How to Automate a Print on Demand Store

So you may have seen this video on my channel recently which people seem to like and in that video I basically build an end-to-end automated print-on-demand store and what that starts with uh spoiler alert is we scrape reddit for popular clothing subjects really just popular subjects and then we extract through open ai uh good one-liners for mugs and that could apply to t-shirts any kind of merch item as well from that and then we push that with printify we create the product and then finally to the etsy storefront and this kind of bought the system that we set up in that video does this 24-7 around the clock really you know as much as we want we can run it once per day we could run it once per hour that's a whole nother video but I wanted to extrapolate some of the concepts and the lessons in that video into this one and into how to automate your print-on-demand business so we're going to cover some of the actual scripts and strategies employed in this video as well as a number of other tools and concepts in this one my goal here is just if you get into a print-on-demand business I want you to be able to focus on the highest leverage kind of part of the business and for you that's likely to be the marketing the creatives the vision talking to people networking it's not likely to be a lot of the things that through the automation that we'll talk about in this video you can automate and or delegate so that's the video let's get into it I first want to very briefly touch on print-on-demand versus traditional e-commerce you may be familiar with print-on-demand if you are just skip forward 30 seconds otherwise I'll keep it quick generally print-on-demand or pod means that you don't have to pay for inventory or put any money up up front to create products and someone else manages the entire process once someone purchases an item they will create it or print it quote-unquote they will ship it they will put it in a package they will accept payments they'll do everything and if you compare that to traditional the problem with traditional e-commerce if you wanted to start a clothing brand for example is that you have to go to say the Chinese or whoever else that's going to manufacture your item and then you have to order 4,000 t-shirts up front to get a decent price otherwise you're paying 70 dollars and per unit say at the minimum order quantity so you pay for your 4,000 and you spent let's say you know eight dollars per and you're going to sell them for 16 bucks or 20 bucks well you just have to spend 32,000 on inventory and then where are you going to store your 4,000 shirts now you have to get space for that or lot space for that there's a lot of risk there there's a lot of money and there's a lot of time because you have to wait six months for you know those people not not actually six months but let's say three months is a very real number for your manufacturer who's overseas to create the whole bulk unit and to ship it to you often on a you know shipping container or whatnot so print on demand is much easier than that you simply upload the design so let's say you have a design for a and i'll get into what kind of products you can create in a second you have your design for your shirt you upload it to some kind of print on demand company and then you connect that company the the print on demand supplier to a storefront so that could be amazon shopify walmart etsy ebay or your own website and then once someone a customer purchases the item on ebay on amazon on your website then the print on demand company creates the product so they print the t-shirt with your design your logo and then they ship it to the customer and that's it so what that shifts the the allocation kind of the bottom leg of the business it shifts it from i have to have fifty thousand dollars i have to take on a lot of risk into you have to be really good at marketing and you have to focus on really building a brand and if you can do that you'll do really well with this model now people associate print on demand just with merchandise like t-shirts right really there's a whole world now there's a whole world of suppliers out there and a whole world of products that you can create designs for and sell that's everything from any number of skincare products uh any typical business merchandise so uh you know pens pencils notebooks backpacks um desks chairs etc um i did a uh a energy drink brand once for a friend that was like customized to um a kind of little mission he was on of trying to run a four minute mile so i called the energy drink brand four minute mile um any type of food item right like there's there's so much out there that falls into this category of print on demand and what it effectively means is that if you have the brand then you can get the product created and that is the massive advantage of print on demand versus traditional e-commerce now one key step to build a business that stands out from a crowd and to give your business a digital home is to build your own website with a dot store domain right we're talking about print on demand in this video which means you will likely have a website or digital home for your brand where you sell your own products and dot store is the perfect domain for selling things online because it actually helps you sell more that's because a detailed study showed that websites with a dot store domain get 87 percent more traffic on average and a 2x higher on average ranking on google and that's because when customers see your website is a dot store domain let me erase this and i'll write dot store they instinctively know that it is an online store where you're selling something like for example your print on demand products and that helps you materially sell more so dot store is built for sellers it is the perfect domain for anyone selling anything online and that is also why it's used by over one and a half million sellers like mr beast ronaldo rihanna and emirates airlines which is i mean that's a pretty cool set of customers and for a limited period of time you can get a dot store domain for just 99 cents by using this code or go to that link in the description and use that code to get your dot store domain for 99 cents so now i'm going to show you me actually going and checking out and buying one of these and as a bonus when you get a dot store domain you also unlock free access to the plus version of elevate.store this isn't just another discount site it's a curated toolkit for online sellers like you so from marketing tools to e-commerce software elevate.store provides exclusive deals designed to help you launch and scale your business we're talking canva shopify autodesk and many many more it is everything you need to succeed all in one place and it is yours for free when you choose dot store that said make sure to again check out that link and use that code and now let's get back to the video so now let's jump into my computer and i'll cover the the approach that we took and we'll break down some of the automation elements there from that last video i mentioned this one where we made a merch bot okay so i want to walk you through the singular python script that this whole merch bot system is hosted on that you can run locally with kind of a crontab system or you can employ a server that will run it autonomously the reason i want to show you this is because i think it's a very useful frame and a base for integrating all kinds of systems into your print on demand store to automate whatever part of it you want so i want you to understand generally how this works we'll walk through it briefly and then you can take what you want out of there and i'll make this script available as well just check the description for that so there's a few parts here what this system and the script generally does is it scrapes from reddit and it scrapes and you'll see this in a second and how it applies it scrapes essentially popular posts from it it feeds that into open ai which we have the api key and when we select that right there and then it creates an image locally from that in a future video as well we'll merge just a text image with actual uh designed images so like you know ai images and whatnot as well for now that's just text and then that image so the text with a white background is applied and then sent to printify where it's pushed through to etsy so fully automatic and again we'll walk through how to do this those are the four setup