Instant Drop Ship Merch Store

Building a merchandise store selling logo’d t-shirts, hats, mugs and hundreds of similar products is very simple and we discuss how.

• Drop Ship with Printful
• Designing a logo or shirt
• Use for branding and community engagement
• Shoppable posts on Instagram and Facebook

Transcript

Jesse: What’s going on, Richie?

Richard: What’s happening, Jess?

Jesse: Not too much. It’s a good day. I recovered from all the conferences and all the events recently. So I’m catching up on normal work. How about you? I think you have one more left.

Richard: I had one more. Actually, have one again tomorrow, but that’s just a local one, not traveling anywhere. It’s a one-day, bunch of marketers.

Jesse: Cool, so that the family can stay intact. You’re not getting too crazy on traveling.

Richard: All good.

Jesse: Yeah, and part of the thing, a lot of other people are on conferences. A lot of people in our space were mentioning the same, and as I was at several conferences and mentioning the ability for Ecwid to do merch stores or print-on-demand, I thought this would be a perfect time to bring Daniella back to the pod. So Daniella, how are you?

Daniella: Hey, guys, I’m great. How are you, guys?

Richard: Great.

Jesse: Yeah, doing awesome. What have you been up to lately?

Daniella: I lately worked on my website and my blog and I redid everything to offer a bunch of Ecwid Commerce tips and tricks. So I hope it’ll be great for Ecwid users.

Jesse: Awesome. And what is that website? I’ll let you do a free plug here.

Daniella: Thanks. It’s Daniella.io.

Jesse: All right, awesome. For listeners, check that out if you search anything Ecwid on YouTube, very likely you’re gonna come across Daniella as well. That’s awesome. And now how about you been doing, you did the course as well? Have you been getting some good feedback from customers?

Daniella: Great feedback, yeah. There are a whole bunch of 60 videos that are completely updated with Ecwid tutorials, tips, and tricks. I go from building your store to designing it, to driving targeted traffic and increasing your sales. So it’s a complete e-commerce course. I worked really hard on it, and I’m glad it’s bringing value to a couple of new e-commerce users, and Ecwid users that have been on the platform for a while already now.

Jesse: Awesome. I think I’ve seen a couple of preview videos that looked awesome. Maybe I had to get a freebie link or something there to go through the course, but I don’t really have time for that I guess. We brought you on to just steal the best bits of information, so that I don’t have to go through the full course. Anyway, for everybody listening if you do want to… I think that’d be great for people that really just need more hand-holding and be able to go through the course at their own pace. That’s awesome. So, you’re an expert, that’s why we brought you back today. And the reason, the topic I want to talk about with something actually… Matt and Joe from Evergreen profits on their recent podcast, they mention this, they actually gave us a good plug at Pod Fest. They mentioned it to all sorts of podcasters from around the world about being able to add, to monetize their podcast through a merch store. They talked a lot about Ecwid and the integration with Printful. I knew you have done a couple of stores like this. I wanted to get your real experience here and share with the audience.

Daniella: Yeah, when the integration with Printful and Ecwid came out a couple of months ago, I was super excited. I thought it was a really great opportunity to be able to sell merch online. And I wanted to test it, take it a little further. I wanted to see if it was possible to integrate Printful with Ecwid but also sell directly to eBay thanks to that. So to sell through Ecwid onto eBay and Instagram since Ecwid agrees with both platforms. But I wanted to see if it was completely automated, like if I had to manually go do things and Printful and to update sales. And it worked, it was crazy, I was selling on eBay in a day. We set it up in a day pretty much and we already started making sales. It was really powerful. I think there’s something there that’s really interesting.

Jesse: Wow. That’s awesome. eBay was never really the goal of that integration or that project but I’m glad you were able to take your own spin on it. That’s what it’s there for. Here are the tools, go ahead, go play and wherever you think this merch would sell, please, create a shirt, go make it. For people that are driving in their car, they’re not going to be able to go do this. But I know that the URL is Boostedstartup.com and it’s a variety of what kind of merch for side hustlers, for entrepreneurs and there’s a lot of products on there. Did you have to go and design each of those products individually, are you a Photoshop wizard or how did that process work?

