Print On Demand 2026 (Tutorial for Beginners) - Shopify, Gelato, Etsy...

Key Takeaways

So, there is a huge opportunity out there, but most people who click on this video will probably never actually take action on it. But, honestly, this is something that can make a lot of millionaires. It's a business opportunity that has never been better. And I've three reasons that are backed by data that will show you that make now the best time in history to start a print-on-demand shop. After that, of course, I'll walk you through everything you need to know, full start-to-finish free tutorial on how to set up your own print-on-demand store. This is the kind of thing that a lot of people hold behind paywalls. They charge for coaching, they charge for all these upsells, they make videos and then it's just maybe halfway through they're like, "All right, good luck. I've a link down below to my course, but that's not what we're doing in this video." This is like literally check the description. I have no links. I have no way of accepting your money. So, in this video, I'll show you how to set up everything you need to know to make a successful print-on-demand shop. But, before we talk about how to set things up, I promised I would show you why now is such a good time to start. Well, here is the first thing I want to show you. There's three things. One is this Grand View Research paper, which was recently published, indicates the projected growth of the print-on-demand market. As you can see, we're still very much in the early innings. This is something that is only going to grow in popularity as people want more custom stuff, there's more options out there. And you can see right here, by 2033, you're looking at about a four to five x growth from today's levels. Secondly, if we look at the search trends on YouTube, print-on-demand is significantly lower than it was just two years ago, which means there's significantly fewer people watching videos to start their own print-on-demand shop. So, more demand, less people learning how to make their own print-on-demand shops. And the third thing is that now we have significantly better tools that make it way easier to make designs using AI. So, you can make more designs, you can make them faster, you can test more designs. No longer do you have to have that expertise to make your own design or hire someone to do it. You can iterate so easily and so quickly, as I'll show you later in this video. Also, suppliers have been getting more advanced, they're significantly easier to use now, the margins are going to be better. We also have AI mockups, so once you have your designs, you don't need to purchase all of them and try them on and take photos like that. Instead, AI mockups have gotten quite good and are looking incredibly realistic. We also have huge distribution options, you know, people are shipping globally or anywhere you want. And because people are so siloed on the internet, there are so many niches that are stronger than ever. People get in their little corners of the internet and they just become super fans of the most obscure niches out there. And if you're able to tap into that, there's just so much opportunity in so many niches out there. Odds are many of the niches you're in are completely underserved. So, those are the reasons that I'm excited about print-on-demand. And I'll link the Grand View Research article down below if you guys want to read more about that. You can see they talk a lot about what is doing well. So, apparel is still doing incredibly well, but home decor and drinkware, such as mugs and things like that, are also incredibly popular. On top of that, the North American market is still more than 1/3 of the global market, which, if you're in North America, is great, but if you're other parts of the world, it's also good to know that you don't have to ship to North America. There's demand for this all over the world. So, quick little recap of what we're talking about in this video. We'll start off with what is print-on-demand. I'll talk about how you can create a hub that you're then able to be very flexible and sell on multiple different platforms, as well as advertise on many platforms. I'll talk about how to find the right supplier for you. We'll go through finding a product, designing the product, making the mockups, editing your store to really look professional. And all of this, you don't need any experience. I promise I'll show you everything you need to know so that an absolute beginner, as long as you know how to turn on your laptop, you will be able to follow along and have your store up and running by the end of this video. There's then some crucial settings we'll dig into, we'll talk about marketing options, and everything else you need to know moving forward. All right, so what is print-on-demand? Well, it's a really simple business model where you make your designs on mugs or t-shirts or sweatshirts, but you don't buy any inventory. You list them on your store, and then when a customer buys them, your supplier will do the printing on demand, one order at a time, and ship it directly to the customer. That means that you don't need to hold inventory, you don't need to buy a warehouse, you don't need to do any of this stuff. And because of that, there's very, very little overhead to get started, which means anybody can do this for just a couple dollars. And you also can make as many designs as you want. You can iterate quickly, there's no commitment to your designs, and you can just try hundreds of designs if you want until you find one that works exceptionally well. All right, so let's just jump right into step number one. I'll have a lot of links in the description down below. I'm going to number these links throughout this video so you can follow along. The first one is for Shopify, which is going to be where we set up our central hub. Everything throughout this video is going to be built around our store on Shopify. So, I like setting it up on Shopify first, and then we're able to connect everything very easily and the flow will be much more natural. Now, we have a link down there that can get you 3 days for free and then 3 months for $1 per month. So, it's an exclusive link. If you want to go through that or type in santrelmedia.com/shopify. So, if you're following along to build your store with me in this video, I recommend going through that link. It's an affiliate link, it supports the channel, and saves you money with that extended free trial and then discounted trial after that. So, you can type in santrelmedia.com/shopify, Shopify, or you can click on the link in the top of the description. That will bring you to a page that looks something like this. You'll click on enter your email and, of course, enter your