Online Stores
Get High Money From Online Stores in 2021
Hey everyone and in today video I thought I would take you behind the scenes Of one of my sources of passive income. My automated clothing store. Now as you can see it’s made over $2000 TODAY AND use all of these sales were automated, every single aspect of this store works on autopilot, which is why I can safely call it a source of passive income. Now not all of the money is obviously profit and I will discuss margins in this video but as you’ll see I’ve even found a way to automate my expenses to kind of be a source of profit too. But yeah every single aspect of this store is on autopilot. The production creation process is automated, the order processing is automated, the shipping is automated, even the marketing is automated. This store almost feels like a machine and it’s pretty cool to watch make money by itself. In fact you may have noticed I have been refreshing my sales and the store has made even more money as I’ve been filming this live, it’s made an extra $90 I believe which is neat. But yeah, for me, passive income has always been my number one goal. I am far less impressed by big sales figures in business. Whenever I see a big income screenshot, I think to myself, yeah, that’s pretty cool, but how much time did you have to spend to actually earn that? Because you see, here is the thing. Most people in life think that their scarce, most valuable resources in life is money. But in my personal opinion they’re wrong. It’s not money, what it actually is, is your time. Think about it. Every single day that you spend doing something that you didn’t want to do is a day you can never get back. Nope. You can never get that back. You can always earn more money. But what you can never earn more of is time. Thanks to passive income I can now spend my time doing whatever I want, because my income is not contingent on my actions, my income comes in regardless. And in my opinion, that is what true financial freedom is. Not the ability to buy Lambor ghinis! So as I said, my store is a clothing store. And please do not ask me for the URL to the store because I will not give it to you. All of my clothing features original art and designs and I don’t want people to come in and steal them. But what I will say is my store is a niche clothing store. It’s biggest seller is tees. But it sells other clothing like hoodies and things like that. And for those of you out there out there that don’t know what I mean when I say it’s a niche clothing store, the word niche sometimes pronounced as Nitch, means to focus on a narrow segment of the market, which has a highly specialized interest. So for example I made a fake niche clothing store to show you what I mean. This store would be considered a niche clothing store because all of the clothing in it is aimed at one interest, coffee! This would be a clothing store for coffee lovers. I’m going to switch over to my store now and I’m going to be doing this first section on my phone because it’s way easier to blur customer data and information on my phone and it’s extremely important that I get that bit right. So I’m in the orders page inside of my shopify admin area. And we’ll see how my store works.
Now, as you’ll see since these are real customers and not draft orders, I’ve blurred the customer details.
A lot of my screen will be blurred for this video because yeah, these are real customers who are trusting me with their data such as their names, their addresses, their emails, things like that. Anything that could be remotely considered private I’ve blurred. Because I take my position as a merchant very seriously. It also makes it really annoying and hard to make videos like this because I have to double check and triple check that I haven’t leaked any customer data and these videos take ages to make. So, um, we’ll just take this order here as an example and as you can see, this customer bought a female t-shirt. So, I can imagine a lot my new viewers out are like OK Sarah, but now what? The customer has bought the t-shirt from you but how are they going to actually get it? Do you have a bunch of shirts that you’ve made in-advance sitting at home in your garage that you now have to package up and send out to customers at the post office? The answer no, no I don’t! Instead, here is what actually happens. My store is connected to this automated service called printful. In the industry we call printful a print on demand company. And here is how they work. You see printful has big factories in the USA and Europe. These factories are designed to print custom merchandise on behalf of externals like mine. When you sign up to work with printful and it’s absolutely free to do so by the way, you log into your account and you can browse through the different merchandise that they can create. And as you can see, you can create all sorts of products, such as custom hoodies or home ware, such as custom mugs, and pillows. And of course you can make custom t-shirts. Printfiul have lots of and lots of different t-shirts that you can choose to print onto and sell in your store. So this one here is the specific t-shirt that my customer bought from me earlier. Once you’ve selected what type of t-shirt you want to sell, you then just upload whatever artwork you want onto it. So if you had a niche store aimed at coffee lovers you might want to create this cute dog coffee tee design. You can then list the product you created in your store. And when a custom comes into your store and buys the t-shirt from you, printful warehouses immediately are notified of the order. They’ll print the design onto your product, which in this example is a t-shirt. They will then package the t-shirt up and ship it out to the customer. Automatically without you having to do anything. So you can see why this service is called print on demand, because that’s what it literally is. A customer comes into your store, buys the t-shirt and they get printed and created on demand. And that is exactly what happened here. So when the customer ordered this t-shirt from me, my store’s eCommerce platform Shopify processed the payment. Printful opened up their own order page and imported all of the data from Shopify. And as you can see currently this order has the status of waiting for ful filment. And I’ll show you what will happen over the next few days. So here is an order that was made yesterday for a woman’s t-shirt. But with a round collar instead of the v-neck collar. Just like with the other one, when this was first imported, the order page said unfulfilled. But now it’s different, it's green! And that’s because Printful have started the process of making this tee. And as you can see, there are 5 stages Printful go through to make it.
