As a filmmaker or photographer, you would probably love to sell physical prints or movie posters. A physical print brings your photo or poster to life and makes it a tangible object that people can experience. But producing and selling prints is out of your budget range right? You may think only the big-name studios can afford to do that and actually make money on it. After all, it's a big risk to invest in inventory unless you know people will buy it. If you order prints, then you have hundreds or thousands of dollars tied up in inventory that may or may not sell. And printing high-quality images in-house is even more expensive unless you already own all the equipment and printers needed. So it's out of the question until you make it big, right? Actually no, it's not. Today, we're going to show you how you can offer prints, posters, and other products without owning any inventory or investing any money upfront. Enter PrintfulPrintful is what's known as a print on demand & drop shipping service. This means they print custom designed products as they are ordered from your store. Printful doesn't require upfront payment, minimum orders, or subscription fees. You don't have to invest money buying inventory up front that may or may not sell quickly. All you have to do is select and design design your products, publish them to your website's store, and wait for orders to come in. Printful automatically produces and ships purchased products to-order for you. It ships directly to the customer. How it WorksPrintful produces and ships the orders your customers place through your store. This video showcases the high-quality printing process that is used to create a product your customers will love. Setting Up The first step to towards selling with Printful is to create an account and set up your store. Creating your account is easy and totally free. If you're like me, you're waiting for the catch to pop up when you hear "free." "They gotta make money somehow," you say. Well, yes they do, but there's no shady catch. Let's stop here to address that issue of money. How Printful makes Money Printful really does allow you to sell without any inventory or financial investment upfront. The way that Printful makes their money is by taking a percentage of the sale of each item. This is why they require you to connect a payment account such as PayPal during set up. The full payment from the customer is sent to you through your store's payment gateway. Printful then bills their cut out of your PayPal or other payment method and you keep the rest! The percentage they take is high yes, but the profit you net in the end is about the same as the profit you'd take home after investing in inventory, except with Printful, you don't have money tied up in up-front inventory costs. Printful allows you to set your own product price and see exactly how much you'll profit from the sale at any given price. Printful does make money, but only when you do! Now that we've cleared that up, you're ready to set up your store in Printful! Follow the checklist at the link below to get your store up and running in minutes and ready to start selling! Products you create on Printful can be offered directly on your online store. They are listed, managed, and ordered as a native store item. You don't have to use embedded frames or widgets like some platforms similar to Printful require. Customers stay on your website at all times, from landing page to order confirmation page. They are not redirected, nor shown any ads or branding, by Printful at any point. Most online e-commerce shop hosts and website platforms integrate seamlessly with Printful. Once integrated, your website's store will automatically sync your published Printful products and new customer orders. If your site doesn't have an integration, you can manually set up your store with their API. Your Printful account has a dashboard to monitor your sales and manage your products from. It also has a library where you can organize design files and images. The product editing tool lets you import finished designs and add them to the products. You can add text and clipart in the Printful design editor too after selecting a product. They also offer many other products beyond photo prints and posters. You can sell clothing items, phone cases, mugs, and much more through Printful! Once your design is complete, you select a set of custom mock-up product photos which you want to display in your store. Their mock-up photo generator tool creates very good product images! You can download one or more image sets, exclude images which you don't want to use, and select either jpeg or png file format for the images. Then set the price, name the product, add a description and publish your new product. You can add your logo be printed on all of the packing lists which ship with your products. Printful also offers warehousing services if you already have merch or want to include non-inventory add-in items with the orders fulfilled by Printful. Warehouse products are shipped directly to customers from the warehouse location. Offline sellers can still sell with Printful even if you don't have a website! Printful has manual ordering options on your dashboard so you can place orders for your products manually. Printful offers you the ability avoid risking an up-front inventory investment but still sell your choice of physical products, with your designs and your branding, directly on your store. They give you the resources and the freedom to drop new merchandise with each project you do, get your work out into the world, and create memorabilia, no matter your budget. Your supporters can bring your work into their home, and you don't have to bring boxes of inventory into yours to make it happen. Whether you have a store online already or are looking to start one for your photos, posters, designs and more, Printful is the way to go if you want to avoid the risk of investing your hard-earned money into inventory. If you have a design or photography you'd like to sell, it would be worth your time to check them out. Since you have no upfront investment to make, it's risk-free. Why not give it a try? Loading...
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