Daniella: There’s a lot of available options for someone who wants to start their Printful store. We tested all of them pretty much. I have a knowledge of Adobe Illustrator. So I made a couple of myself but that’s a little bit more advanced. The easiest way was using what’s already available within Printful. They have an editor where you could add text to a shirt or a mug or anything that they sell that’s available within the platform. And they offer images and icons and things like that. So you can use what’s already available within Printful and that’s probably the fastest way to get it started. If you work with a designer, you might already have images and things with your logo or whatever you might want to put on a shirt. And then Fiverr is a great way to go too, if you have no skills with the design online or anything like that. Outsource it to Fiverr for five bucks and get whatever you need to be made. That’s another way to do things.

Jesse: Awesome. Yeah, a couple of things I wanted to touch on there but I think for people that have never heard of Fiverr. Richie mentioned it to me probably like 10 years ago when it was first on and I didn’t get it at first, I’ll be honest with you. I was like, that sounds like the dumbest thing ever. Then I’m like, oh, but they pretty much do anything you want for five dollars.

Richard: So many crazy things. I mean you name it, like oh, go write my wife’s name on the sandy beach on the Bahamas and take a picture and send it back to me. And there it is. I love it.

Jesse: Yeah, I know. For five dollars you can get that done. For people that are like, okay sky’s the limit on that. I don’t want to get stuck in a rabbit hole of Fiverr and it’s Fiverr — I believe — .com. Yep, go ahead, get stuck in a rabbit hole on your own time. But for us, if you have this great idea for a logo or a t-shirt, you can go to Fiverr and say… I actually haven’t done it. I think you post something and you pay the five bucks and you get the results.

Richard: Yeah, and a lot of people, if they see other prices they won’t be scared. Most people start at $5 but there are things like, oh if you want today or expedited then that might be ten dollars. Or if you want it in all these different kind of vector graphic and this other plot, delivered in different ways, it might cost you more but the basic starting cost is $5 for pretty much anything.

Jesse: Yeah. I think that starts at five is probably a good way to do it. But if your needs are pretty basic and you want some help with something like a quick little graphics for a t-shirt — Fiverr.com, you can do it. So Daniella, you also mentioned you use Adobe Illustrator and then Printful has their own editor. I think if you just have a quick little saying and you want to put on a t-shirt or a hat, just go there, you can do this in a couple of minutes. Daniella, a lot of the shirts you made for Boosted Startup, they were done with the Printful and the Printful web app, I guess you’d call it. There’s a saying and it’s on a T-shirt and the t-shirt is on a person. It looks like a real person but really you just did it on Fiverr and whipped that up in a couple of minutes. Is that correct?

Daniella: With that having a couple of minutes is exactly correct. Yeah, I think we were making… because we got so excited. I was doing it with a friend and it took us five minutes to make any product. So we were just like wow, let’s push this to the Max and see what we can do with it. We made like a 120 products tonight or 250 and then we push them all out onto eBay. It was very fast to do, it wasn’t very complicated.

Jesse: Awesome. That’s great. So people can check that out and that’s for a basic store. You were able to whip something up, start making sales right away. There’s a couple other… I believe you helped Steve Olsher as well.

Daniella: Yeah. We worked on his store because he does a podcast. I think Ricky knows a little bit more, he could talk a little bit more about it in detail. But yeah, we made a submerch for his store too also.

Jesse: Awesome. Yeah, and Steve was on a previous podcast for people, it was the e-commerce OG if you’re looking back in the history of the podcast.

Richard: He’s been doing it way back in time. CompuServe mall, so put it that way, half of the people don’t even know what I just said. He’s back when the little computer disks were getting put out to get people to sign up for a store.

