I have a bunch of different merchandise available for sale in the shop on my music/comedy website. Creating merch to sell to your fans and delivering it to them turns out to be a lot easier than you might think.
The secret is to join Printful. They are a print-on-demand printing house who drop-ship the products directly to your fans. You don’t need to handle orders, hold stock or worry about warehousing yourself.
Your fans see a professional looking shop on your site where they can order products that are physically created in response to each order and shipped directly to them by Printful. All you have to do is sit back and collect the cash while you make music.
To make this all work you need to:
- Install the WooCommerce plugin on your band’s WordPress site and configure a payment method, if you don’t already have an online store.
- Sign up for an account with Printful by clicking here.
- Log in to your Printful account and connect it to your band’s website choosing the WooCommerce integration.
- Select a method of paying Printful to fulfil your orders. To simplify the cash-flow process you can use PayPal to both receive payments from your online store and pay Printful to fulfil them.
- Start creating merchandise on Printful such as t-shirts, coffee mugs and beach towels. Use your album art or promotional poster images. See the merch in my shop for examples.
Once your store is connected, items created in the Printful designer automatically appear in your online store.
If you want merchandise printed by Printful available at your live gigs, order it via the Printful site rather than in your store so that you pay wholesale for it and don’t have to pay your own retail markup.