email. I can make a password and create my account. Then we can enter our credit card details. It is still free for the first 3 days, but then if you don't have your credit card in there, it'll delete your store after that. So, I just put these in right away and, like I said, after that it's $1 per month for the first 3 months. And now we have three different plans. If you're just getting started, just go with the basic plan. Don't spend more money than you have to. You really don't need these more expensive ones until you have a larger store. I'll have a link in the description, I think I'll call it link number four, that will be a tool that can calculate uh what revenue point it's worth it to upgrade. And really, the difference is going to be 2.7% versus 2.9%. It's the credit card transaction fee. And once you make enough money, that 0.2% might be more than the difference in these rates, and you can actually save money with a larger business by going with the grow or the advanced plan. But, again, for beginners, let's go with basic and we can skip all of this stuff. You don't really need any of this custom setup here. That's just going to change some things in your dashboard, but it makes no difference in the long run. And there you go, we now have a Shopify dashboard. Everything in this video is going to be connected back to the Shopify dashboard. And congratulations, you already made it further than probably 99% of the people who clicked on this video. So, be proud of that and let's keep moving forward. So, the next thing we need to do is talk about finding our product. And before you find a product, you need to think about what niches you might be interested in. I find it's much more helpful to think of the niches ahead of time, so when we're doing the product research, you have those in the back of your mind. So, a couple things that I like to do. One is just ask AI. You know, you could use ChatGPT or Gemini and just kind of say say like, "Hey, based on everything you know about me." Because if you use it a lot, it probably knows more than you think about you. You could say, "Think about 15 print-on-demand niche ideas that would be relevant to me." In general, I find it's best if you are in the niche because you have a better idea of what performs well with your own interests versus something that is completely uh you know, you're not part of the group at all. Some things you want to look for though, you want to find something that has a really high level of interest and engagement and commitment. People that you like it's part of their identity if they're part of this niche. And you could kind of identify that if there is a strong Reddit group or X account or Facebook account that is specifically dedicated to this topic and a lot of people follow it. You also ideally want to find groups that have high disposable income. They don't have to, but often times that is quite helpful. And they should also be niches that would have some likelihood of buying mugs or apparel or totes. And And I think most niches are this, but for example, if it was like Rolex super fans or Hermes bag owners, like a group like that, then yeah, maybe that's going to be, you know, probably not the same group that would buy a graphic t-shirt. But, most other people I think would fit into this category. Some examples of these, so some examples of these, golf is a really good one. If we look at the boxes that we had, high commitment, people are playing every weekend. Disposable income, yes. People that would wear or use apparel, yeah, absolutely. They're always buying new stuff. And it doesn't have to be graphic tees, it could be mugs, it could be custom golf balls, it could be custom it could be custom divot tools. There's tons of options here. Astrology is also incredibly popular and on the rise. Well, any kind of hobby in general would be really good. So, if you are really into sewing or really into houseplants or really into anything like that, that's all very very relevant. Pop culture is another one. This is not necessarily like a niche you'd have to be in, but if you're looking at like on the right, for example, anything that's like really trending right now, you have very little competition, but a lot of like a ton of interest. So, like Punch the Little Monkey, that I mean, depending on when you're watching this, this might be very outdated, but anyway, it was like it's a trend right now. A lot of people are following and keeping up with Punch, and this kind of shirt I could see doing really well. In fact, it already did, has 4.9 stars, 900 reviews. Tons of people are buying this, and it's, you know, just a relatively recent event that this even became relevant. You've got a bunch of other ones, and I'll have a link, I'll call this link number three down below in the description. You can click on that. I have it's a full PDF, totally free. Um again, I don't charge for anything in this video, but in that PDF, we've got AI prompts that are going to help you to identify niches, identify products, and I'll talk about We'll be using the prompts throughout this video, but I have them all written down in that PDF. I also have some examples of other niches and some other things that might be helping you along the way. Now, you don't need to be dead set on one niche right now, but you should have a list of maybe five to 10 niches that you would really be happy to work with here. Now, the next step is to find a supplier. There's several big ones. I've made comparisons between Printify, Printful, Gelato. The one that I'm going to use in this video is Gelato. They'll be link number two in the description. You can also go to santrelmedia.com/gelato. And that'll bring you to this landing page. It's a custom landing page. We worked with them to get you a special discount on this. So, 30% off your first purchase if you make it within the first 3 days. It could be a sample order for yourself, which is what I usually like to do. It could also be for I mean, honestly, any order if you just have your store up and running and somebody makes a big order, you know, the first one, whatever the first order is on your account, 30% is going to be reduced. So, you just say get offer and then we can make our Gelato account. Again, I'm going to sign up with email. sign up with Facebook or Google if you wanted to and then create your account. Now, you have to verify your email. You also have to verify your email Shopify. So, now's a good time to open up your email and just click verify on those two emails. So, the Gelato one, I verified that. It brings me to this page and we're going to have to go through a little bit of a setup thing. We're going to say right now we're launching an online business. We I I'm just going to sell in the US. You