- Hey everyone, so if you've been a long-time
subscriber on here, you'll know that my favorite product
to sell to make money online right now is T-shirts.
However, because of this favoritism,
it means that I have been seriously neglecting
another awesome item that you can sell to make money online.
The classic mug.
Yes, as I've discussed before on this channel,
mugs are a great item to sell to make money online
because of the fact that
they are super popular with customers.
So I thought, why not shake things up
a little bit around here and do a case study
of a print-on-demand store that is making
over $100,000 a year selling just two mugs.
But you know what, that's not all.
Because do you know what I love more than owning $100,000?
What I love more than earning $100,000
is any time that someone takes a moment
out of the very busy day to give this video
alike and to subscribe, because seriously,
every time you hit that like button,
it genuinely helps my video with the YouTube algorithm.
So thank you so much to everybody
that takes a moment to do so.
But yes, something else that I love
more than earning $100,000
is earning $100,000 in profit.
So yes, do not worry.
These mugs I'm gonna show you,
they are not just earning $100,000 a year in revenue.
Nope, they are earning $100,000 a year in profit.
And to show you how they are doing that,
something else I'm gonna do in this video
is I am going to reverse-engineer this store.
Yes, reverse engineering.
I'm gonna show you how if it was you that had come up
with these two bucks a sell, that you could have been making
over $100,000 in profit.
Even if you don't have an expensive heat pressing machine
to print mugs to resell them,
and even if you aren't a graphic designer.
Nope, no design skills necessary
or heat mug pressing machine required.
My hope is that by reverse-engineering the store,
I'd give you some inspiration for ideas on mugs
that you could start selling online right now.
So let's begin.
So this is a mug, one of two that is earning
over $100,000 a year in profit online.
And as you can see, it's pretty cute, isn't it?
It's a custom dog mug.
And yes, as I'll show you,
even if you don't have a heat pressing machine,
or even if you want aren't a graphic artist,
if you'd been the one to come up with this mug idea,
you could have listed it for sale and made big profits too.
So the price starts at $23 for an 11-ounce mug,
but you can pay more to get a bigger mug.
You can pay up to $35 to get multiple pictures
of dogs on the mug.
So for example, if you had two dogs,
you could pay extra to get a photo of one dog on the front
and one dog on the back.
And as you can see,
this mug has been listed for sale on Etsy.
And opening up your own store on Etsy,
like TypeLeaguePress did here is free.
And as you can see,
they've listed several items for sale on here.
Now it seems pretty popular in the USA,
and so a lot of Americans will already know about it,
but it is not as popular elsewhere in the world.
So if you're watching this and you've never heard of Etsy
and you don't know what it is,
Etsy is an online marketplace similar to eBay.
You just register and start listing products
for sale here, no website required.
So that's a beginner-friendly way to get started.
And it's an extremely popular place to sell mugs.
Most mugs on here,
they are not made by the sellers themselves.
They use low-cost print-on-demand services
to sell their mugs on here.
And the cool thing about Etsy
is because they've spent millions of dollars on TV ads
in the USA, every month 300 million people come here
looking for products to buy.
So as you'll see, you don't need to advertise the products
that you list on here for sale.
Most people who bought this mug,
they did not buy this because they saw
an advertisement for it on Facebook.
Instead, most people bought up because they came to Etsy
on their own, since they'd heard about it
through word of mouth or Etsy's TV ads.
And then they came to Etsy's search bar
and type in something like dog mugs or dog gifts,
and they found this mug.
So most of the time Etsy sellers
don't have advertising costs for the items that they sell,
because they make the sales
through free search engine traffic.
That makes it a budget-friendly, beginner-friendly way
to start selling items online,
This is why I've had several subscribers
successfully start their first stores on Etsy
after watching my videos.
Congratulations everybody.
So while I myself don't sell on Etsy,
I do use Etsy for product research
when designing the T-shirts that I sell.
Well, we can apply my research techniques to mugs as well.
