Passive Income – Redbubble Review .. Wait I got a sale???

Kia ora Whanau!

This post is going to delve into a bit more about my passive income journey and will cover off my first “organic” sales through the print on demand (POD) service. I will also be mentioning the other sites I use for POD so expect to be taken down the rabbit hole on some of the other POD sites as well.

Ok so if you read my last blog post Creating a Passive Income then you will know that I started creating two previous POD’s websites. Threadless, TeeSpring and now my new site is for Redbubble.

So what made me try Redbubble? Well honestly a lot of youtube videos where I am learning these skills from suggest TeeSpring, Redbubble and Merch by Amazon.

I have been doing POD for about 4 months now and can say that out of all three of the sites the one site I no longer use or upload to is Threadless. Teespring is a good site but going through the checkout and costs for more than one item can be a bit … painful. So I decided to try my hand at Redbubble.

So are you gonna review the other two? – Yes, in time I will review the other two but for this post I am just going to summarize my thoughts on using Redbubble. If you want to hear more of my journey feel free to listen to my podcast Get A Job and Get Healthy With Costas Enterprises.

Is it actually any good?

Yes. I’ll be honest with you all, there are some really good advantages from using Redbubble veruses TeeSpring, but on the other flip of the coin there are also some great things about TeeSpring that Redbubble doesn’t have.

As always this is my own opinion and my experience, I am learning about this just as you are.

Pros of Redbubble

So there are a few pros and I will try to explain them here as best as I can and why this aspect is better than the other two POD’s I am currently using.

1. Tags

What like FaceBook? Well not exactly but in a way … kind-of.

For those that don’t know, Redbubble uses ‘Tags’ to advertise or promote your products. Depending on what you search for, or what you click on, Redbubble will suggest your design based on the tag that you assign to your design.

What I mean by this, is say for example you are looking for a design around “succulents”. Any designs which use the tag “succulent” will start to appear from your search. Note: Your design may not be the first to show up, however it is there trust me. Redbubble has a way of filtering your designs from you.

So why are tags good? – Simply put – if you create the right tags on your designs you will generate more traffic to your design. Redbubble ask that you don’t add more than 50 tags to any one design. They can also check if your spamming your tags and if they deem this to be true they will remove your design. An example of spam tags are putting “Mask”, “T-Shirt”, “Red”, Orange” etc..

The other cool thing about Tags, is that unlike both TeeSpring or Threadless, once a tag is on your design Redbubble will start advertising this after 15 minutes of you publishing the design.

How are tags different from TeeSpring and Threadless?

Because of the way Tags work, your design will start being advertised almost immediately. With TeeSpring there is the issue of the Trust Score. TeeSpring’s Trust Score means they will do the marketing of your product for you, but only after you have achieved a positive Trust Score.

When you first start with TeeSpring you won’t gain a Trust Score until you have at least sold 1 – 25 sales (meaning you have to market your site yourself). Threadless also use Tag’s for their designs but the main problem with Threadless is they are just not big enough. This means they don’t have as large as an audience to use the tags effectively.

2. So Many Products

You read that right, Redbubble has a huge selection of products for your design to be printed to. Not just the stock standard T-Shirt like most POD’s but also items such as Clock’s, Mugs, Hoodies, Leggings, iPhone Cases and even notebooks.

Now TeeSpring has a huge selection of products as well but Threadless is clearly dead last in this category.

Of course with Covid 19 all of these POD’s now print masks as well.

The other advantage of the products with Redbubble is that once your design is uploaded, you will see a mockup of the design on the potential product very quickly.
REDBUBBLE TIP: If you do upload to Redbubble – check every product you want to upload, sometimes your design will not be centred or will be cropped and your design won’t look right.

How are products different from TeeSpring and Threadless?

So let’s get this out of the way at the start, Threadless is dead last for a reason. They do make great products as they originally started as a T-Shirt business and expanded into POD. The reason they are in last place in this instance is simply because they don’t have the audience/ following that the other two have. This means less sales. Threadless do have some cool variations from TeeSpring and Redbubble such as Skateboards (which I was not expecting from any of the POD sites).

TeeSpring has a wide selection of products and I’ll be honest out of the three TeeSpring feels like you have more control over the creation of the products. Uploading may not be as easy as it is with Redbubble but that is where TeeSpring lets you see the design on a mock-up of the design while you are uploading. That said TeeSpring does make it a bit tedious to upload because you have to tick every single product you want to upload with your design meaning these are not selected by default. Redbubble will start with alot of products already selected.

TeeSpring Upload Tip: When uploading make sure you edit your price here before you publish the product. Also TeeSpring will put the cost of the product up to make you a product … this profit is sometimes too high meaning you won’t sell as many because your trying to make $7USD profit on a mask (for example).