could do worldwide if you wanted to. I'm going to go with just the US for this video. It doesn't really matter which one you choose here. Again, just customizing your dashboard. I'm going to go with clothing in this video, but again, choose whatever you want and everything in this video will still be relevant. How much money do you currently receive or what's your current revenue? Zero, we're just getting started. And right now, what brings you to Gelato? I mean, it doesn't really matter what you pick here. How did you hear about us? I mean, well, maybe from me. Maybe maybe you already heard about Gelato, but um let's just say I guess influencer. Is that what I would say Santrel Media. Santrel Media. I don't know. I don't think that really matters. Um oh, also, this right here. Choose if you want to have this selected or not to get offers and e-commerce tips from Gelato. I'm going to leave it enabled. Sometimes it's useful if they let you know about updates or whatever, but if you have too many emails, feel free to uncheck that box. And now, that brings us to our dashboard. I'll talk about how to use Shopify's dashboard and Gelato's a little bit later in the video. I don't want to overwhelm you too soon. I think moving through and getting progress is really important here. And so, what we want to do is go to product catalog. So, if we click on product catalog, what I want to do is scroll through and just kind of get a good idea of what is going to be available. We've got a lot of t-shirts and sweatshirts. Like if you just say men's clothing, for example, you'll see Gildan is like a really popular one. They're usually one of the top-selling ones. They have embroidery products as well. So, you can print, you can embroider, several different options there. Uh we also have tote bags on the left side. You've got wall art over here. Uh wall art is a huge That's a whole category that a lot of people don't think about when they think of print on demand. So, if you're an artist, this could be a great way to sell your art without having to buy inventory. You also have, you know, cards, photo books, hats. Just scroll through this for maybe 5 minutes or so and you'll get a pretty good idea of what kind of things are actually available. There's also more premium brands as well. So, so if you go down to brands on the left side, you'll see you've got like um comfort colors. Where are they? Here we go, comfort colors. That's a really big one you're probably going to see later in the video during the research phase. Um but, you know, tons of other things. You've got like Under Armour, you've got uh some eco-conscious stuff, you've got Sport-Tek, just a lot of things. Threadfast. Whatever you're looking for, usually there you know, there's a lot of options here on Gelato. So, once you're kind of familiarized with what products are available, we get into the research phase of this video. And this is really going to be the make or break for your store. But, honestly, not even break. There's make or redo, I would say, mostly. Uh because this is going to be like a muscle that you build and really get better at and refine as you make more products. You're going to find out what works, what you should really be looking for. I'll give you some guidance, of course, in this video, but as you start to really iterate and test your own abilities, you're going to figure out how to find the best products. You'll come up with your own secret sauce on how to actually, you know, research this. I'll share everything I know, but there's three big resources I have linked on the right side here. And again, I'll have these all linked down below. You've got Etsy, you have Facebook, and you have TikTok's Creative Center. TikTok is really probably not my favorite one here. I'd say Etsy and Facebook are going to be the main ones, but TikTok's worth checking out to see if people are running ads for, you know, what you're really looking for. Not necessarily always apparel, but a lot of the other print on demand stuff, you have a good chance of finding it over in TikTok Creative Center. But, I want to start off with Etsy. Etsy's a really powerful way to find what's trending right now. So, if you just go to etsy.com and you type in We could just type in t-shirt, for example, you'll see almost all of these are print on demand. I absolutely guarantee a huge majority of these are print on demand. People making designs, listing them on here. And just scrolling through, you're going to be picking up on some trends. And it's really important if you look at these on the bottom, you'll see how many reviews right there. You can see right there and right there. So, some things Like this one's going to be really hard to print on demand cuz it's all like uh embroidered. But, something like this, that's not hard to do print on demand at all. This is a very cheap thing to do. And you can see 1,600 reviews, which means significantly more orders than that. So, kind of think about what your niches are and scroll through and start looking at things that are relevant. Or what I really like to do, one of the best strategies for this style of business is to look at things that are adjacent to your niche and then see if you can translate them over to your own. So, maybe it's going to be like a lot of pet owner stuff, things that people make jokes about their pets or certain formats you notice about pets. And then you want to translate that over to house plants or beekeeping or something else that is different from dog owner, but kind of a similar crowd. You'll also observe like what is really doing well. So, kind of a vintage weathered pattern looks to be doing quite well. Comfort colors, again, is doing very well. I I actually really like comfort colors. Their their shirts are really good quality. Uh but again, comfort colors there as well. So, that's something to keep in mind. All right, a lot of people are using comfort colors and a lot of designs are a little bit more of a vintage style. These actually look to be rather like boardwalk-esque. Like probably things you'd find at like a boardwalk shop. You also have the format of like kind of a play on uh a brand, for example, or some things even look like they're making a brand out of a a destination, for example. There are also a lot of political things. So, depending on your political stance, you can make I mean, that's a huge thing. People make so many things um just based on the most recent activities in politics. And another thing I like to do is start typing in some different search terms. So, for example, if you look up uh like destination. So, Amalfi Coast, very, very popular. A lot of people like going there. And if you think about what kind of feeling the person is going to get when they buy your