Why Printify Is the Place to Turn Ideas Into Products

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One of my favorite things about being a creative in this day and age is that I can dream something up and turn it into a real product in minutes with just a few taps of the keyboard. Where am I going to find the money to bring my idea to life? There’s a solution for everything. Today, let’s get into Printify and why I think it’s a great place to turn your ideas into sellable products quickly. Before getting too deep into it, I use Shopify for my e-commerce and Printify integrates with Shopify seamlessly, so that’s what I’m going to be doing today.

Shopify Free Trial

If you have not gotten your Shopify site yet, you can easily get a free trial. What I love most about the free trial is that you can actually fully run your store. Once you have your Printify products set up, you’ll connect them to your Shopify store and use that trial period to work out your marketing and figure out how you’re going to start building your community. Take advantage of the fact that you’re getting Shopify at a discounted price to really test out your new Printify products.

How Printify Works

So how does all this work? Printify is a print on demand platform with tons of products to choose from. You create your products, set up your designs, publish them to your platform like Shopify, and start selling with very little risk. Many people have asked me about pre-orders and getting their business started on a really low budget, and this is the way I’d suggest doing it.

Test Different Variations

First, it lets you test a lot of different variations. You’re not limited to just one product based on your budget.

Low Risk

Second, there’s very little risk involved. You’re not having to maintain inventory, handle shipping, or run back and forth handling logistics. Printify takes care of the backend for you. Someone comes to your website and checks out on that product, Printify takes their portion, and your customer receives exactly what they ordered.

Built-In Designs

I have lots of design ideas that I would like to try out on Printify, but not everybody is design savvy. They make it easy with some built-in designs, so you can create products that are not only high quality but look great visually as well.

Merch

I’m no stranger to merch. It’s one of my very favorite things to sell, whether it’s for my personal brand or my stationery brand, Paper Standards. People love merch. Hoodies, tote bags, mugs, everybody loves merch. What I like most about Printify is that the items on the platform are things I would actually buy, actually use, and actually want to share with my community. I have some designs queued up and I’d love to see how they look on the Printify items. Once I have those set up, we can get them integrated with my Shopify and I’ll show how everything looks.

Exploring the Printify Catalog

I have the Printify catalog loaded up, and there are so many products to choose from. I feel like there are over 2,000 products, which is a ton. Of course, we love stationery over here, so we’re under the home and living category looking at journals and notebooks. Lots to choose from. I’m really interested in this hard cover bound notebook, and I love that it has a closure on it. The price is $15.63, and it looks like there’s also a premium account version where you would save even more on the cost of the item. It’s available in nine colors and one size.

Product Details

This item uses UV printing, which the listing says is best for vibrant logos and images on hard goods. We get nice full color printing. The size is A5, and there are a ton of colors to choose from. It’s an 80 page notebook with cream colored paper, an elastic closure, a ribbon marker, and an expandable inner pocket. I love those details. There’s lots of information on the specs and everything you’re going to get with this product, so let’s start designing something and see if it’s a good fit for my shop.

Creating the Design

We’re going to get the design uploaded into Printify. I’m going to be using one of my favorite Paper Standards mantras, “Keep your eyes on your own paper,” which looks good on a lot of different products. I would love to see this on a mug, but for today we’re just going to focus on this notebook.

Our design is here. We could play around with different colored notebooks for branding purposes, but I’m going to stick with the white notebook and black text and go ahead and save this. Other colors would work better with white text, but for this one I’m keeping it simple.

Mockups

Not only did it show me a product preview of what it would look like, it also provides mockups, which is essential with print on demand when you’re trying to launch a product without investing too much time and money in photography or having inventory on hand. Those mockups are going to be key to your promotion and marketing. We can use the mockup they created, and we can also save it for other uses like social media. For now, we’ll make sure it’s selected for our product listing and save the selection.

AI Features for Title and Description

There are some built-in AI features to improve the title, description, tags, all of that. You can opt in or opt out. Because I allowed it to populate some of that information, there’s already a lot filled in. Of course, you’ll want to go in and customize it for your brand and business and make sure your title and description are correct. This is nice because the specs, dimensions, and paper type are already built in, so you don’t have to do any heavy lifting to put the product description together. You’ll still want to make it align with your brand specifically.