Jesse: Yeah, for people who want to listen back, you can listen to that full episode, but he has a merch store, selling using Printful and Ecwid so that he can help monetize his audience and his podcast. For people out there that want to check that out. Daniella, any other new projects that you have in the works with print-on-demand merch stores?

Daniella: Yeah, and there’s a YouTuber who reached out to me. Their channel is Toasted Gamer Boutique, it was kind of weird, but I was like, wow, they started five months ago and already have 1500 subscribers. There’s a lot of potential there. I was like, okay, let’s have a look. She’s thinking about ways to monetize her channel. We launched a website seven days ago and it already has 2.3 thousand organic clicks in Google search console, which is crazy like that, a lot of people clicking on her website already. She’s just starting out but eventually, the merch is going to be one way of monetizing her audience, which is a great opportunity.

Jesse: Wow. There was the original source of traffic, it’s a YouTube channel.

Daniella: Exactly, YouTube.

Jesse: Okay, awesome. Then most of that traffic is coming from clicks through the description on YouTube, am I correct?

Daniella: No, actually most of it is organic. To her website specifically, it’s been mostly organic search. Some of it is from YouTube, I think maybe 15% at this point but a lot of it was a Google search. I think she just has a great niche right now. And there’s a lot of people looking for information on the game that she’s playing on YouTube.

Jesse: Wow. Okay, that’s actually a ton of organic. I don’t want to get stuck there, but that’s a ton of organic traffic in just a week.

Daniella: Exactly.

Richard: Is it a new game?

Daniella: No that has 10,000 downloads, it’s existed for a couple of years now. So no, but there’s just no one talking about it and actually doing voiceover content. That’s really interesting and fun. She’s really good at livestream. She’s attracted a lot of people early on.

Jesse: That’s cool, man. I’m doing the wrong thing again. I should just be playing video games on my phone and recording it. I always do the wrong thing. All right. (laughing)

Richard: Either that or you just like bright shiny object syndrome.

Jesse: Yeah, I do have a tendency to jump on new things. But all right, a video game review and streaming site and now going to start monetizing it through merch so yeah, I love it. I love it. All right. Okay, so I think we’ve covered a couple of things here, but I think for people that are listening and haven’t heard of a merch store yet. The concept of a merch store is basically… think of your favorite band, right? They have merch, you go to the show, you want to see that, you want to buy the t-shirt that proves you were there. It’s the same thing in the influencer space, for really any space, merch is just branded merchandise. That’s usually the t-shirts, the hats, the hoodies, coffee mugs in the more business-y world. That’s merch stores. And then the reason I like this is because it’s print-on-demand. You don’t have to go to a t-shirt printer and get a hundred different sizes or a hundred printed with different sizes and colors. You just wait till you sell it, then somebody else ships it for you. And you keep the rest of the profit.

Richard: Yeah, your margins not going to be as high because they’re storing it, they’re shipping it, they’re doing all the stuff. But when someone sitting there and they’re thinking of themselves, hmm, I have good designs or I have a good saying or someone says something on the news. That’s the new meme or they just want to try, give something a shot and they don’t want to put a lot of money into inventory or setting up the logistics of everything. Literally, Daniella is telling us how in one day they set it up. I wouldn’t try to do as many products, probably.

Daniella: Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend it. (laughing)

Jesse: Yeah, you don’t need to do a hundred and twenty products for people listening. That was probably a little overkill there.

Richard: Well, but yeah, if you started with one, just give it a shot. In one day you could set up a store and have it selling on eBay, selling on your own website, selling in various locations, depending on how deep you wanted to go with the inside of Ecwid. And you don’t even have to buy any product. Again, you’re not going to get as big of a margin. But that’s nice to not have to buy anything, store anything, ship anything. All you have to do is come up with the idea, the meme, the saying, the logo and spend a day, and next thing, you got a store.

