My Experience Doing Etsy POD

Hello and welcome back to Liveliness. I hope you all are making it through your days.

Today I am going to be talking about my experience doing Etsy POD.

If you don’t know what that is it’s Etsy Print On Demand.

Basically you choose an online good, make a design for it, then sell that good with that design on it on your Etsy shop.

The print on demand software that I chose to use was Printify. It’s really easy to use with Etsy because you just link your shop to it, then you can choose your products and upload your designs onto them.

I used Canva Pro to make my designs along with clip art from Creative Fabrica.

I advertised my products on Instagram and Pinterest and used mockups from Etsy. I used Everbee and Erank for my SEO and keyword research.

I learned how to do all this with YouTube and Printify.

The great thing is that all of this is free to use unless you use a premium version of it.

The bad thing with the learning process is that there are many voices out there, all telling you different things. I could find YouTube videos telling me that I could succeed and make thousands of dollars doing Etsy POD, and others telling me that the time for Etsy POD was over and that I would only lose money. Furthermore, everyone seemed to be offering their own course on how to make it big with Etsy POD. There was always a different person with a different suggested way to do things. It was very confusing, overwhelming, and distressing.

The products I chose to design were mainly t-shirts, blankets, mugs, and sweatshirts.

I think in total I got 5 sales and made $35 in profit before I quit. And there’s a couple of reasons why I quit. First, it took a lot of time to research designs, create them, do SEO for them, and upload them. So in the long run it wasn’t worth it for me. Second, I didn’t enjoy spending all of that time at a computer. My world felt like it was reduced to one small screen and I didn’t like that. Third, I saw a lot of inappropriate things on Etsy when I was doing my design research, so much so that it made it not worth it to continue. Fourth, I was experiencing mental health challenges at the time that made it difficult to work. These last two reasons were the main reasons why I decided to quit Etsy POD.

As far as the inappropriate things, I saw swear words that I wasn’t comfortable with, inappropriate jokes, and very immodest clothing. I had thought that as a small handmade business platform, Etsy would emphasize more family-friendly styles, but that just was not the case. And suffice it to say that I was a little disappointed with it.

On the lighter side, doing Etsy POD taught me certain business skills that I am glad I have now. It taught me how to use Canva, and I can now use it for various gifts and logos. It also taught me that business ventures are a lot more work than they seem like they will be. Furthermore, it taught me that I don’t like the finance aspect of business very much. I hated keeping track of my expenses in a spread sheet and trying to budget. It was monotonous for me.

In conclusion, some people may make tons of money doing Etsy POD, but I found out that it was not for me, and that’s ok. I think that the lessons that I learned from it were worth it. I don’t think it’s my job to either recommend or not recommend Etsy POD because everyone has their own experience. But I would encourage you to take my experience as a lesson to you on your own path of figuring out Etsy POD.

Good luck out there, and I will see you all next week with another blog post. ❤