Building an e-commerce POD store from the ground up

How it all began

Last year, around November, I decided I wanted to do more with my Etsy shop. I’ve always had the entrepreneurial spirit, and creativity fortunately runs well in my family. I started to sell handmade items on Etsy, but I wanted to do even more and I wanted my business to scale faster. I had previously come across podcasts and articles online talking about print on demand (POD). I started researching it, and soon I eventually brought POD to my Etsy shop.

I really wanted my store to reflect my passions. As you likely have read and noticed throughout this blog, I have several – so it was tough to try to niche down into a single subject. That’s what all the experts recommend when starting out – you need to know who your ideal customer is in order to create designs with them in mind.

The birth of La Vie Bien & Onstage Swag

I decided to start out designing products that would fall under the mental health, performing arts, and second language acquisition categories. (It’s a lot, I know!) So I purchased a basic Shopify account to get La Vie Bien started. And after hearing from at least one other e-commerce store owners that my site felt a little random, I decided to separate my performing arts apparel and goodies to its own store (I felt it could survive on its own relatively well) and thus, Onstage Swag was born! I wanted to try a different platform from Shopify to test out different marketplaces (and to see what other pricing packages would get me), so I used Squarespace for Onstage Swag. I really like being able to compare features between the two sites to see how best to adjust my shop settings for the customer to more easily find what they’re looking for.

Having two stores as a beginner is a lot. I do not recommend having two stores as I recognize that I’m spreading myself thinner where I could be spending all my efforts on a single store, with a single niche. They say that the more “niched-down” your store is, the more successful it will be. This could be because it’s easier for your customers to understand what your brand is all about versus coming to your site and not being sure what you sell or what to look for.

Knowing how and what to prioritize

It can be incredibly overwhelming starting a business online – from picking your niche, to getting your first hundred products published, to creating marketing material for brand awareness – you will be spending countless hours on your business and strategy and will likely not start turning a profit for quite some time (depending on your niche and marketing strategy). You may be spending a lot on ads at first to get your brand out there, but you shouldn’t be spending on ads until you’ve done your market research to ensure there is a desire for your product and that you are bringing something unique to the table that can compete in an already extremely competitive marketplace.

I admittedly did not start out doing much product research. My mind is constantly swimming with ideas and I just had this desire to create, and see what happens. A lot of experts and podcasters will say this is not the right approach (they refer to it as “throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks”). However, I find more enjoyment in just creating designs and testing out products without spending hours on research tools, and seeing what works based on my store sales. I do still research, yes, but I spend more time on creating products I want to create as opposed to what I see has thousands of sales on Etsy. This is my personal approach based on what I enjoy, and you might decide that you want to take a more research-heavy approach before starting to create your first products. That’s completely fine too! I just wanted to start designing and creating based on my own creative ideas and get those ideas published.

A time consuming, but rewarding, effort

You will need to become extremely diligent with knowing how to manage your time when working on your side hustle, especially if you have a full or part time job while you try to build your business (and/or a family that deserves your attention!). It will be hard to walk away when you are deep in the creative flow, but it’s very important to remember to take breaks and know that the business will always be there waiting for you when you are ready to get back to it. Your Etsy listings will stay up for 4 months (until you renew them, and that’s only $0.20 as of this blog date). Your Shopify listings won’t expire so long as you can keep paying for the storefront. Some POD providers like Printify offer their own pop-up shop, which is a free storefront on their own domain, where you can sell your POD products. You have many options that you can choose to use based on your own budget and the time you have available.

Things are going well so far, but I’m having trouble right now with getting traffic to my Shopify store. Etsy seems much easier as they give you the option of using their own ads (as well as offsite ads), and there is already a very large following on Etsy. If you create your own storefront, you alone are responsible for driving all the traffic to that shop, and that can get expensive.

I hope this article is helpful and answers some questions you may have if you’ve ever been curious about what it takes to start your own POD business. Are there any topics mentioned here that you’d like to see another article on in more detail? Let me know and I’ll share more as time allows!

Until next time,

Maddie