Your print-on-demand drop-shipping checklist for Shopify
Do you need a checklist to make sure you’re on track to launch your new print-on-demand drop-shipping store or clothing line? We’ve got you.
1. Sign up with Slaite
Before you can get into the fun stuff like designing and promoting your new custom products, you need an account with Slaite. It takes less than 5 minutes and there is no financial commitment. Click here to start the process.
2. Select and design your custom products
Review our catalogue and select products for your store. Once you have a list of products to design, it’s time to bring your artwork to life.
We dive deeper into design steps and design hacks in this blog if you need more help. Or you can always send us an email – we would love to help you!
3. Order samples
Seeing is believing. Order a sample to test – and photograph – your product. While our free product mock-ups and other free mock-up tools such as PlaceIt do fine in a pinch, it’s beneficial for your online business to have final product images.
4. Download the Slaite app in Shopify
Click here to download the Slaite app for your Shopify store.
5. Publish your products to your Shopify store
In Slaite, navigate to “My Collection” and select “Publish” on any product you want to start selling. When the status is reads “Published”, you know you’re good to go.
6. Set up shipping profiles in Shopify
Setting up shipping profiles for your products is essential. This step will assign automatic shipping rates for your customers based on their geo-location.
We have an entire Slaite Library post and video showing you how to set these up, click here.
7. Edit and publish your product listings in Shopify
Once you’ve published your products to Shopify, you can edit your product listing before the product is active on your site. You can change your product title, description, image alt-text, mock-up image and price.
You can also add your products to collections to organize your clothing line by design, product type, season – whatever works for your brand!
Don’t forget to add tags, image alt-text and ensure your description is optimized for SEO. No one can buy your product if no one can find it. If you’re new to SEO – don’t panic. Shopify wrote a great help center article to give you an overview of how SEO works and how you can use it to gain sales, click here to read.
Once you’re happy with your product details and product locations on your site, you can set the product status to ‘active’ to begin receiving orders.
8. Plan to promote your products to build customers and sales
You don’t need a big advertising budget to start promoting your products. You can begin to organically promote your products with free social media tools, social media engagement and SEO.
It’s important to post consistently at a frequency that makes sense for your brand and engage with your audience. Another tip is to share your product reviews on social! You can screenshot and use free editing tools, like Canva, to post an aesthetic, on-brand version of the review in your feed.
9. Set up your social catalogue
If you’ve ever seen tiny shopping tag icons on a brand’s social page that bring the user from the app to a company website to purchase a product, that means a catalogue is in place for that company.
It may sound daunting but it’s a simple process. All you need is a Facebook Business Manager account (which takes minutes to set up) and create a catalogue in your business account that syncs to your Instagram or Facebook account. The set-up time depends on how many products you have but once it’s live, you can create a more direct path for your customers to purchase.
10. Incentivize content sharing
If your customers have an incentive to share and interact with your products and content, your engagement and exposure will increase.
Typically, companies will use giveaways to promote content sharing and engagement. If a giveaway doesn’t make sense for your brand, consider simple tactics like asking your audience questions in social posts or stories and ensuring you respond to queries quickly.
Don’t forget to add a branded hashtag to unify your posts and any customer-generated content. Encourage your customers to share posts of their new gear and use your branded hashtag. This community identifier will help you see all your customers engaging with your brand and it bridges the gap between your customers and the company they love.
If you’d like more support, have more questions or just want to share your final designs with us, we would love to hear from you. Send us an email or DM us on Instagram. We’re listening.