And we can see that Kimerbly marked 11 hours as having passed the quality control phase. That’s when an actual human at Printful looks at your shirt and checks that the print is good and it’s not messed up. So that you know that the customer is going to get a good product. The next stages for this are that it is going to get sorted to the right shipping location, packed and then shipped out. And when it is, Printful will update the order screen to instead look like this. Order is fulfilled That means then that they have finished all 5 stages of fulfillment. And the product is on its way to the customer. And they even give you the tracking code. And so you might be thinking OK well do I need to alert the customer and give them the tracking code? The answer is NOPE! Because I’m using Shopify they have an inbuilt feature called customer notifications. These are notification emails that get instantly triggered when things take place in the store. And you can modify and turn them off. But I have them turned on. So this notification here is the email that Shopify sends out. When a product is shipped to them. And Printful talks with Shopify and automatically sends this email out to the customer, and they add in the tracking information here too. As you can see the entire store and the product creation process it literally happens without me. The entire process from start to finish of the customer ordering their product to it getting made to it getting shipped out to them happens on autopilot. Which is why I absolutely love Print On Demand as a way to run eCommerce businesses. And I even talk about it more in my free eBook, the 6 steps that 6-figure online stores follow to make over $10,000 a month. And you’ll find a link to download that eBook in the article description below. But yes, to me, the most valuable thing about the store isn’t how much money it makes, it’s how it makes it. Because in life and especially in business, we aren’t all just using 1 currency. We’re actually using 2. One currency is money. Spending money to make money. The other currency is time. Spending time to make money. And I think it goes without saying that I would much rather spend money to make money any day. Which is exactly what my store does, but utilizing Print On Demand services. Because they are not free. There is definitely a price you pay to use them. We’re using money to make money. That t-shirt that Printful have already shipped: they charged me $17.94 for the cost of the t-shirt, the ink, the man-power to print it, package it & send it and the shipping fees, leaving me with $15.96 as my margin, so about a 47% after PrintFul fees. But of course, Each of my products have different margins, especially if I use a coupon code to poach a customer back into the store, like I did with that t-shirt I sold today. That customer paid me $28.92, and Printful charged me $20.44 for fulfillment & shipping.
That left me with a $8.48 margin, which is almost 30%. Now, for me I look at these fees and I’m like, Man, these fees? They’re an absolute bargain! Like, wow yeah I’ll happily pay that so that Printful can literally do everything for me! But it was interesting. I got a comment from this viewer, and we ended up getting into a discussion. He made this comment after my previous video Where I showed how to use Amazon.com Print On Demand service, March By Amazon, to sell shirts online. As you can see, their standard margin leaves you with about 26%. And, well, John thought this was ridiculous, far too high. He said that he’d rather just handle everything in-house, so that he could make higher profits. Now, John, honestly mate, I enjoyed our discussion so no shade here, but honestly, when I saw this, I was like, mate, like, really? Have you, have you actually thought that statement through? This store sells multiple different types of clothing, not just unisex crew t-shirts, but let’s say for a moment, that John wanted to open a store that just sold my unisex tee, the industry standard Bella Canvas 3001, and handle all of it in-house instead of with a Print on Demand service like Printful or Amazon. First of all, he’d have to order in bulk the base t-shirts themselves. And, unlike what John commented, the industry standard unisex tee, the Bella Canvas 3001, does NOT go for $1 each! And remember, thanks to Print On Demand my store sells this in 8 different sizes, so John will have to bulk order t-shirts in ALL of these sizes in-advance. And you know god forbid. He wanted to offer a black t-shirt because now he’d have to bulk order all 8 sizes of each of those colors too! Next, he’d then have to get a DTG printer, and then find somewhere to store it. Each time a customer came & bought a t-shirt from him, he’d then have to either print it himself manually, or hire a staff member to do it for him. They’d then have to manually package the t-shirt up and ship it out to the customer. And they’d have to do that for EVERY SINGLE ORDER! I had 50 orders today, most of them containing at least products. Imagine doing this day in day out! John later indicated he meant he’d rather buy these products in-bulk in-advance from a t-shirt factory, not print them himself, but honestly, given how many size & Colour variations you’d have to order for each different t-shirt design, I don’t think that’s much better. SoI think at this point here, when you start to realize what these Print On Demand services do for you, you quickly realize, these fees seem perfectly reasonable. In fact, I like to use it to my advantage. Did you know that my EXPENSES Pay for my luxury international travel? Yep. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that I’m a regular at the pointy-end of the plane, a godsend when you live in New Zealand like me, where it takes a long haul flight to get to almost anywhere in the world, other than Australia or Fiji. Now, you might think this is insanely expensive. But actually, for me, it’s not. You see, there are credit cards like this that give you free Airmiles & travel rewards for spending money on them. So inside of Printful, I made sure to put my best credit card with the highest travel rewards as the one I pay all of my expenses with. And so now, I get to fly first class and business class around the world, for massively reduced fares. Not only does my store enable me to travel around the world, because it provides me with passive income, Even if I’m trekking through the desert & don’t have an internet connection: but it enables me by literally flying me around the world, just by spending money to make even MORE money. It’s crazy cool.
