Starting a print-on-demand business is an exciting and lucrative venture, allowing you to express creativity while tapping into a thriving market.
However, this business model is not without its challenges, and if you decide to embark on this journey, you must be aware of the common pitfalls that can hinder your success.
Wondering what these are and if you also make them? Read on to see our list of 11 print-on-demand mistakes with tips to avoid them.
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11 Print-On-Demand Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make
We’ll list the most common mistakes in the order you may encounter them during your POD journey.
1. Lack of Market Research
One of the most critical mistakes to avoid is the lack of comprehensive market research. Understanding your target audience is paramount in the POD industry, as a deep awareness of their preferences, interests, and purchasing behaviors directly influences your product offerings.
Without this insight, you risk making poor product choices that don’t resonate with potential customers, leading to low sales and wasted resources.
🔧 How to Solve It?
Begin by identifying the demographics of your target audience, such as their age, gender, location, and lifestyle preferences.
Leverage social media analytics, customer surveys, and keyword research to gather valuable data.
In addition, you can engage with potential customers through online forums, social media groups, etc., to get insights into what products they search and what designs appeal to them.
2. Not Checking Competitors and Industry Trends
The POD sector is one of the most dynamic industries, shifting and changing really fast.
As a result, if you want to become or stay relevant, you need to be flexible and adapt to changing trends.
Otherwise, you risk stagnating and losing your audience.
However, new sellers frequently clone existing successful stores without understanding what made those businesses thrive.
This approach can lead to failure as you overlook the unique value proposition and hard work that established competitors have invested in their niches.
🔧 How to Solve It?
Analyze what successful POD businesses offer and how they position their products. Pay attention to any emerging niche-relevant or seasonal products and how you can complement them with evergreen products.
Moreover, keep a close eye on your competitors.
Assess their existing products, pricing strategies, and customer feedback on their offerings to find gaps you can exploit.
This not only helps you understand current market demands but also provides inspiration for your unique offering and your own USP(unique selling proposition).
Without a clear USP, it becomes difficult for customers to understand why they should choose your products over others.
Thus, clearly articulating what makes your offerings unique is essential for standing out.
3. Low-quality or Generic Product Images
Product images and mockups are the cornerstone of any POD since they are the first point of contact between your product and potential customers.
A majority of shoppers explore product images immediately upon reaching a product page.
If the images are low-quality or generic, they can create a negative first impression, leading to distrust and increased bounce rates.
What’s more, customers tend to associate image quality with product quality. Low-resolution or blurry images can raise doubts about the credibility of both the product and you as the seller.
When customers see pixelated images, they may question the legitimacy of your brand, leading to cart abandonment and affecting conversion rates.
🔧 How to Solve It?
With Dynamic Mockups, an automated mockup generator, you can avoid these business-costly mistakes and not only improve the quality of your designs but also enhance personalization.
Our Free Mockup Library lets you browse multiple popular POD categories and easily customize and personalize your mockups to avoid overtly generic designs.
Furthermore, it offers lifestyle mockups, essential in conveying the real feel by enabling your customers to imagine your product in real-life situations.
Thus, you can:
🔥 Input your product and style preferences, and our AI Mockup Generator will create realistic scenes without affecting your original design.
Experimenting with different backgrounds and styles allows you to customize scenes and check what works best for your audience.
🔥 Use Photoshop mockup templates that you can upload to our platform and customize them further.
You can also apply Photoshop blending modes for more realistic mockups.
4. Not Diversifying Product Offerings
There is nothing wrong with being focused on 1 product type and owning it, but sticking to a narrow range of products can limit your market reach in the long run.
Furthermore, relying heavily on a single product or category makes a business susceptible to market fluctuations and changing consumer trends.
Without diverse offerings, sellers may struggle to increase the average order value and also miss on upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
Ultimately, a narrow product scope can stagnate your brand growth.
🔧 How to Solve It?
By providing complementary products or variations, you can encourage customers to purchase more items in a single transaction, thus boosting overall revenue.
When you present customers with related or upgraded products, they are more likely to make additional purchases.
Did you know that with Dynamic Mockups, you can bulk-create 100 unique mockups in 10 seconds, enabling you to upload multiple designs and colors on different products to diversify your catalog or launch a new collection instantly?
5. Neglecting The Design Placement on Your Products
We’ve already mentioned a common problem of using low-quality or generic product images or mockups.