Jesse: Yeah, very cool. I’m going to steal a little bit from Matt and Joe’s recent podcast at Evergreen profits. They launched their merch store using Ecwid and they use a merch store a little bit differently. They make money in other places. They’re really using it just to spread their brand. They had an event recently. They pre-ordered like a hundred t-shirts just to have there and handed them out, or they use it for people that buy their course and they get a free t-shirt. It’s kind of used as a coupon. There are so many different ways you can use it. It’s a very easy add-on for people, for more traditional listeners here that already have an e-commerce store, selling your own products. Is your brand strong enough where somebody would say, yeah, but I’ll buy their t-shirt too. You can add your logo to a hat, a t-shirt, things like that and maybe make a little bit extra money. And then the reason I like merch is because we live in an Instagram world here. I’m a little older than that demographic for Instagram, but Instagram is the hottest platform right now, the hottest social platform. All that merch we’re talking about now, that’s the beginning of a new post, new image, new story, you name it. Now your merch, whether you sold it and make money on it, or whether you just gave it away to customers, now it’s a part of the story. You can do all sorts of stuff with it. I think that’s where I’d like to see more…

Richard: Oh, definitely. If you think of it, think of all the people out there that have influence with no affluents. They have a huge market of people and they don’t know what to sell them. This in one day gives them the opportunity to again create a logo, a meme, they probably have something they say to their audience all the time. They could just put that quote on a shirt. That’s what we did with Steve Star. We just took some of the quotes that he says to his listeners all the time, our listeners I guess because I’m on the show with him. Now all of a sudden you have another way of monetizing. So to Jesse’s point, you have all these people that have these following. And they don’t know necessarily what to do or what to sell. They don’t have to go buy product. They literally can sell within a day to their existing audience and then start getting some affluence with that influence.

Daniella: Absolutely. Actually, ToastedBoutique.com, she’s always saying “patang” in her videos when she gets something right. She’s like, yeah, patang, and she put it on a shirt. She hasn’t pushed it yet, but I’m pretty sure because a lot of the YouTubers watch her playing or like, hey, say “patang”. So yeah, I think it’s a possibility. It’s a funny thing that she says in her videos. It’s pretty original. It’s like her thing. So why not put it on a shirt?

Jesse: Yeah. That’s perfect. So really there’s a made-up word. That she now says while she’s streams while playing video games and you can put that on a T-shirt and make money from it.

Richard: And you don’t even have to make thousands of that. If you can pay for your coffee by saying a word and don’t have to touch a darn thing, that’s awesome. And I’m sure she’ll do better than that with that many followers this week.

Jesse: All right. So I think I need a patang T-shirt and nobody will have any idea what unless there’s a fan. That’s easy wearing this t-shirt to be like what is that? I don’t get it. But yeah, I could see a ton of uses for that. And again, it’s social friendly so, saying with the Toasted Boutique. Is it Toasted Gamer Boutique or Toasted Boutique?

Daniella: Her YouTube name is Toasted Gamer Boutique and then her URL is ToastedBoutique.com.

Jesse: Okay. All right. You got the proper URL structure, proper YouTube name, we’ll get that in there. I love it. I lost my thought there, it was a really good one though. Rich, you jump in.

Richard: Did she actually build this direct in an Ecwid, or does she have another website already? Did this integrate, or how did she pull this way?

Daniella: I started, it was just YouTube and then at one point she realized there were quite a few people looking for things in Google. So it was like, okay, let’s make a website where we can refer and embed all of our YouTube videos. And then that was the next step and then it was like hey, this audience is growing really fast, how do we monetize it eventually? Because you can do YouTube ads, you can do ads on your website, but you can’t count on that. You can’t have just one source of revenue if you’re actually going to build something that you want to be able to live from. We’re like, well one way to monetize is with Ecwid. It’s super easy to integrate to any website, she’s on WordPress. It really doesn’t take much time to just set up and then create a couple of shirts on Printful and put them on the site. Plus the Printful integration, you saw it, you don’t have to pay upfront for the shirts or anything. You just create them and if they sell that’s the time that you pay for them.