product or wear your product, is it going to be more Is it going to be like nostalgia or excitement or is it going to be just like really peaceful and calming or is it going to be like a bold statement they're making? You want to think about what the feeling somebody's going to get when they buy your thing. And that's really going to tie into your marketing quite a bit. So, I actually really like this one right here. Kind of a weathered look. Like I've said, we've been seeing this kind of vintage weathered t-shirt that's kind of It looks like it's marketing. Like Amalfi Market or Flower Market. Again, it's like probably a fictitious brand, but it looks like something that somebody would have said like, "Oh, I bought this like 10 years ago over in Italy." I think this one looks really good. I actually like this one a lot, too. There's, again, just kind of look through some different things. Uh we've got I also found this one. This one's super basic. Anyone could wear this. This could be men, this could be women. Just four trout there. Um and it's kind of like a cool design, cool style. I could see, you know, again, a vintage look on this one seems to be doing well. One thing to definitely keep in mind is that Etsy does tend to bias towards a female audience. I think that's usually the demographic doing most of the shopping on Etsy. And so, while it's a great resource, if you are a male and you're marketing to a a really male-dominant niche, then you may want to find some other resources. Again, check out those accounts on X, check out the subreddits, and you'll get a better idea of what's going to perform better in different niches. But, once you have an idea of some different designs you like, then again, going back to that PDF I have in the description, the next AI prompt is I recommend just like copy these pictures into ChatGPT or into Gemini and then ask it to make similar designs or similar flavored designs. So, I've got a few designs here that I made from Gemini, ChatGPT, Photoshop, a little bit of a combo of all of them. But, they're based on designs that I saw that were working very well. So, one of them was, I think, like California maybe poppies. I forgot what it was, but anyway, I looked up some of the most popular flowers out there. Roses, obviously. Marigolds, obviously. And I had some other ones that I Oh, daffodils. Some other ones I saved as as well. I just don't have I didn't download them. And then I made a slight, you know, I just had it make a different design. So, you can see this one I think could look really cool on like a dark weathered like deep gray or almost black shirt. Um you've got instead of the trout, you've got, you know, a walleye perch uh and some bass on there. You've got the destination one instead of Amalfi Coast, the Lofoten Islands. Um so, kind of just the just similar flavors of what worked, but focused on different categories entirely. And just for your own reference, here are some of my observations I found. Um I recommend writing them down in a notebook as you research. Actually, this entire process, a notebook is super helpful. Um just to, you know, keep your ideas in one place in case you come back to this day after day. Um but again, you see a lot of like ink stamping, vintage appearance, uh a lot of retro clothing. Comfort colors did really well. Um sometimes song lyrics or titles. Be careful not to use anything that's copyrighted. So, you don't want to use like a band's name and logo, for example. But, you can use some things that are similar flavors to that that might appeal to those audiences. Once you have a design or a couple designs, don't spend too much time perfecting them yet. A lot of people get what's called paralysis by analysis, where they're really trying to get it absolutely perfect. But, early on in my career, someone told me, and I think this is really great business advice, that the best way to succeed in business is to be in business. In other words, you can't know exactly what's going to work well or how to improve things without actually just getting out there and testing the waters. So, just make any design you can, even if it's not the best perfect design, and put that on your store. Then you can spend time iterating that. Make more designs, test more designs, test your marketing. And I'll talk more about that later in the video. The idea is if you have a design that is close enough right now, even if you just made it in ChatGPT or Gemini, um ChatGPT is really good at removing the background, so I'd probably recommend that over Gemini here. Uh, then you're ready to just go over to Gelato and we'll get our first product set up. So, from Gelato, we'll go down to stores and as long as you're signed into Shopify in one tab and Gelato in the next tab, this is extremely easy to connect. I'll click on connect on Shopify right here, so we click connect Shopify. It'll open up Shopify. You'll say, "Yes, we want to install the Gelato print on demand app onto Shopify. So, Shopify apps onto your website. That's kind of the way it works. We can click on install again just to make sure that it's set up and your store is now connected successfully. And in case you want to access this in the future, I'll go back to my other Gelato tab and just show you how I did that. So, from here, let me refresh. It'll show that I'm connected to Shopify and you can just go to add product right there. It'll bring you to the same page. But going back to that add product page as I have on this tab right here, we can choose the product. I want to go with brands. I want to go down to comfort colors. Just for me personally, I think that really high quality seems to be trending quite well and I think that's really what I want to go for. We can close out of these pop-ups. We don't need them right now, but a quick little rundown to lay out of the land on Gelato here. In the front of the shirt, you can print right in the middle, but that's not the only place you're able to print with Gelato on the shirt. Every additional print, you can think of it as how many times does somebody have to set up the shirt to be printed? It's going to add an extra cost on here. So, try not to print absolutely everywhere unless it's really important to your brand, but we can print on the back of the shirt. Quite a large space. You see the dotted outline allows you to get a good idea of what is a printable on the shirt. You can print on the inner neck. So, if you want to have like your little brand logo in there, that's kind of a cool touch. You can have the outer neck on the back if you wanted to. And of course, you have the sleeves if you want to print kind of a patch style. Again, not not literally a patch. It's going to be printed, but we have several different ways that you can