Misplaced design assets are another common issue that sometimes goes hand in hand with low-quality images.
Not only do they affect the overall look, but they can also diminish the perceived value of your products, deterring potential customers.
🔧 How to Solve It?
In addition to creating high-quality, personalized product images and mockups, make sure your design assets are aligned, appropriately positioned, and match the general outlook and product size.
Dynamic Mockups automatically adjust your designs using smart objects, allowing you to resize and relocate assets within the Print Area.
Furthermore, it dynamically calculates the width and height of the Design Asset so you can precisely place and size them within mockups.
6. Choosing Unreliable POD Supplier
Selecting a reliable POD supplier is fundamental to ensuring product quality and timely fulfillment.
A common mistake if you are new to POD is to overlook certain aspects, such as:
- Reviews, ratings, and feedback from other users regarding your desired POD supplier.
- The quality of the products and printing options.
- Shipping and delivery time.
- Additional costs such as shipping fees or hidden charges.
- Responsive customer service and support.
- Integration capabilities with other platforms, etc.
Neglecting these aspects will most probably result in choosing the wrong provider.
🔧 How to Solve It?
Do a thorough search on a potential POD supplier and use our list above as a guide. Make sure you:
- Go through unbiased reviews, ratings, and feedback to get a general idea.
- Order product samples so you can vouch for the design and material quality.
- Check the supplier’s shipping and fulfillment times and opt for one with a proven track record of timely deliveries.
- Check if the provider shows clear information about base prices, shipping costs, and any additional fees so you can make informed pricing decisions without unexpected expenses.
- Choose a POD supplier that integrates well with your eCommerce platforms if you plan to sell on multiple platforms.
To get a headstart, jump to our blog, 12 Best Print-on-Demand Sites To Try to check some options.
For a more specific comparison, check our blog, Printful vs Teespring – Which One is Right for You?, on 2 highly popular POD suppliers.
7. Not Choosing The Right eCommerce Platform or Marketplace for Your POD
A wide range of eCommerce platforms and marketplaces can make it difficult to know which one may be the right for your business.
If you are a novice, you’ll most likely be tempted to try more than one and perhaps disperse too many resources.
Thus, it’s a common mistake to rush to multiple platforms and marketplaces without checking them in more detail.
Each has its merits, but if your target audience isn’t there or it’s not suitable for your product types, you won’t be able to reap the benefits.
🔧 How to Solve It?
First of all, you need to know the difference between an eCommerce platform and an online marketplace to make an informed decision.
With an e Commerce platform like WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc., you can sell your products or services directly to customers.
On the other hand, an online marketplace like Shopify, Etsy, etc., allows multiple vendors to list and sell their products or services to customers.
Thus, you need to see where your target audience is, how easy the setup process is, the total costs, how scalable the platform or marketplace is, etc.
Dynamic Mockups has integrations with Etsy and WooCommerce, allowing you to create and update product mockups for listings easily
You just need to upload your designs, and we will generate high-quality mockups, which you can quickly add to your listings, making your shop look great with minimal effort.
8. Neglecting a Design of Your Online Store
Building an online store is a time-consuming process where you must take care of many aspects, which can cause major overlooking and hamper the shopping experience.
Deterring potential customers is the last thing you’d like to do, right?
So, what are the most common mistakes here?
- Neglecting user experience and the importance of intuitive navigation, clear layouts, and fast loading times.
- Low-quality or generic images.
- Lacking mobile optimization
- Poor product descriptions.
- Lack of SEO best practices.
- Not using social proof.
🔧 How to Solve It?
Based on the most common mistakes, the reply pretty much imposes itself:
- Ensure your store is easy to navigate and visually appealing with optimal loading times.
- Optimize your site for mobile with a responsive design that adapts to various screen sizes for a smooth shopping experience across all devices.
- Establish a clear brand voice, visual style, or messaging using brand colors, logos, etc.
- Enhance your product descriptions by highlighting key features, benefits, and unique selling points while incorporating relevant SEO keywords.
- On the same line, include proper keyword integration in product titles, descriptions, and metadata so tour customers can find you through search engines.
- Include genuine customer reviews or testimonials, both good and bad, to build credibility.
💡 Thanks to our WordPress plugin, you can offer a more personalized shopping experience, making it easy for customers to preview their custom designs before they buy.
You set the templates on which customers can upload their designs. They will automatically appear on product mockups.