Listing Details

Let’s go over to listing details to make sure everything is how we’d like it. I’m going to take this off since it’s not really necessary. Hard cover is going to be in the description, so I can take that off, too. Now, this is interesting. There’s a personalization feature, which is cool. It says, “Let buyers add custom requests for text, design, and more. On average, they’re willing to pay 20% extra for personalization.” That figure comes from Printify’s own listing page. I love a little custom personalized product, so I’ll check that out another time.

Pricing and Profit

Down here, we have suggested pricing. The cost for the product is $15.63. They suggest pricing it at $26.50, for an estimated profit of $10.42, which they show as a 40% profit margin. You’re in control of all of this information, so I can edit the price as I see fit. Let’s say I want to bring it down to $20 to make it a little more reasonable for my customers. That brings my profit down to $4.37. But again, this is a print on demand product. This is for me to test out interest and see how well it does. I can play around with pricing, but for this purpose let’s leave it at a clean $20. If we make any sales, I’ll have a profit of $4.37.

I love that this is fully transparent. I don’t have to play a guessing game as far as profit, because there’s already a profit margin calculator built in. I know that’s a huge pain point for people deciding on pricing, so being able to see your retail price, the cost of the goods, and your profit margin all on one screen is a big plus. Now that we have everything worked out, let’s publish the product. This is going to require the connection to Shopify that I mentioned earlier, and it’s really simple.

Connecting Printify to Shopify

Let’s get Printify connected to my Shopify site. All you have to do is go to the Shopify app store, look up Printify, install it, and use your Printify credentials to log in for your Shopify site. Right now, we’re looking at my Printify setup right inside my Shopify store. I don’t have to have an additional app or open another tab. I’m live in my Shopify store and accessing all of my Printify backend, which I love.

Viewing the Product in the Store

I did publish this product. I created it really quickly: I had my design, I uploaded it, and that was it. You can change all of the variations and update your description as needed. Let’s see how it actually looks inside the store. Over here you can hide it on Shopify, replace it, or duplicate it. Let’s check it out in the shop. It looks cute. I did not have to create any mockups, and we got front and back views here. If you want to use the feature, it can autofill the description. So that’s all set.

Design Help and Canva Integration

I really didn’t have to lift a finger. All I had to do was have my design ready. If you are not design savvy, there are some features inside the Printify platform that can help you with design, and I have tons of videos on how to design without design skills. One thing I noticed while I was in Printify is that there’s an integration with Canva as well. If you’ve been here before, you know I’ve shown the backend of Canva and how you can make tons of designs in one sitting. So everything works together, and you don’t really need design skills or web design skills. You just need a passion to create something, and these apps work together to get it on your site.

Final Thoughts on Printify

That was so simple. I’m loving it. Normally I would go in and really customize my description and make everything align with Paper Standards, but the fact that I could get this done in minutes and it already has the specs is great. If I had multiple color choices, all of that would be here as well. All I have to do now is start the marketing part. I remember starting out with ideas for all these different products I wanted to create, and you have to search for a manufacturer and meet minimum order quantities. These days, there’s little reason you can’t think of a product and create it in a short period of time.

Low Risk and Testing Variations

It was not intimidating. It’s very easy to navigate, make your selections, do your designs, integrate it with your Shopify platform, and start selling to your customers. The low risk is my favorite part. When you’re working with a lower budget, which I’ve been in plenty of times, you really can’t do a variation of items. With print on demand, you can try multiple colors, multiple sizes, and multiple runs of anything you’re trying out, which is a great way to test things with your community.

Marketing

Now that you have your products set up, you’re probably wondering how you’re going to market them. I love that we haven’t invested anything so far, so we have plenty of time, space, and opportunity to figure out the marketing part. Marketing does not have to be intimidating. You can start with some low-effort marketing on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Instagram trial reels are a great way to test out content with that specific audience.

Trial Reels and a Dedicated TikTok Account

If you already have a community that isn’t aware of your plans to launch this business, and you don’t want to mix your friends and family in with your new business community, check out trial reels. You could also try a TikTok account dedicated to that product. Depending on what you’re selling, make sure you’re speaking directly to the intended audience. Give them something relatable, something they’ll want to repost and reshare. Create content that’s really made for sharing. Shareable is the key. You want people to see themselves or someone they know in it, so they send it along and bring more eyes to your content.

Comments

Is this something you would try for your business? What products would you like to start with first using this print on demand service? What are your customers asking for?