print. Different garments are going to allow embroidery and you'd see that on the left side with print technique. Um, but we have direct to garment and direct to film. There are kind of it's kind of a subtle difference between them, but definitely an important one. So, depending on what material you're printing onto or what your design looks like, one may be better than the other. Direct to garment is printing directly on the cotton, which tends to be a little bit of a softer feel when you're wearing it. Whereas direct to film, like there is going to be an actual film there. So, it can, if it's a really big square, you can feel that when you're wearing it. Um, but it does have plenty of advantages in terms of durability, vibrance and stuff like that. Um, I talk about that in a previous video where I compare different suppliers. So, be sure to check out that video after this one or actually even better than that, I'll just put a link in I'll put that in the PDF. Remember I said I was going to have a PDF with, you know, extra details you need to know. Check that out. I'll show you some samples of both in that PDF, so you have a good idea of what the differences are. I'm going to go with direct to garment in this one. We have a lot of comfort colors to choose from. I don't know why I call them that. We have a lot of colors to choose from for comfort colors here. Uh, so now I want to add my design. On the left side, one of these tabs, you'll see files. We can choose a file, so we can upload our file. So, I'm just going to click and drag my design over here. I'll drop it there and then you can either click on the plus to bring it. It'll just put it right in the middle or you can click and drag. So, if I click and drag, you'll see it's not done uploading, but I can drop it anywhere over there. So, once it's done, I'll click on the plus and you'll see up on the right. This is really important. A lot of designs, especially from Chat GPT, are going to be a very low resolution unless you make it really small. So, if you make it small, you'll see the DPI is going to go way up. But if you make it big, like if I stretch this way out, it's going to say, "Hey, that's that's kind of a low resolution. It's not going to look great when you print it." So, let me resize this to a normal size again. But one way you could combat that would be if you have Photoshop or some free similar tool, um, you would be able to Actually, let's make it a little smaller, so it's the right resolution. There we go. You would be able to use Photoshop or something like that and just, you know, upscale it. There's plenty of tools out there to do this, but again, once you have your design, you want to make sure you have the right resolution on that. Also, the shirt color. If we go back to product here, we've got some other options. So, I've got a bunch of colors here. If I want to, you know, you can hover over them and see this one's like graphite, for example. Um, and if you want to see what it looks like with them, just click on them on the right side. It'll it'll illustrate the entire thing. Um, you can see grape. I want something that's like kind of a dark charcoal. Not navy. Black is pretty good. I still feel like graphite's probably the one. And again, choose as many as you want. These are all going to be listed on your store. Just make sure it looks good in all of them. So, for example, I don't think like pink would necessarily look a blossom. I don't think that would really look good. Actually, it doesn't look bad at all. Actually, it doesn't look too bad. So, I don't know. Let's let's roll with that. I've got a bunch of different colors here. Whatever. We'll leave them all in there just so there's options. Um, and I'll show you how that looks on the store in a minute. But we've got other tools here. So, if you didn't have your full design made elsewhere, maybe you just have an icon and you want to add text in Gelato, you can do that. So, if we go down to text, we can add text on here and you actually are able to allow personalization. So, if you're selling something that is maybe for like a a wedding or a bachelor party or bachelorette party or a birthday or whatever it might be and you want someone to put like their date or their names on there or something like that, you can make this consumer customizable. So, the end user, the buyer is going to be able to add their own image of their dog or their own text on here. You can make it personalizable using what's called personalization studio from Gelato. I'm not going to be using that in this in this video, but uh, let's get rid of this text. I can click on the trash can icon and it gets rid of that text. But that's how you'd go about adding that. There are also a number of other graphics that you can use with Gelato. If you go down to layouts, you can have like, you know, split left right. Uh, you can personalize it here. So, this is personalization studio as I said. Um, you can have it either in your Shopify page, which is really clean or you can have an editor. It opens up when they buy it and they're able to customize it. But I'm happy with this design. I think it looks good. I'm not going to add anything to the neck or the anything like that. We'll just say continue to mock-ups. From here, you have a couple options depending on the product that you chose. Some of them are going to have some mock-ups that show like models wearing the shirt and it puts it on pretty well, but there's a really great tool that uh, Gelato has called magic mock-up. So, these all look good. I'm going to select these. I want to show uh, pretty much all of these, you know, just so people have an idea of what they're getting, but let's click on magic mock-ups as well and this is going to be an AI prompt that you can give to really create the right mock-up. So, if we just click on some of the suggestions here like a flat lay, for example. Again, go back to Etsy, go back to Facebook or wherever you're looking at these and see what does it actually look like? Like what are people showing? Um, are they usually showing a flat lay? Is it usually a model wearing it? So, maybe for this one, I think urban outdoor makes less sense. Nature makes quite a bit of sense. Flat lay is a really good one though. So, let's say uh, cozy flat lay and we'll generate a mock-up. And you get I think 10 free mock-ups per day. So, feel free to use as many as you want. Try to really tailor this and get it correct. Honestly, that's not too bad. I think that's pretty good. So, I'm going to add that mock-up. I'm going to totally use that one. And uh, yeah. By the way, you can choose which one's the primary. All right, so I'm going to include this one and we'll continue to details. From here, you can choose the name of it. So, let's