Jesse: That’s perfect. Now some of those t-shirts get out to our fans. Now she can ask for people “send me a pic of you wearing your T-shirt”. And then now that can become a Shoppable Post on her own feed on Instagram. Is there an Instagram feed that’s related or is that to come?

Daniella: Yeah, she’s got an Instagram. She actually already received fan art, which so funny. But yeah, there’s potential there. I think it’s possible that if she even gave away a couple of shirts for free and asked people just to wear them and send in a picture. I’m sure there are people willing to do that.

Jesse: Wow, fan art as well.

Richard: Generated content to a whole nother level, right?

Jesse: Yeah. Now I’m a little jealous, listeners of the podcast, I have received zero fan art so far. This is episode 37. You know, where’s the love? I don’t know. (laughing) All right, fake fan art, please, can we get some fake fan art? All right. That’s awesome. Daniella, any last thoughts you have on a merch store? It seems like you’ve been playing with it, it’s a lot of fun. I want to just encourage other people out there that are thinking about what do I do next? This is an easy thing to test out and try.

Daniella: Exactly, it doesn’t demand too much time. If you’re not a techie or anything like that using Ecwid super easy and simple to set up. I did a lot of research looking at a lot of platforms in the past. And if you don’t have any coding or technological background, you’re going to love Ecwid. It’s very easy and I’m thinking specifically about people with audiences, and they’re trying to figure out how to monetize them like Instagram influencers, podcasters, YouTubers. There’s an opportunity with this here and yeah, just give it a try.

Jesse: Awesome. It’s almost like you’ve heard one of our previous advertisements for this. I love it. (laughing) I wanted to keep hammer at home because I know people can do really well with this and I got a little special bonus here. We are not in the habit of doing like bonuses and stuff, but we’re going to try something out here. If you remember to write this one down or should be easy enough to remember, but we have a secret special plan out there of Ecwid that people may not be aware of. There’s only one way to get it and since you’re listening to this podcast, I’m going to tell you the way. So you go to Ecwid.com/social and then when you get there, you’re going to see this special plan. What is our social selling plan? It’s specifically meant for people that are in this space. It includes, it’s a five dollar plan, it’s less than our normal Venture plan, but includes access to Printful and then it includes the access for the Shoppable posts on Instagram and Facebook. We did kind of tighten up the limits on other stuff, so you don’t get the full, talking to support you get anyway, there are some other limits but it’s a five dollar plan. That’s Ecwid.com/social. I don’t know how long this link is going to be out there, so get after it pretty quickly if you want to do this. Daniella will be putting this out on YouTube here. This is a podcast only. Special, but you can use it.

Richard: That’s great. See someone that wanted to just try this out but didn’t want to mess with her existing store. Why not even do that? It could be a good way to have a secondary store. It’s five measly dollars and you can’t even buy the t-shirt for $5.

Jesse: Yeah, 5 bucks is nothing but it does include Printful, it includes Instagram and Facebook. I think a lot of people are going to jump on it. That’s why I don’t want to spread this too far out there. But I want to encourage people to give this a shot. I think it’s awesome. I think people are getting a lot of value from this and get after that.

Daniella: It’s an awesome deal. Seriously.

Jesse: All right. So Daniela any last thoughts here before we go?

Daniella: No, thank you very much for having me today. It’s always a pleasure.

Jesse: And where can our listeners find out more about you or your course?

Daniella: Absolutely, head over to Daniella.io and you’ll find my Ecwid course, free Ecwid tutorial videos, tips and tricks, consultations. I’ve been doing consultations lately and recording them and offering them on my website. So if you want to take your Ecwid store to the next level, check out the Daniella.io.

Jesse: Awesome. Well, Daniella, Rich, another good show in the books. Everybody that’s listening out there, just want to encourage you to get out there and get after your store and make it happen.