How to Scale Your Print On Demand Business with Podza in 2024

Anna Navolokova, Marketing Manager in Multi-Programming Solutions  •  10 min read

Print-on-demand scale-up business plan is the first priority for the e-commerce company that wants to grow and keep competitive advantages. Buyers appeal to brands that figured out how to boost revenue, reducing costs simultaneously. Such organizations are more flexible, can withstand crisis periods, and adapt to rapid market changes without losing efficiency. They follow the latest market trends and provide an excellent customer experience.

How to write a business scaling strategy? A well-thought plan follows corporate goals, helps predict or overcome challenges, and handles increased sales or workflow, bypassing bottlenecks. Technology enabled every business to grow with software implementation that allows users to acquire more traffic, automate tasks, and organize cloud workspaces for remote work from any location.

This guide will describe print-on-demand business scaling ideas, showcase experts' opinions, and describe innovations that can help companies thrive and manage their processes effectively.

Table of Contents

What experts say about scaling in 2024

Stay small and you forgo the efficiencies of scale

How Podza helps business owners scale up

Conclusions

What experts say about scaling in 2024

The American Economic Association conference is an annual event that lifts the veil on the latest achievements and tendencies in financial, commercial, technological, and other spheres. This year experts met in New Orlean to discuss inflation, unemployment, energy transition, the economics of crime, and other issues of concern.

Still, those waiting for significant breakthroughs could be unsatisfied with the results of the presented studies. Most expert works were dedicated to business scale-up by focusing on big data analytics and theoretical modeling. Wonks argued about the credibility of such strategies, explaining that new research often reflects the assumptions from predecessors’ works and can be even dangerous without thorough practical support. Tyler Cowen of George Mason University stated that the reliability of empirical research has improved in the last 30 years, positively impacting the development of a successful business scaling strategy.

The economic growth is not exponential but rather linear in the last few years. In confirmation of this, Christina Romer of the University of California, with her narrative approach, described how monetary policy slowly but noticeably impacts unemployment and inflation.

During the seminar on economic growth, Daron Acemoglu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) put in that markets don’t get new approaches right. Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University continued this thought, saying that nowadays, innovations are shifting from theory to practice. At the same time, field experiments, machine learning, and data analytics play a vital role in this process. Such approaches help scale up a business, reaching new milestones and growing revenue without a substantial cost increase.

Stay small and you forgo the efficiencies of scale

Launching a new round of development for the company is always challenging. It requires a thoughtful strategy, reasonable distribution of efforts, and a wisely calculated budget. Ronald Coase, in his work “The Nature of the Firm,” dated 1937, described how to scale up without making your business unwieldy. Increasing productivity and growing profit doesn’t always mean you should invest more in equipment, warehouses, staff, or other resources. That’s all about drawing the boundaries of your company - what you can and should do on your own, following the brand values, and which tasks you may outsource. 

According to the Economist research, the intensity of task delegation among large American and European firms, including Apple, Microsoft, and Walmart, has increased twice from 11% in 2005 to 22% in the last few years. Companies become more flexible, optimize their internal workflows using automated software, and outsource secondary tasks to third-party services or qualified freelancers. They acquire competitive advantages, cutting costs for communication and collaboration between employees and affiliates. Such reorganization helps businesses scale up production without scaling down the exceptional customer.

Common pools of resources, e.g., cloud computing technologies, e-commerce platforms, and marketplaces, allow entrepreneurs to find partners abroad, represent the brand globally and distribute their products/services to local buyers.

As for print-on-demand business, scaling aimed at profit growth with minimal additional costs is possible with software integrations. Apps like Podza or Dropza contribute to establishing multichannel sales and building reliable partnerships among successful POD providers, sellers, and customers. Later in the article, we’ll describe how technologies allow entrepreneurs to scale a business quickly. But first, we’ll say a few words about bulk sales as one of the methods to increase profit.

Wholesale opportunities in print-on-demand

Wholesales allow you to grow profit without significant investments in marketing and advertising of your brand. Vending larger amounts of products to other retailers instead of doing it right to the direct customer is an effective way to increase sales and fasten capital turnover. Entrepreneurs don’t have to consider how to attract single potential buyers but focus on unique offerings for bulk vendors. To succeed in the wholesale print-on-demand business model, you should offer reasonable prices, which can differentiate you from other sellers and simultaneously top-up margin.

Wholesales may be an excellent decision to scale a t-shirt print-on-demand business. This B2B e-commerce model has several advantages over B2C:

• Increased order volume. You may set the minimum quantity of items available per purchase and discount prices, which decrease as orders get larger.
• Consistent revenue. You may establish a long-term partnership with other sellers and build a profitable print-on-demand business. Ensure your products quality, prices, and logistics can satisfy retailers.
• Additional promotion. Retailers may also create a marketing campaign with your goods apart from your own advertisements. 
• Raised brand awareness. If sold at several retail stores, you can make your products more recognizable among a larger target audience.