say this is going to be Wait, why is that my mock-up? I don't want to make sure did I deselect one? Oh, no, that's right. Okay, we're good. So, let's continue to details. We can choose the name and the description of this. So, I'm going to call this one and you can have a description down there. We'll include these things down here. I think care instructions is pretty useful. Make sure that your store is selected, which we'll rename that in a minute and you can say continue to prices. From here, usually what I do is I just have a, you know, set margin. So, you can have all the different sizes. You can have the margin set to a certain amount or the profit set to a certain amount. So, maybe the profit is like $5 each. Not 550. Make it $5 $5 each. You click update and now all your prices are going to be based on the actual profit there. So, so you're looking at like $20 per shirt with $5 of shipping. If again, if you go back to the other platforms, go to eBay, Etsy, Amazon, all those different places and see how much people are selling for cuz you want to be competitive, of course. Um, but you know, you don't want to you don't want to undercut yourself. You have to factor in your marketing costs and the cost of, you know, running your entire business and make sure you're actually making a good profit here. But I'm going to roll with this. I think this is fine. So, I'll continue to review and I'll click on publish. And you'll see we should have three little dots here, three little circles telling us how many uh, variations are published, how many have problems and how many um, are, you know, in the red there. You'll see Um, you'll see that in a second. But it should automatically port this over to our Shopify store. And there we go. 35 variations all in the green. We're good. So, that should automatically, like I said, go over to our Shopify store. So, if we go back to that tab, I can refresh this and we're ready to really start building this out. If I go down to products, we'll see right there. It's active. Inventory's not tracked because of course, it is print on demand. So, we're ready to start designing our store. Shopify lets us do that in a very easy way. If you go down to sales channels, the only one we have right now is our online store. Eventually, we can set up other sales channels to sell this on Instagram or Facebook or Tik Tok or Etsy or, you know, anywhere else you want to sell it. You can use this as your central hub and port out from here. But let's start with the online store. Designing that, I think it's really important. So, we can choose a theme to give us a little default theme here. I'm not going to use that one. I want to go down past the AI stuff down to explore more themes. There are a lot of themes to choose from. Unfortunately, most of them are paid themes. So, 24 are free. This number keeps growing like crazy. I swear, it was like 200 just a couple of years ago, but we've got a thousand paid ones. They're expensive though and I think for what we're doing, you probably don't need a paid theme. At least not yet. Maybe someday if if your store grows and you want some specific feature in the paid ones, it could be worth it, but to get started, save the money, go with the free theme. And because we're, I mean, depending on how many you're selling, choose the right theme for you, but I'm just going to list this right now, which is one product, just for the sake of a simple a simple website, and I'll go with the origin one. But, feel free to browse around. You can click on them, interact with the website, see what it looks like. Don't worry if the colors are different or anything like that. You're looking for the general vibe and and shape of the website, because it's going to save you some effort. But, you could technically start with pretty much any one of these and edit them to look however you would like. So, I'll say Of course, if you click on view demo, that's where you can click around, like I said, you can really do that. But, I'll say try theme. I'm just going to implement this theme. It's going to add it to our store themes, but it's not automatically going to make it our theme on the website. I'll explain what I mean right here. So, at the top, this is the theme that is currently implemented on our website. Below, you have your theme library. Down here, you can edit a theme. So, in the future, if you want to change your website theme, you'll leave your main one active. You'll design a new store in the background in your theme library. You can go to edit theme, design it entirely, and then when you're ready, click publish. It's a hot swap. You don't have a half-baked website. It'll just automatically have the new website up and running. Because this is a brand new one though, we don't really need to do that. I'll just click publish right away and make this our main store our main theme on here. So, I'll say publish. That way, as we're building it, I can, you know, keep it updated and test out what it's going to look like on on on iPad or a phone or a different device. It's really important to check the website as you're building it. Now, we have a password on here. It is password protected, but we don't need to do that. So, let's get rid of the password by clicking on this. If you already added your address, it'll just say, you know, click this to get rid of the password, but I didn't add a store address, so I'm going to click on that. It'll make me add a store address. There we go. The address is added. We can remove the password now. There we go. The address is added. We can remove the password now. And this theme, we're ready to go. So, if I click on edit theme, you'll see how easy this actually is. They give us like a just a basic shell of the website, and the way this works is on the left side, you have this hierarchy, this tree of how your website's actually designed. So, this is using what's called a section layout. So, as you scroll down, each section is stacked on top of one another. It's really common for websites to be built like this, and you'll see they're outlined in blue. So, each section, this is like the first rich text is the name of this section. It's really the style of the section. Then you've got a product down here, a featured product. You've got just an image banner. You've got your testimonials down here. This is actually two different uh sections that are with the same background that look like one, and then you've got your footer on the very bottom. You can edit these on the left side. You can move them around. So, if I wanted this text to be below the featured product, I can hover over the six-dot array here, click it, and drag it down. And that moved it below there. If I wanted to edit anything, well, before editing, within each