3 Types of Print on Demand Sellers

I was thinking about this yesterday and it occured to me that there's essentially 3 types of Amazon Merch sellers or print on demand sellers.

What I mean by this is people typically approach Amazon Merch and the POD industry as a whole from one of these three was.

The first is "The Dabbler". The Dabbler is someone who's new to ecommerce, online marketing, and making money online. They see print on demand as a low barrier to entry way to get started trying to make some money online. They aren't necessarily a graphic designer or an artist and are kind of playing around giving the platform a try.

Second we have "The Designer" or "The Artist". This is someone with a graphic design background. This is someone who actually takes great care in creating unique, attractive and creative designs. Sometimes the artist or the designer gets frustrated their quality work gets lost in the shuffle with the thousands upon thousands of text based designs. The artist focuses more on their art than they do the business side of things.

Thirdly we have "The Marketer" or "The Businessman". A great example of this would be Merch Empire or "The Jersey Boys". These guys treat Merch and Print on Demand as a business. They aren't designers or artists, they outsource everything, but they are good marketers and are good at SEO and come at it from that angle.

In many ways Print on Demand is just another form of online marketing or affiliate marketing. I get into this a bit more in depth in the video but essentially affiliate marketers create content to drive traffic and drive sales for someone else's product. In the case of traditional affiliate marketing, marketers use blogs, videos, and inforgraphics to drive sales. In print on demand, your essentially just selling blank tee shirts for Amazon or Printful or Redbubble, the design is simply the content or the medium you use to sell them. So in many ways POD is just another form of affiliate marketing and because of this marketers with little to no design skills can still succeed in this space by outsourcing the design aspect to graphic designers.

I thought this was an interesting way to look at Amazon Merch and the Print on Demand industry. I think its good to examine which of these characters are you and how are you approaching Merch or your POD stores?

Which character are you? Drop a comment below...