Opening a print-on-demand store may seem like a daunting task and also very expensive but you can actually get most of everything you need done for free.

In this article, I’m going over how you can set up a shop that you can advertise. Whether that is on YouTube your website or other social media platforms.

The Basics

The first thing we want to do is figure out what type of merchandise we want to sell. Do you want to do shirts, hats, mugs?

The next thing we want to do is start finding some designs for our merchandise. After that we can go ahead and start with our designs, either by doing the design ourselves or having someone else design them for us.

Next, we want to go ahead and set up our shop and start adding our designs to that shop. Last but not least we need to advertise our store so we can get sales.

Step 1: Designing your merchandise

In this article I’m going to assume that you already know what you want to sell so what we need to do is start getting some designs for the merchandise that you want to sell.

Employ a designer

Fiverr

Now maybe you just want to find designers to do the designing part for you. Well the best bang for your buck is hiring people on fiverr.

Fiverr is a freelancer site where you can find any type of work. You tell them about your project and they will tell you how much their services are.

They usually have different tiers of cost depending on what you want. So if you want something simple, it may cost like $5 to $10.

If you want something that may take more time, it may go up to 30 to $40. Check it out yourself. fiverr.com.

Design Yourself

If you are looking to design your own merchandise you can go to a couple different websites to help you make a design online.

If you already used something like Photoshop though that might be the best option for you. The first place I would suggest going to is Canva.

Canva

On Canva you can edit different designs four different things like thumbnails, websites, stories and merchandise.

There are a lot of free assets that you can use to create an image but you can also get a subscription to get even more assets to use to help design your merchandise.

Whatever design you build up there you will want to make sure to save it as a PNG file so it doesn’t have a background. You can check out Canva here.

Placeit

The next website I would suggest using is called Placeit. There are a few designs that you can use for free on Placeit but you can also make and buy a single design for $3.

On the other hand you can buy a subscription for $15 a month and have unlimited access to use all of their assets and make as many designs that you want.

You can start with one of their templates and adjust to your liking. Check out some of their shirt templates here. Placeit also has more templates than for merch.

You can also find templates for social media posts, stories and more. Check my review on it here.

They also have mock-up images that you can upload your designs to and see how they would look on different merchandise.

Not only that but you can download the mock-up image and use the image to help promote your product.

Being able to download the mock-up images makes me lean a little more towards Placeit, but regardless both are good options.

Quick Tip

When thinking about the designs for our merchandise, it’s best to do designs that parallels with what our audience knows us for.

Example, my YouTube channel is about how people can grow on YouTube so small Youtubers are the ones that’s more than likely going to look at my channel.

If I can have some type of merch that will help them with their Channel, like a subscribe shirt, my audience is more likely to buy a shirt like that from me.

Step 2: Build your merchandise shop

When you have merchandise you’re ready to sell, it’s time to build a shop. You’ll find that there are a lot of print on demand websites that you can choose from.

There are several websites that you can set up a YouTube merchandise Shelf on your Channel with.

Spring and Spreadshop. I prefer Spreadshop but essentially they all are the same. You can sign up to make your own store for free.

The way Spreadshop gets paid is that they have a base price on every product that they sell. You would put in your margin that you want to gain from each shirt and the sum is what people with see the purchase price is for.

I’ll be doing a different article on how to set up a Spreadshop store step by step.

Promote your products on YouTube and other platforms

After you set up your P.O.D. store, you got to advertise your merchandise. So how are you going to advertise your merchandise?

Will you promote it on YouTube, other social media, or on your own website? Squarespace can help you build a new website pretty easy if you don’t have one yet.

An effective way to get more eyes on your product is to use paid advertising. At the same time, you may just have to put in the sweat if you don’t have the money for advertising.

Using other platforms like Instagram to show off your merch to potential buyers as well as having your merch in your videos can really help you sell your products.