kind of the four platforms you'll need you're going to need credentials on reddit the reddit developer platform same with x or twitter then open ai and printify but again if you just want to pull from you know reddit and you want to apply that to a different app than printify or a different supplier you can do so and same with using say x directly and scraping from there as opposed to reddit just however you want to use this set of automation tools you can do so essentially first what we're doing is getting content from reddit itself and this starts with a list of subreddits you can also pull just generally trending tweets from just reddit but what we're doing here is specifically subreddits that are applicable so in this case we're choosing subreddits where we can get kind of one-liners from that would make sense for a piece of merchandise and apparel so it's going to randomly choose one of the subreddits we can just you know edit these and change them out for whatever subreddit we want and after that's selected it's going to clean that data and then what it's going to do is like i said send that to xacti pt now the way that works is you choose the the model with with open ai and then you give it instructions or you give it a prompt and this is the prompt that we're using so we're saying select the best text from the list that would make a great mug design and you can change that out for whatever type of product you want and then we just tell gpt xacti pt this is what a great slogan looks like and also only minimally edit the text don't the from reddit don't just redo it across the board uh then also just do not include anything that would get this product you know shut down or banned and then in in that message the prompt that we send to gpt we include this variable which is the actual list of texts that we pulled from reddit which we pull up here and generate so that's sent to open ai and then we have to create the image after we get back from xacti pt the response and then you can see here how exactly we're creating that image so essentially we're choosing you know default size the font itself then also how to size it because we don't want it to go off kind of the size of the image and then the in the case of printifying this changes depending on where you you want to actually send the product to so to speak we need a 1200 by 1200 pixel image or just kind of a box and you can see in the last video as well what exactly those end products look like and then this is just again more formatting more kind of cleaning and then once that works well we have our image there's a lot of work here and really just making sure it fits like that's most of the actual code and then we can connect to printify and every supplier like i said is going to have a slightly different system for this and there's going to be a list that you uh you need let's see this right here this product data on a per product basis so in the case of printify we need a mug id specifically so an actual variant of a mug and you can see that right here this this 33719 is a 11 ounce mug variant and for the print device store so that's the kind of products that we're then attaching different elements to and you can see those elements right so we're attaching the image we created to this variance this kind of mug this 11 ounce mug and then we're pulling the title from the actual text that's on the mug and then the same with the description and whatnot so one other thing to note as well is that you have to send to a specific store so let me see yeah right here so the shop id which i included in the credentials on the top here is going to be the store in your printify account that you're actually pushing this through to so after that's done um you're largely done like you you can let's see let's just go through here um that is essentially it and those are all functions that kind of do those parts and then in this main function right here uh then we go through and just do those four things in order so fetch the reddit content select the slogan create the image and then upload to printify so that's how this works uh again the script the script will be in the description and also just i generally be aware that you can play around with these systems like this whether it's shopify whether it's amazon whether it's your own website you can automate a lot of those core processes in addition to some of the automation we'll talk about later in this video so i hope that uh that helps you next i want to touch on delegation versus automation i've covered this in i think a book chapter actually a while back um but essentially after you let's see automation after you validate a business concept you're focusing on growth you really want to you want to scale you want to do everything you can to just hey you made it work how big can we get this thing while you know maintaining profitability and whatnot now at some point what you want to do with your business is focus on these two things delegation and or automation delegation is just i'm going to get someone else to do it automation is i'm going to make sure it gets done automatically just set it and forget it some combination of these two things is going to free up your time so you don't have to be a slave to the thing that you create and that's why a lot of people get you know into business into their own kind of entrepreneurship process in the first place it's because you want to spend your time how you want so you probably don't want to you want to at least have the choice um you know what you're working on and so these two things are what actually let you do that and both of them can be done in a print on demand setting delegation is contractors vas in-person people just across the board that's a big thing to consider and then otherwise what we're talking about in this video is automation so just wanted to touch on that for a second now let's go back into my computer to look at a whole range of other tools that are important when it comes to specifically automation and just keep delegation in mind as kind of the okay so i've gone over make.com and zapier briefly uh zapier briefly but really make.com in another video that i'll put on the screen now i recommend you go watch that if you want a little bit more of an in-depth uh dive into what exactly these do generally these are both platforms that let you create scenarios or kind of workflows that automatically do things for you for example we just go into a template in this account here let's wait a second for this to open and we can see some kind of trigger that's going to initiate the workflow so in this case a custom webhook and then that's going to do something that results in a google sheets column or row being updated and when you think about the implications of this when it comes to print on demand specifically this means that considering how developed make.com and zapier are that you can integrate with all kinds of services whether that's the front end for example we'll type in this type there shopify right so shopify is going to have all kinds of different apps that we can connect to and we can automate with whether that's the actual print on demand provider whether it's a crm whether it's google sheets and then the same over here with make which is just slightly more ai focused so there's a whole world here and i don't want to spend you know an hour or more going over the specifics in this video i want this to be more of an overview so what i recommend that you do if you aren't familiar with these tools and how they can apply to print on demand go watch some other videos some more you know thorough guides and also look specifically at the triggers and the connections and whatnot that you can build and the sequences you can build for the stack that you have for your print on demand business so again shopify is one i guess search printed demand excuse me i'm on shopify let's go back here by search print on demand this will pull up some other print on demand integrations that work with zapier as well and there's all kinds of things you can do here as well with make.com and i highly recommend looking through that template library as well so that is how you can automate and how you should what you should look into automating with so specifically make.com and zapier okay and again make sure to go get your dot store domain at this link or the link in the description and that said that's the video i'll see you in the next one and cheers