While planning how to scale a print-on-demand business with wholesale, you should consider warehouse issues, price calculators, and shipping options. Main tasks to solve before collaborating with other e-commerce businesses are the following:

• Own/rent a space for stocking goods or use a Warehouse and Fulfillment service (W&F) provided by a third-party company, like Amazon.
• Put bulk prices 2.5 times lower than the retail or use another strategy that relies on break-even points and higher margins.
• Set a fixed price for shipping or apply a cost calculator, depending on the package sizes and weight.
• Ensure you can fulfill all orders on time. Wholesales can be inappropriate for handmade goods but suitable for mass production, like apparel with identical prints.

One more thing to mention for wholesalers is possible payment delays. Some retailers may work with you on strict conditions, like 30-60 days payment arrangements after receiving an invoice. But if this isn’t a good decision for you, it’s better to partner with small boutiques and take payments upfront.

You may wonder if a print-on-demand business is profitable if you sell goods in bulk at a discount price. We can say that the profit margin for wholesale is more than twice lower as selling the same batch of products at retail. But this business model allows one to earn income faster, accelerating capital turnover and investing it in further business development.

With plenty of routine work to do daily, POD entrepreneurs are searching for a cost-effective and trustworthy way to start scaling the printing business. Regardless of the e-commerce destination (dropshipping, POD, or W&F), software integrations are necessary for companies that want to develop and build new horizons in the modern market.

How Podza helps business owners scale up

MPS products are ready-to-use solutions that help print-on-demand entrepreneurs provide hassle-free administration, reduce operational costs and discover new business opportunities. B2B e-commerce frameworks combine product, order, and warehouse management, which is essential for scaling the printing business and further expansion. The innovative Podza+Dropza combination allows companies to organize a fulfillment center and delivery process in a single working chain.

Podza for those who have their own POD company 

While POD services that own equipment and fulfill customers' orders already have a lot of manual work, they require automated software capable of coping with orders volume, preventing human errors, and fully controlling the fulfillment process. Podza will help POD providers to organize multichannel sales through connected online partners’ stores. 

All you have to do is get an app and integrate it with Shopify, Etsy, Woocomerce, eBay, or other platforms. Your partners will combine online shops with Podza and automatically redirect their orders for fulfillment. You’ll receive a systematized business process and will be able to build new ones. This is a set of features printers can apply within Podza:

• Create product collections, design mockups, unique descriptions, and packing slips.
• Collect partners’ orders from e-commerce platforms and monitor stocks in real time.
• Set up discounts and costs for specific shipping locations.
• Generate invoices and observe payment reports.
• Track the delivery of parcels by uploading additional software like Shiphero/Shipstation and much more.

With Podza POD, businesses save the time and funds required to develop similar applications from scratch. While it will take around six months for other companies to build a framework for your needs, setting up and testing Podza will cost you only two weeks to start generating additional income. MPS solution will also save ⅓ of your budget, which you can use for marketing campaigns or releasing new product lines.

DropZa for dropshippers and wholesalers 

How to scale a small business if you don’t own any equipment and production lines? With Dropza software, you can make a modest company more profitable because this software handles order proceedings and shipping 24/7, even when you sleep. The app benefits suppliers and sellers who connect their online stores with dropshipping software. A single framework can easily streamline primary e-commerce operations, which take several hours daily, and free up human resources for generating more valuable insights. Here is the set of features wholesalers and dropshippers can use with Dropza:

• Import listings from any available source within a few clicks.
• Distribute products among all the connected online shops (Shopify, Etsy, etc.).
• Manage orders, partners, and products in a single dashboard.
• Set up prices and currencies.
• Message with the connected merchants.
• Generate and save artworks to Google Drive or Amazon S3.

Dropza becomes a real life changer for those developing a scaling strategy. With this automated software, business owners receive an opportunity to manage multiple selling channels, reach a wider audience, explore international markets, and increase sales.

Conclusions

Is print-on-demand scalable? It’s the most frequently asked question for startupers. And the answer is - yes! Scalability in POD lies in the business possibilities to meet increased sales and workflow demands, maintaining low expenses associated with it. While some business owners use the help of outsourcing firms to cope with high loadings, others benefit from innovative technologies. POD businesses have two ready-to-implement solutions, Podza for printing services and Dropza for dropshippers and wholesalers, designed to help enterprises scale without hassle and overpaying. 

A set of software features helps to automate essential processes in the sales chain, grow revenue and save resources. Flexible frameworks ensure that POD companies can adapt to quickly changing market demands and integrate additional custom tools which will help optimize workflows for every personal need. Managed printed services cover more than basic business needs and allow to generate valuable insights for future improvements.