So no, I am not mad I have to pay Printful expenses at all. And really, whenever I see comments like this, I think, man, It’s really easy to take the opportunities we have now for granted. And I guess for me, I can see that people do that, because this store, it ain’t my first rodeo. I’ve been in the eCom business for a long time. And back when I first entered the ecom scene 13 years ago when I was 16, we didn’t have anything like this. Nope. Printful was one of the first Print On Demand services, and they were only founded in 2013. Back in the day, I used to sell these in my online store: pokemon video games. Well, not just pokemon video games but they were definitely my biggest seller. I had realized that in the USA, there were several video games, such as Pokemon games, that sold for around $15 to $25 US dollars, that here in New Zealand, due to a lack of supply, sold for more like $40 to $50. And so every week, I’d reach out to Mom & Pop video game stores in the USA I had built relationships with over email, and ask them if anyone had traded any of my golden games in.
If they had, I’d buy them all, and get them shipped all the way from the USA. To here in little ole New Zealand. I’d then list the games for sale online for the mark-up price. And then, each time a customer bought a game from me. I would have to package the video game up, and then go to the post office, and ship it out to them. Not only was this extremely time intensive. And the absolute opposite of a passive income business,
but it also meant I had a very limited customer base. Because think about it. Most of my customers are based in the USA & Europe. If I were to ship shirts I printed here over to those countries, it would literally take weeks. But thanks to leveraging Printful’s local printing factories, I can ship products locally with 2-5 business day shipping times. I’ve gone from having a customer base of 4.5 million people here in New Zealand to having a customer base of over 330 million people in the USA and over 195 million people in Western Europe. That opportunity is NOT lost on me So yes, I definitely think people don’t appreciate the opportunities they now have, that previously didn’t exist. There is still something that I haven’t touched on though that I need to, and that is my automated marketing strategy. It’s funny: whenever I make videos like this one I made, that discussed the logistics of running a t-shirt store such as creating great products people want to buy, and having a good customer service experience so that you can get repeat buyers, I’ll inevitably get a comment from someone. Who is like, yeah Sarah but actually I don’t care about creating & selling amazing products or
offering customer service. I only care about the 1 thing that matters: traffic & marketing. And while I would sincerely disagree that traffic is “The most important thing” to running a successful store. I am happy to talk about traffic. So yes, the traffic & marketing for this store IS on autopilot. But as you'll see, that’s not the only cool thing about this store’s traffic strategy. The other cool thing about it, Is that now that the upfront work for it is done, it's 100% free. And that’s because the way that my store gets new customers is actually with a traffic method called SEO, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization. For those of you that don’t know what SEO is, let me show you. If I come to Google and type in “lawyer mugs” and do a search, Google will scour the internet, looking for websites relevant to my search phrase However, Google can only show me 10 websites on the first page of results, and so it has an algorithm that chooses which websites it likes the most. And, sitting at number 2 on the list for my keyword phrase is actually a Print On Demand store called Mugdom. Like me, they leverage Print On Demand providers to make these mugs for customers after they order them. Because they are sitting at the top of the results for the phrase “lawyer mugs” - each month, they’ll get free traffic from people looking for mugs to give as gifts to lawyers, who find them through Google. And the great thing is that if Google likes you and ranks your website, it is not just free, it’s ENTIRELY hands off. No testing different ad-sets and Facebook ad management here folks. Thank goodness! Now you might wonder, OK Sarah, but why did Google choose Mugdom over the other 2 million websites? Well, the reason why Google likes Mugdom is that it’s made lots of tweaks & modifications to its store. So for example, one small tweak is making sure they use relevant keywords on their page in the right places. It’s too big of a topic to go into right now, but I’ve actually got a free tutorial on this channel that shows some of my techniques for getting free SEO traffic. And my premium eCommerce training program, eCommerce Clubhouse, has an even bigger SEO tutorial article series. If you’re interested in my program, I’ll have a link to it in the video description below. And that’s exactly how my store gets it’s customers. Not through paid ads. So this here is SEM Rush, a tool that lets you track your website rankings Well, I went inside of it & generated a keyword ranking report, which tracks what keywords my store ranks highly for. And, while I’ve blurred the actual keywords themselves you can see that it ranks #1, #2 & #3 for LOTS and LOTS of keywords And so what happens is people will be searching for these keywords, see my site at the top, and click on it. And come into my store, browse around, and then buy products. And of course, once they do, Printful & Shopify take care of the rest for me. I know the phrase “passive income” can be a little bit controversial, because people often have a very high standard of what constitutes “passive.” But I genuinely think this store meets that standard. So, did you enjoy seeing how an automated online store works behind the scenes? If so, subscribe for more videos about creating passive & semi-passive income online, And I've actually got 2 videos you might be interested in as well. The first video teaches you how to set up an online t-shirt business without needing a credit card, for free. And the second video gives you 10 things that you should do BEFORE you start a store like mine.