One of the biggest roadblocks keeping musicians from selling lots of merchandise is having to pre-purchase the items and hold them as inventory. Having a variety of items such as t-shirts, posters, stickers, and gifts on hand and readily available to sell at shows and through online stores takes a lot of time and money to upkeep. A lack of resources and space creates a challenge for musicians to earn a significant profit with merchandise. However, selling merchandise can contribute to overall earnings for musicians exponentially, especially at live performances! In fact, we outlined just how impactful selling merchandise can be to your bottom line and how to do it effectively in a previous article, here. There’s no question that merchandise is a valuable revenue-generating tool for musicians. The challenge lies in reducing overhead costs, saving space, and increasing profit margins.
Related: 5 Passive Income Strategies Musicians Should Build Today
Fortunately, there’s a way to circumvent all this hassle by eliminating the need for inventory and the expense that comes along with it. Have you heard of dropshipping? This new method of merchandise production and fulfillment allows you to run a successful merchandising arm without carrying any inventory at all. What’s more, you don’t even have to worry about packaging or shipping products out to your customers. Dropshipping gives you more time to focus on other aspects of your art.
Here’s How It Works…
- You design all of your own merchandise.
- You set up your designs to print on merchandise supplied by a distributor.
- A fan finds something they like and places an order whether in-person or online.
- You receive the money from your fan and immediately place an order with your distributor at an at-cost price.
- The distributor prints, packages, and ships the product to your fan with the appearance that everything came straight from you.
Dropshipping allows you to provide custom products and create a smooth fulfillment process for your fans while being hands off with the logistics. With this model, you don’t have to worry about buying inventory. You also don’t have to worry about storing it or shipping it because your distributor does it for you.
Here’s How to Get Started
Select a Distributor
The first thing to do is select a distributor. Your distributor will handle printing, packaging, storing, and shipping products to your fans. We recommend using Printful as your distributor. Their printing and quality of products are top rate and they offer wonderful tools such as a product mock-up to help create incredible shopping experiences for your fans as well as a profit margins calculator to determine pricing strategies. Their customer support is excellent. They also have a wide variety of product offerings to choose from. Setting up an account with Printful is free. They make their money when you make sales.
Design Your Products
Because you’re an artist you don’t have to go very far to find designs. Song lyrics, CD artwork, the name of your band, your logo, and similar branding all make great sources for merchandise design. Printful provides high-quality products that you can use as a canvas to display your brand such as different types of t-shirts, mugs, framed posters, dresses, pants, hats, pillows, stickers, and more. You can also get your fans involved in designing merchandise by hosting a contest and picking your favorite designs. Start by looking at Printful’s vast selection of products. Choose several different products that would appeal to your fanbase. There are design dimensions and guidelines on Printful’s website that you can follow. If you need help from a professional designer, try this list of recommended designers from Fiverr. They offer graphic design services starting at just $5. Note: Printful is great for physical merchandise products like fashions and gifts. But for music-based products, we recommend going the traditional route and ordering a short-run of CDs so you can have physical CDs on hand.
Set Up Your Store
Whether you’re using Printful or another distributor, you’ll need to integrate with whatever platform you are using for your website. One of the reasons we recommend Printful is because they can seamlessly integrate with 20+ platforms including Squarespace, Storenvy, Amazon, and Etsy. This makes it easy for you to set up your store and have the orders automatically process through Printful’s system. The best option is to create a store on your own website because you have more control over the overall look and feel of the store. Printful has the capability to connect to your store and automatically fulfill whatever sales are made online. Additionally, you can order products manually directly through your Printful dashboard when you’re taking orders at your merchandise table during a live show.
A big part of setting up your store is creating professional-looking pictures of your products. Printful makes this process easy by providing a mock-up generator. With this tool, you can easily create product pictures with your designs imposed on their products for a realistic look. Giving your customers a nice visual of the products can have a profound impact on sales. If selling in-person, you can have a demo product on display and offer to send the product (in their size, if applicable) directly to them with free shipping. Demo products can be ordered manually through your Printful dashboard at a fraction of the cost. For on-site sales, shipping can be folded into the cost of the product. Call it the At-Show Special and throw in a digital download to provide some added value to the purchase.
Promote Your Merchandise to Your Fans
Speaking of putting your merchandise on display, don’t forget to announce that you have merchandise from the stage at live performances! This will bring awareness about your merch table and remind the audience to come up and shop. If you’re worried about coming off too salesy, don’t! Audiences are used to hearing merch sales pitches throughout the show. Besides, what good is having a merch table if no one knows about it? Live performances provide a wonderful environment for selling merchandise, but you’re not limited to in-person sales. Get proactive and write blog posts about new merchandise items as you add them on. One idea is to tie them into National Observance Days, for example, unveiling a custom coffee mug on National Coffee Day. Promote your merch items in newsletters, on your YouTube videos, and on social media. The great thing about drop shipping for musicians is that you have a built-in audience – your fans. In contrast, most people starting an eCommerce business have to build up their audience. But since your audience is already built into your overall business model as an artist, incorporating dropshipping will be a smooth process.
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Turn your interests into revenue-generating strategies and start earning more income with your music.
Dropshipping is a new kind of business model that makes it a lot easier for musicians to sell merchandise. It’s simple, clean, and hands-off. Most of all, it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to provide a diverse, virtual inventory of high-quality products that your fans would enjoy. With drop shipping, musicians can set up a store full of products in minutes. As an added benefit, you can purchase a minimal amount of products at a discount for display at merchandise tables to provide visuals. Best of all, you don’t have to store boxes of inventory while waiting for sales to come in. Inventory is kept safely with the distributor at all times until fulfillment. If you haven’t tried dropshipping for merchandise, do yourself a favor and give it a shot. You’ll make your life 10x easier. Open your free account with Printful and set up your store today!
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While I love the sentiment, I must say that after trying every on-demand service from here to the moon (i.e., CafePress, Zazzle, RedBubble, Threadless, Canva, Merchly, and more!) and have NOT found the supplier that can deliver the quality, design–that’s front AND back–and that can be sold from our own website, so I am less than enthusiastic to try any more. Instead, I have resorted to purchasing and using a Cricut to make our own t-shirts and have ALL but given up on trying to sell them en-masse. In fact, we use them mostly to wear ourselves and to advertise for our enterprises; and NOT as a band merch item–as we had originally intended. Have you tried embedding the Printful t-shirt link on your website? Does it work? How is their quality? Do the shirts last through a good few washes? Do they hold their shape after wearing? Can you print on the front AND the back? I am hopeful to find an on-demand service to do that for us, but I am leery of all services after all that we’ve experienced….
Hi Vox. Thanks for sharing. I’m impressed you went through all those platforms! That’s a lot. I’m sure you have a lot of stories to tell. So to answer your questions about Printful, I do have a shop on my music website that I sell directly from that is linked to Printful. When I get a sale, printful automatically gets it, prints it, and sends it to the customer. It works. I’ve purchased their mugs, t-shirts, and pillows for myself and the quality is to my standards. No fading and that’s through several washes. The shape holds as well. Yes, they do have print options for front and back all though the back printing is pricey, so I’ve never tried that option. I understand your hesitation after going through your experiences, but I think you would really enjoy Printful as an on demand option. Best wishes and please share your thoughts if you do decide to give Printful a shot.
I certainly will. Thanks for the quick response!