How do print on demand t-shirt fulfillment services work

Re: How does this all work

Buechee said:

How do these sites work? Do I buy the shirts or do they print them on demand?

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They print them on demand as the orders come in. You just upload your design, add it to the products you want to sell through their online interface and send traffic to the stores they create.

When someone places an order, they charge the customer, ship the t-shirt and your profit is the difference between what they charge to supply and make the t-shirt (base price) plus your markup.

So if their base price for a t-shirt is $15.99 and you sell your t-shirt for $19.99, then you make $4.00 per t-shirt for just for creating a design and marketing it.

So, stupid question. Who are these places that do that? It would certainly be easier than keeping a whole inventory on hand. Are we talking about places like cafe press or zazzle? I haven't had any experience with either of them, so I'm just tossing out names here.

lben said:

So, stupid question. Who are these places that do that? It would certainly be easier than keeping a whole inventory on hand. Are we talking about places like cafe press or zazzle? I haven't had any experience with either of them, so I'm just tossing out names here.

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Yes, places like CafePress, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, PrintFection, Skreened.com all do that type of work.

The main drawback is the lowered profit per design because you're doing much less of the work.