section, you've got multiple different elements. They call them blocks on Shopify. So, here you can see we've got In this section, we have a heading block. We only have one block in here, but you can add blocks above or below that by clicking on the plus over here or on the left side in this tree, which at first seems non-intuitive, but I personally, after building dozens or probably hundreds of Shopify stores, I prefer to do it on the left side. I just think it's easier to see exactly where things go. So, you can click on the plus right here, and there's a lot of different blocks you can add. In this particular section, there's a limit to like you can only have four different ones here, but anywhere else, you can add tons and tons of different styles of blocks. Now, to keep this website really simple, let's start off by editing the featured product. So, let's add our product here. If I click on featured product, or, you know, if you click on the little drop-down, you can edit individual things within this, but let's edit the featured product first. So, click on featured product, or if you don't have this, you can have you can use a different theme. I'm just showing you how to use this. We then have everything we can edit within featured product. I'm going to click on product and just add one. We'll select our product. We only have one right now, so I'll select that one, and you can see it automatically adds the title in there, the price. Um we need to add the description. That's important. That's not a good look right there, but you've got sizes and colors down there. They can add to the cart. They can buy now. And we're able to customize Maybe you don't like this background, this kind of tan background. You can choose a different color scheme. We have five right now that are for this site. And if you want to customize what those color schemes are, you could, of course, click edit here, but I want to show you how to access this in the future. So, let's close out of editing the featured product. On the top, you'll see the little gear icon. Those are the theme settings. From here, we can add the colors for scheme one. And scheme one, if you click on it, the background is kind of this like tan, beige, I don't know, kind of grayish color, to be honest. Uh we could change that and make it any color we want. So, something that would match well with this. I think this is all looking quite bad. Let's go with white. Just a white background could be fine. Um just an idea of one of the ways you could set this up. If you ever don't like something, you're like, "Ah, I really wish I kept that color that was there before." You can click on the back button on the top right. It'll go back to what you had. Go back again to that tan. I think that's the color. And now you, you know, you undid whatever your mistake was. Also, while I'm pointing out the top right, I should also mention two other really important things here. One is the mobile view. While you're looking at this site, click on the mobile view often to see how is this actually going to look on a phone? Because a lot of people, if you're advertising on social media, are very likely going to be visiting this from their phone. Click it again to go back to desktop view. And the little sidekick button, the little guy who's got the little mask on, looks like a sidekick. Click on that guy, and you'll see we now have the ability to ask it to do things for us. So, if we don't like something, so maybe the description right there, I can click on this, and then I could just ask this guy to edit that. It's also very editable on the left side, so maybe that's not a good example, but let's talk about the buttons. Maybe the button on the bottom, let me X out of this. These buttons. Maybe I just don't like the colors of them. I could click on ask for changes, or click on the sidekick here. You'll see it does say buy buttons right there. You want to make sure that's selected. So, it so it's editing the right thing. Say maybe we want to round off the buttons, um and also add a shadow. You can just hit enter, and the sidekick's going to do that for us. And if he can't do it, he's going to tell us how to do it. All right, and you can see it did that. So, if I close out of the sidekick, we now have a shadow. We've got a radius on there. Awesome. You can also ask how to do some more advanced things, but I just love how it's able to actually edit your site, rather than just being a chatbot on the side, as many other site builders kind of do have. We also have a lot you can edit here. I'm not going to dig too much into that, because I do have a full like hour and a half long Shopify website design tutorial, and we don't really need to do that just to get this launched. Get the the really minimum viable product is what you're going for initially to get your site up and running, to start getting some sales, and then focus on really designing your entire site. But, like I said, those are the basics on how you can edit this. On the left side, you'll have, you know, everything, all the little sections here. In each section, you can click the drop-down. You can add blocks or manage individual blocks, or just edit the entire uh section as a whole. So, you can change the background or the image on this one, and that's how you go about doing that. Of course, always click save on the top right, but you'll notice that it still has like it just has my store. We don't have a name for this store yet. So, I think it's a good time to exit from the design the builder right here. And I want to show you some other really important things. If we go down to settings, we need to set up on a way to get paid. And that is, of course, going to be down in payments. So, click on payments, and from here, we can click And from here, click on complete account setup for Shopify payments. That's going to allow you to accept pretty much all major credit cards, Visa, Discover, MasterCard, American Express, Apple Pay, Google Pay. I think Klarna's on there. Uh there's a bunch of different ways people can pay. It's all set up through Shopify payments. PayPal's also accepted, and Amazon Pay as well, although not by default. You have to click on the settings icon, and then just toggle that on. There's no real reason to do that, but Amazon Pay The idea is you want to really reduce the barrier of purchasing as low as possible. So, anybody on your site, if they forgot their credit card, but they have an Amazon account, can just, you know, easily make the purchase and buy from you. Also, some other key settings. We need to name our store. It's just called My Store. So, if we go up to general, we can click on store contact details. Right now, My Store. We can rename it. So, let's come up with a name for this one. Let's