How to Make a Successful Print on Demand Store on Wordpress?

Even the most seasoned entrepreneurs can be intimidated by the prospect of building a WordPress website. But in the modern world, running a successful business without a website is like driving a car without an engine. You can only move on mechanical shocks from outside, implementing advertisements, and making cold calls. 

To achieve something more, you’d have domain hosting, WordPress, and a couple of niche plugins. And yes, programming skills are no longer required to create an online store.

Considering that the last two years have been like a bomb, its explosion has completely changed all the entrepreneurship cannons. In the business world, the concept of scalability is often discussed, and namely, enterprise growth strategies adaptable to realities. To survive, your site must become the company’s personification, remain competitive from year to year, meet the market and search engines requirements. We've composed a simple guide on how to make a stunning store and some helpful tips on its promotion.

Table of contents

E-commerce is a booming sector

Why choosing WordPress to build your POD shop?

Which platforms to use?

Don't forget about the shop promotion

Conclusion

E-commerce is a booming sector

According to UN experts, since COVID-19, e-commerce share has grown sharply from 16 to 19%. Overall, global sales reached $26.7 trillion in 2019, up 4% from a year earlier. During the quarantine period, there was also a surge in online transactions: in the UK, they grew from 15.8 to 23.3%, in the USA - from 11 to 14%. 

Interestingly, such services as travel agencies and taxi companies suffered the most: the world-famous positions of Booking Holdings and Airbnb dropped significantly in the ranking. Among the winners were Shopify stores, whose profits grew by more than 95% last year. That's even more than Walmart, with 72.4%!

One of the emerging sectors of e-commerce is a print on demand industry: fast delivery and ease of online shopping have spurred widespread online stores acceptance. As it turned out, you'll have more opportunities to start a print on demand business in such a difficult time. It has become more accessible than ever before: the light industry giants have become less attractive to the average consumer as, e.g., authentic items. 

For newcomers to better understand all the features of a niche business, it’s worth periodically spying on your competitors. The best print on demand sites are often prominent on the net: they might not even run the sickening ads that everyone is always trying to get rid of. The crawlers “want” to see them in the first lines of the SERP, and the buyers, relying on a high level of trust, order goods only from them. How this is possible, and why you can do it in the same way, or even better, read on.

Why choosing WordPress to build your POD shop?

WordPress allows you to create a free online store with customizable themes, plugins, extensions. You don’t need to shine with programming skills - the admin interface and backend navigation are intuitive for users of all levels. 

Impressive statistics are confirming the popularity of sites built on the WordPress platform: 

• there are 64 million websites on the net;
• about 400 million visitors visit them every month;
• about 661 new websites appear daily.

For a print on demand WordPress store, there’s a guarantee to keep up with the times and work without interruptions - it can be updated following trends and standards. Choosing a scalable platform gives the business a lot of flexibility: it can be customized to fit the needs of the enterprise and expand the capabilities by loading more functionality. To provide a better user experience, you’d create a scalable store. The site encoding will affect its loading. Considering that about 40% of sites worldwide work with WordPress, it’s evident that they do this task perfectly. 

SEO is worth mentioning if you’re still in doubt about the correct alignment of WordPress and print on demand niche. CMS site is often essential for brands to post large amounts of content - you can use WordPress print on demand plugins specially designed to improve SEO.

Most Common SEO Mistakes for E-commerce

Which platforms to use?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of entrepreneurs changed their physical points of sale to online platforms. In the second quarter of 2020, Etsy increased its active seller base by 26.4%. Sales growth has been reported on Shopify and eBay. But the main difference between websites from WordPress-based is the narrower functionality and time spent on customization. The last one allows you to make more personalized solutions: chatbot, multipurpose themes, motion UI, video backgrounds integration. As voice search is gaining popularity, the WordPress capabilities for print on demand sites will be helpful for your SERP. Industry leaders must continually follow the leading e-commerce trends: offer more payment options, introduce on-site personalization, AI, and AR adoption. Create the best quality print on demand to sell on WordPress, and you’ll see instant results in successful brand promotion. Let's talk about how to make a POD site user-friendly and at the same time not be afraid of novelty in the form of constantly changing market needs.

Don't forget about the shop promotion

To make a successful store, take care of its technical side and establish yourself as a reliable seller. Read the basic brand guidelines and try to implement them. 

SEO

If you’re a seasoned entrepreneur working on one brand for a while, you can introduce the opening of a new store to your existing fans. However, newbies will have to go through the path of improving on-page and off-page SEO. That bodes well for your rankings in search results and increases brand awareness on the web. Here are some tips:

1. Expand the description for each product: enter keywords, check the grammar.
2. Take care of getting feedback from satisfied customers who bought the product. You can read more about this here.
3. Embed videos and authentic product photos.

Social network

Integrating the print on demand WordPress plugin with the functionality provided for social media management is extremely important for broader coverage of target audience segments. Interactive buttons with icons allow you to share important information with the visitor - so word of mouth will start working for you.

How to use Facebook marketing for print on demand business

Mailing

Some print on demand WordPress plugins provide functionality for collecting emails from visitors. Set up your business email so that your correspondence looks professional and efficient. Remind about discounts, promotions, updated products - the name and logo of your brand will be remembered. 

Discounts

What do customers love the most? Discounts, of course! Who doesn't want to buy a cheaper product? Creating a pop-up window with a message about the discount will encourage the visitor to subscribe to updates.

More traffic

Run personalized ads to get more traffic. That's a proven method, but it doesn’t guarantee an increase in sales at all. You can promote your products to a new audience, track user activity (e.g., while using dynamic Facebook posts).

Conclusion

The value of WordPress for printing on demand is inestimable: even if you don't have a lot of resources, you have great functionality available. Among the significant number of plugins, themes, and extensions, you can choose the most optimal one for your POD store showcase. The main thing is that search engines and users notice you. So it’s worth using different website promotion methods. We reviewed them in this article and hope that they’ll be valuable.