3. Ease of Setting Profit

Ok this is what we all want to read .. how much profit can I make if I make a sale??? Well let’s get into it now. Setting your price-point for the three sites are different in each site.

Redbubble

Setting your price point for Redbubble is not about setting an actual amount but more a percent. Now if your new to Redbubble it took me a few minutes to find where to set my profit margin but now I know it is really easy (basically look on the Left Hand Side Dashboard). The other advantage of this is Redbubble allows you to set the percent across all the products, meaning set it once and walk away.

Don’t get greedy, I currently set my percent to a 7% profit on Redbubble – This is not a huge margin compared to other sites and will result in a small profit for you then click apply to all and all product have the same profit margin.

If your design is any good you will sell lots of them and then that’s when you start earning and this is the same for all POD sites!

TeeSpring

By default TeeSpring will set a profit margin for you, be careful with this as the profit margin is very high. They want to cover their cost and you to make your money as well … but if the item is priced too high it simply won’t sell. I aim to make $3- $7 (USD) on some items but remember the TeeSpring Trust Score – you don’t sell anything then you don’t get added to their marketing. I suggest keeping the prices low to start off with and take the hit of a few dollars on each item until you start selling more than 25 sales. You will have established a Trust Score by then so new items can be priced a little higher. Notice that I said new item and not old items … That is the disadvantage of TeeSpring – once you set a price you can’t edit it. You would have to delete the item from your store and then re-upload it to change the price.

Threadless

You can’t really change the prices of your products for Threadless – Also the profit margin you get is close to $1 -$3 (USD) per item. This effectively means unless you sell lots your going to make very little.

So how do I get paid??

PayPal is your friend – All of these sites will prefer you to be paid by PayPal and they will pay you in the currency of USD (as all these sites are based in USD). Make sure your PayPal is set-up correctly in the name of your bank account … otherwise you won’t get paid.

4. It’s free to set up

So with all three of these sites they are all free to set up. You just upload the design and your done. The main advantage of Redbubble is that your tags will start generating traffic to your site .. and hopefully sales!!

The Cons

So upfront there aren’t as many Cons as there are Pros and as I have previously said in my podcast episodes. But that is not to say that Redbubble doesn’t have some cons.

1. Uploaded Designs image issues

Ok so this isn’t the biggest issue to have but one little issue with Redbubble is that when you upload a design you don’t have as much freedom than what you do with TeeSpring.

Wait what do you mean by freedom? – Ok so let me be clear – the upload process for all three POD’s is really easy but out of the three I like a mix between Redbubble (for applying your design to all products fast) and TeeSpring for being able to move, resize or flip the design.

Redbubble uses a sliding scale for it’s zoom which is still easy to use but can be a bit finicky when trying to make sure you dont cut out the whole design. TeeSpring is better in this instance because you have a lot more help being able to use the frame (like if you are adjusting a picture in Microsoft), the trade off being that you have to do this for every single design you select. Not a huge Con I know but still it would be nice to have the mask to make things easier.

The other issue with this upload process is that when you go to edit the scale on the design, a pop-up window will appear and sometimes the preview window is hard to see so you find it difficult to adjust your design and see it change on the preview.

2. Audience

Ok so this is both a plus and a minus for Redbubble. The audience size.

Redbubble has like 40 million views a week … That is great, but because of this it also means that there is a lot of competition. I suggest really think about the designs your putting up. Redbubble is very big on copyright and trademark infringement (not as hard as Merch by Amazon) but still pretty big.

You need to have the right to sell the design you are creating. So make sure that you are not just taking that Dragon Ball Z image of google and uploading it – you will get fined or worse for breaching copyright or trademark infringement law – no matter what country you are from.

Never fear! there are some websites that can help buy giving you permission to use their designs or any design you create in them for POD. One such site is Canva which is what I use for my designs.

Conclusion

In conclusion I still recommend you to upload on all three sites. After all they are all independent and free and there is nothing stopping you from using each one to sell the same product. Redbubble is great and I wished I had started with them earlier but I wouldn’t have learn what I learnt if I didn’t try the others first.

Didn’t you say something about an organic sale??

Thanks for remembering! Yes out of all three sites Redbubble is the only site I have done no advertising for. So it is a surprise that I have made two sales on this site for the same product.

I marketed the Redbubble to America because they have the highest audience and to my surprise as of today 15 September 2020 I have made two sales for the below design.

Now my profit wont be huge, and I won’t get a payout until I make a profit of $20 USD but it’s cool to know that something simple is being sold and I don’t have to do anything else for it – Passive Income for the win!

Yep Auntiy Cindy aka Jacinda or our Covid 19 Saviour has earned me two sales – One a T-Shirt and one a sticker. I couldn’t be happier.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me and I will try and make a new blog post every week.

Thanks for reading and sticking right to the end and hope this helped you.

Feel free to check out my Redbubble or TeeSpring sites and give me feedback as I love to hear from my community.