call this Let's call this Dust and Daylight, and we'll click on save. Now, we don't need to worry about shipping and delivery. That's handled by the supplier. It actually auto-populated everything, so we're good on that. Taxes and duties, depending on where you are, consult your local advisor. Make sure you're charging the right sales tax for wherever you are, wherever you're selling, at least. And speaking of where you're selling, you've got markets down here. You can choose where you're actually going to be selling to. Uh we have that set up automatically, you know, with Gelato, just United States. That's fine. That's what we're looking for. Then, of course, domains. We don't even have a domain for this. It's like YW3, whatever. You know, so you don't want that to be your website. You want to have something that is very memorable and actually like a normal domain. So, you can either connect an existing one, if you have one from Namecheap or something, you might save a couple dollars per year. I usually like to just get them directly through uh wherever I'm hosting my website, so in this case, Shopify, just because it's easier. It connects it automatically, and you have your credit card set to one website, and if you get a new credit card, you don't actually forget to renew your domain and lose your website. So, let's check this out. I'm going to go to Dust and Daylight .com. We'll search, see if it's available. Looks like it is available, $16 per year. I can say buy, buy the domain, and it'll automatically connect it. It's super easy to do that. All right. Now, in order for your domain to function on your site, you're going to get a couple more emails. You want to verify your account or your your contact details on the email. That way, you know, your domain doesn't get deleted in like 4 or 5 days. You can say see domain status, it's still propagating. So, so it'll take care of itself soon as long as you, you know, go to the email and verify that. But continuing on, I mean, read through all of these. This is your story. You want to make sure you have everything set up. But if you go down to policies, that's another really cool thing Shopify does. So, they have these kind of pre-built policies for you, basically templates. So, so for terms of service for example, if you click on no policy set, you could just click on insert template. It drops in the whole template. Obviously, your address, everything that's in caps needs you to add that in. But then just say publish. You can do the same with all the other ones. Make sure you have policies on here. Refund and return policy for example, you're going to want to set that stuff up. And then we can close out of the settings and we're back to the Shopify dashboard. From the dashboard, just kind of running through what you need to know. Orders are going to show up on the left side. You can also create orders if you need to this way. You've got your products here. Managing your products, you're going to do that over in Gelato, not here though. It'll automatically show up here. But you can check to make sure everything's working well. Customers will be anyone who made a purchase, you'll see them show up here. Content is just any kind of images you're using on your website. You've got analytics here and discount. So, if you want to set up a discount, you can do that here by creating a discount. There's four different ways you can do it. You can have a, you know, percent off a product, either buy one get one, amount off the order, you can have free shipping. So, let's just say amount off products. You can make it an automatic or a discount code. Um, pretty self-explanatory the difference there. So, discount code, let's say it's like spring spring 10. And it's a 10% discount on the order. You have to choose which collections or which products you're going to do. Let's go by product here because we don't have any collections. Uh, let's say browse and we can say this product. All of every single SKU for this product is all going to be applicable here. And then we can choose is there going to be a limit number, like how many times can it be used? Maybe one per customer. Maybe you have only 12 people can ever use this. And you can have a set a a start and end date. So, I'll save and now we have this discount spring 10 set up and ready to go. And if you wanted to have any other sales channels, like I said, you can click on sales channels, actual word sales channels, and you can find other places you could sell. So, TikTok, Instagram, um, you could sell point of sale. That doesn't really make sense. But if you took physical orders and then said this will ship to you later, maybe at like a market for example, you wanted to do that. I don't know if it's really applicable here, but that option does exist for your Shopify store. So, the next steps would be to make more designs and test out more on your website. Just make as many as you want, as many as you can. And then we have to get into the marketing. So, marketing this, there's a couple ways you could do it. One way is to also list this on Etsy. It's kind of a free discovery platform, although very, very competitive there because so many people on Etsy are doing this. The other way is to set up ads, whether you're setting them up on Meta, setting it up on TikTok, setting it up on Google and YouTube. Uh, there's many different ways you could do that. I have full videos on how to set up for example, um, Meta ads or TikTok ads. I'll link those down below. They really go into a lot of detail and I hope you find those helpful. And the final way of advertising that I really like to do is also just organic viral advertising, which is more or less saying just organic content. So, if you're able to either make it yourself or find other creators and just send them this and say, "Hey, do you want to wear this?" Maybe like a gardening influencer, you send them a shirt, a custom shirt or something like that. You can partner with different creators, especially the micro influencers, anyone under like 5 or 10,000 followers or subscribers. Uh, and it's a great way to get a lot of exposure. They benefit from getting, you know, whatever the cost is to you, like a free shirt, free tote bag, free mug or whatever. And then you benefit by maybe having your link in their descriptions and getting a little shout-out every now and then from them. So, there's a crash course on how to get started with print on demand. I hope you found this video helpful. I wish you all the best of luck and be sure to leave a comment and let me know how the journey's going for you. What does your design look like? What questions do you have? And I'm excited to hopefully be a customer. Thanks for watching. Best of luck and I'll see you in the next video.