stores you have with printing PHI. In my case, I have my Etsy shop. On the left-hand side here. I can go down and find out more detailed information. For example, if I wanted to do bulk orders, I can click on that and actually schedule a call with a session with a print it print defy bulk order specialist. Maybe you're want to order a larger amount of products, you can do that. They're okay. Now my account That's kinda more aware. My information goes my files. This is actually the art files that I've uploaded to print defy. So they're all right here. If I ever need to refer to them, they're all listed here. Payments. I'm not going to click on that one because it's got my credit card information on it, but that's where you'd find out that indirect taxes, same thing, it's kinda more personal, but that's where you'd find your taxes. My stores, you can click on that and actually again see the stores settings is, you know, standard and formats e-mail notifications where you want those kinda notifications to go to and connections. Connections are Regarding API tokens or email. Okay, now, before I go, I want to show you a few things as well. The Help Center is amazing. Now I know I've showed you a ton of great information within this course on how to create products with printf I had integrated to your shop. But if you ever need help, I gotta tell you print device Help Center is fantastic. They've got a lot of great articles in here you can refer to if you ever need anything else. They have little videos inside of here that might be helpful to you as well. And they also have a live chat. You can click on this little arrow here or this little icon and left-hand corner. Click on it. And you can actually start asking questions and just basically start a conversation. So send us a message. They are usually available within five-minutes. It's very, very convenient. Anytime I've had a question, I just go on here and I start chatting with somebody within a few minutes. And it kinda gives you a bit of a dang notification when they are actually there to talk to you. It's over there. They're typing it to you. So it's not voice, it's just typed. But it's wonderful and I found them to be extremely thorough, really friendly, and I have to honestly give them props because they've never let me leave the conversation unless I was totally happy with my understanding of what to do next. But most importantly guys, I want to encourage you to really try out printed phi and test this thing out, create your own products. And if you can, depending on where you're watching this video, go ahead and share it with us if there's a project section, share in the project section and tell us a bit about the product you made. Maybe what you're charging for it, maybe what inspired the product. And go ahead and select from the wide range of products that they have here. And I hope that you'll enjoy it. This is such a fun thing to try, even if it's just for fun. And then you may end up selling it or he may not. But hey, just try it out and enjoy the process, guys. I hope you've enjoyed this process of learning with me and I hope to see you guys again. And I hope that you've enjoyed learning how to print on demand. 10. Thank You (+ Product Challenge!): Hey guys, thank you so much for taking my course, the print on-demand course for beginners. I hope that it's helped you to really create your own print on demand products. And I encourage you to go ahead and share your products with us if you're able to, depending on where you're watching this, share your products with us in project section. Or I encourage you to share it on social media and tag us. Thank you guys so much and I encourage you to keep creating and having fun.