There are tons of "Print On Demand" Websites out there now, where you, as an artist or graphic designer, can upload your design, fit it onto different products and then the website takes are of promotion, selling, printing and shipping to customers.
I've been using a lot of these different websites and will talk about a couple of them here.
As an artist you usually get paid around 10-20% of the price the customer gives for the product. I have been a bit in doubts about how fair it is, I'm still not completely sure, but taking into account how much of the work the company does of promotion, covering all the costs and doing all the practical work, I guess it is kind of fair enough. Sometimes it just sucks to see you have sold a T-shirt that the customer has paid 25$ for and in your paycheck it says 2,50$..!
but after all, someone is now walking around with a T-shirt with my design on, so that's also pretty cool ;)
So yes, I don't know if you can get rich using these sites, I haven't yet, but it makes a little bit of money, and many small rivers, you know! That's why I post on many different pages, some I keep posting on and some I have left. i'll get around to the different pros an cons! I have stayed with 4 pages, so let me introduce those first!
Society6
Society6 has a quite nice overall look I think, they make the products look nice and have some good artists.
They have widened up with a loot more products since I started, in the beginning it was mostly art prints, T-shirts and Tote-bags, but it also used to be really time consuming uploading to their products, because every single products needed it's own specific file in the right measurements uploaded.
Luckily now they've got an easier "upload to all" solution, where you can individually go in and edit and enable or disable the individual products plus upload a different file.
Society6 in general asks for higher resolution files than the other sites and I think sometimes the editor can be a bit slow and annoying. In the more time consuming end of the scale.
Usually I make a "fill all" file to the products with edges (like phone covers and prints) and then a PNG cut out version for T-shirts and stickers where a square doesn't look nice, and it annoys me that you have to upload that second file onto every single product where it fits instead of being able to use the same.
Society6 is also one of the pages that pays the artist the least. I think it is 10% for all products - example, a T-shirt here costs 25$ and I get paid 2,50$.
Just on prints you can choose your own mark-up.
I haven't myself bounght anything from Society6, so I don't actually know the quality, something i should actually get around to..! But I have friends who purchased things and said it was very high quality.
I can see I earned 125$ all time on Society6 - Since December 2012, so not a staggering amount - highest monthly earning was 16$.
Here I have to add that I am probably not one of the best selling artists in any of these sites and I don't work a lot on promoting the items myself. At one point I did, and I can see that those are the months I got paid the most, so for sure a little bit more promotional work on it does work! And of course artists with more popular designs probably get a lot more in on it! ;D
RedBubble
RedBubble is probably my favorite of the pages I post on atm. It's the one I have been on the longest - since December 2008. In the beginning it was just an artist forum, like deviantArt, to share art, but developed into a Print On Demand website with a lot of different products.
RedBubble has one of the better uploading solutions too, with Upload to All function, which it had long before Society6, but like Society6 it also lacks the possibility to re-use a second uploaded file, which is again time consuming to have to upload a second file several times.
RedBubble pays a bit better than Society6 too, actually twice; 20% as a standard - AND you can choose your own mark-up on all products. Their products costs a bit less too - here a T-shirt costs 18,49$ and artist gets paid 3,04$, so even though the products are cheaper, the artist gets paid more.
You could even choose a higher mark up, so the products would cost the same as Society6 and you'd get paid a bit more, but I have just been going with the standard settings. It's time consuming too to have to go in and edit every single mark-up.
I can see my highest monthly income on RedBubble was 28$ - back in the same period where I was promoting myself, against last lazy month's 0,18$ !
I did buy a T-shirt once from redBubble though, and the quality was not as high as I expected. I don't know if the higher prices on Society6 also makes for higher quality..
TeePublic
I am pretty new on TeePublic, but decided to join after I got a personal invite with a promise of the highest payout for artists. But i honestly can't clearly see right now what exactly they pay, but it looks about 20% too. I can see that I have earned an all time total of 47,50$ on 17 items, but there is not an easy overview on monthly income and so on.
I have never personally promoted my items from teepublic, so I think it's a pretty okay income for not doing much ;)
They also have a quite nice and quick Upload, with just a few products, so not a lot of time consuming individualisation for every thinkable product.
They only accept PNG files, so I usually just Upload my cut out PNG version for T-shirts and then it automatically just puts a background of the first color you choose onto all the other products. Then you can leave it at that, easy and quick, or choose to edit further onto the other products.
I am quite positive about the very easy upload and the high artist pay on this page. I don't think all the products come out as cool looking as on the 2 other pages, but maybe that is also because i get lazy to individualise the other products ;) But since it is mostly focused on T-shirts, I think it works pretty well.
Design By Humans
I am also relatively new on this site and also joined from a personal invite. I haven't spend a lot of time personalising this page and haven't got much earning either - but that can very well be because of the time I have put into it!
It actually has an okay Upload solution, but many times i get the message that my image is too wide or too tall, and I often end up with skipping the upload because I already uploaded to the other pages and i can't be bothered with changing my file for the last page.
A very annoying thing is also that you have to choose default color for every type of T-shirt, and there is quite a lot to go through! Then you can also choose the default model though, which is a fun extra feature ;)
But a feature I like a lot is that you can choose different color backgrounds to the different products (so the costumer in the end has various color options), like phone covers, mugs and even art prints, and not just one as on the other pages.
And they also just have 5 different products to upload to, which makes it nice and simple.
They pay artists quite good also - here a T-shirt costs just 14,50$ and the artist gets paid 3$, so again around the 20%
I mentioned also earlier that there are a few pages i have abandoned. One was VIDA which I also got a personal invite to, and it seems more classy and different from the other T-shirt pages, but the upload and design was just a bit annoying for me, and I'm not sure it is the right audience for me. I think for someone wanting more classy clothes and more individual product design, it is perfect, but I had too many other pages to manage!
Another is CafePress which was actually the first PrintOnDemand site I used and I also got a few T-shirts from there which were very good quality. I was happy with the page for a while, but suddenly it just got super confusing with a TON of products (I mean everything from key chains to flipflops and earrings) suddenly automatically added without any artist mark up on and that just pissed me off and confused me, so I decided to leave the page all together to also cut down on too many pages to manage!
Thank you for stopping by! I hope this post was helpful, if it was, please leave a comment, upvote, resteem <3 I'd also be happy to hear your experience with PrintOnDemand websites!