As a result, shopping becomes more interactive and helps customers feel confident in their purchase by seeing how the design looks on the product.
9. Setting Unrealistic Pricing
Setting the right pricing strategy is always a tricky one, even for more seasoned sellers. If the price is too high, your potential customers may not buy the product, while if it’s too low, it may cut your profit margins.
🔧 How to Solve It?
Before determining your prices, it’s essential to calculate all costs you’ll have with producing and selling your products.
- Typical costs include design, production, shipping, platform, marketing, and taxes.
- Set a profit margin of around 20% since less than may be insufficient to cover operational expenses.
- Apply pricing strategies such as competitive pricing, dynamic pricing, anchor pricing, etc.
- Review your pricing regularly.
For a thorough description of the major pricing strategies and the mistakes to avoid, jump to How to Price Your Print-on-Demand Products?
10. Overlooking Marketing & Advertising
Focusing on building your online shop, creating high-quality designs, and choosing the right POD supplier, platforms, etc., makes it easy to underestimate a crucial step — promoting your business.
A standard line of thought is that marketing and promotion can wait until later. Well, they shouldn’t.
Inconsistent branding, lack of brand storytelling, and not leveraging the power of social media are all common pitfalls for newbies.
🔧 How to Solve It?
Social media platforms are gold mines regarding reach and further promoting your POD.
The choice will depend on your overall marketing strategy, as well as on your audience and product types.
For example, Instagram is great for influencer collaborations and product presentations.
Facebook is a good option for ad targeting, as well as for building a community around your brand and engaging with your audience.
TikTok is worth trying for UGC content and showcasing your products and their benefits in a more interesting way.
Collaboration with micro-influencers is another way to reach your target audience and build authenticity effectively.
Furthermore, encourage your audience to create UGC and showcase your products in real use, and reward them with special coupons, discounts, etc.
11. Neglecting Analytics
If you neglect traffic and sales metrics, you run the risk of not making data-driven decisions.
If you don’t know what drives or deters your customers, if you don’t know their behavior or user experience in your shop, how can your business grow and scale?
Moreover, if you fail to understand your product performance, how can you adapt it or improve it?
Analytics and metrics should play a vital role in your decision-making process.
🔧 How to Solve It?
Focusing solely on immediate sales figures without considering long-term trends can lead to misguided decisions.
- Therefore, it’s crucial to analyze data over extended periods to identify patterns that will shape your future strategies.
- Pay attention to the metrics related to user experience, such as page load times and navigation paths.
They are crucial for optimizing site performance and improving conversion rates.
- Collect customer feedback through reviews or surveys to understand product performance and customer satisfaction.
- Conduct A/B tests on your marketing campaigns or product listings to determine what resonates best with their audience.
- Thumbs up for you if you engage in social media marketing, but don’t forget to track the effectiveness of your social media efforts through analytics tools that measure
- Engagement,
- Reach, and
- Conversion from these platforms.
Wrapping It Up
We’ve given you a headstart and provided the 11 most common print-on-demand mistakes and the ways to successfully avoid them and create a more effective POD store that:
- Attracts customers,
- Enhances user experience, and ultimately,
- Drives sales growth.
However, making one mistake in particular will jeopardize all the consequent steps to boost your POD business — failing to create compelling and realistic mockups.
Not only are they the first thing your customers will encounter, but their quality and design will paint a picture of your business in total.
It’s only natural that you want that picture to be of the utmost quality, figuratively and literally.
Dynamic Mockups provides tools to streamline the design process and create highly personalized mockups.
But that’s not all.
How Can You Enhance Your POD Store With Dynamic Mockups?
Dynamic Mockups is a robust mockup generator that not only automates mockup creation but also enables you to fully customize and tailor them to:
🔥 Cater to your audience’s preferences and needs.
🔥 Boost your online presence with personalized and realistic designs.
🔥 Create a recognizable brand with integrated Printful and Printify color options and desired assets.
🔥 Expand reach via our eCommerce integrations and so much more.
🔔 What’s coming next?
Soon, you’ll be able to control the creation process and the printing quality with our iFrame embeddable mockup editor feature.
Thus, it will allow your shoppers to design their products directly on your site without relying on 3rd parties.
And our Shopify integration is about to hatch. So, stay tuned.
Ready to see Dynamic Mockups in action?
Start with Dynamic Mockups for free and take your POD store to another level.
Start creating for Free!
Showcase your E-commerce products like big brands, without costing a fortune
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