The first thing I do when researching a product on Etsy
is estimated how much money I think it's made,
and I have a five-step formula that I use to do this.
Step one, I figure out how many reviews
have been there for an item.
Now, here's a pro tip for you
if you are doing product research on Etsy.
If you come to a product listing like this
and lets it's got 200 reviews, that is not accurate.
Etsy will only show the latest 200 product reviews
for an item on the product listing.
So to figure out how many reviews
this item actually has you need to click on their storefront
and then scroll down to the store's total reviews,
and then go through all of the reviews left for an item.
That was a little boring, but I went through all 247 pages
of reviews for the store.
And I discovered two things.
Firstly, I discovered 75% or more of the store's reviews
were left in the past 12 months.
Meaning the sales for the store
were mostly made in the past year.
And secondly, I counted 589 reviews for this custom dog mug.
And then it's on to step two,
where we need to figure out how many reviews
that the store has had in total,
which is admittedly very easy to find.
This information is available literally on the product page.
So this store has had 2,463 reviews.
Well, step three is calculating what percentage
of those reviews were for the product that I am researching.
So if I take the total number of reviews for this mug,
which is 589, and then divide that by the total number
of reviews that the store has had, which is 2,463,
we discover that reviews for this smug mug
makeup roughly 24% of the total store reviews,
which means it's probably also making up around 24%
of the total sales for the store as well.
So then we move on to step four,
which is when you now take the store's total sales number,
which as of now is 20,179, and work at what 24% of that is.
And as you can see, it is 4,843 sales.
So then step five, you now take your sales number
and times it by the average product price.
And we're going to go with a $25 price point for this mug,
since it comes in a variety of different price points.
And the reviews show that a lot of people
do upgrade their mug.
And as you can see, we can estimate that this one mug
has made over $120,000,
most of that within the past year.
So now that we've estimated
how much money this mug has made,
it's time to figure out how much of that money is profit.
Now, while it is admittedly impossible for me
to figure out the exact profit margins,
unless I look at the profit loss sheet for the store.
What I can instead do is reverse engineer the store
and show you what your profit margins would have been
if you have been the one to come up with the mug idea
and listed it for sale on Etsy,
and used low-cost print-on-demand services to do so.
Because I do want to stress that I never recommend
that you come and copy other people's products.
And as you can see, others have already done so,
so you'd just be joining this competitive bloodbath
of other Etsy sellers who have already copied this idea.
So instead what I recommend is that you do
is take a look at other people's successful products
and you use these as an inspiration to come up
with your own products to sell.
And actually speaking of that, while filming this video,
I came up with a really cool product idea
that somebody could make enlist for sale on Etsy.
So I'll talk about that later in the video.
But for now, back to that whole
reverse-engineering the store thing.
I'm sure a lot of you were saying,
"Okay Sarah, you say that if I had come up
"with this mug idea that I could have listed it
"for sale on Etsy.
"But have you seen how much it costs
"to buy a hate printing machine to make custom mugs?
"And also Sarah, I don't have 4,843 white mugs
"sitting around my house waiting for me
"to print pictures onto it to sell.
"I am confused."
Well, you see my friend, that is exactly why
print-on-demand apps exist, like this one here, Printify.
Printify is one that I personally use
to create and sell products online.
Printify will make your customer's mug
and they'll ship it out to your customer for you.
And actually, Printify has lots of other items
that you can sell in an online store, not just mugs.
Using Printify, you can sell my favorite product, T-shirts,
but you could also sell other things as well,
like face masks, hoodies, shower curtains, pillowcases,
phone cases, all sorts of items.
But yes, to make a mug with Printify,
you just come and click Start designing.
And on here you'll be prompted to upload a picture
that you want to be printed onto your mug.
And so, of course, what do you do?
You upload a picture that features the photo
of the dog that your customer submitted,
and the dog's name.
Printify will then store this design for you
in your database, and once you've done that, at any point,
you can come and buy one of these mugs individually.
And Printify's factory will literally print your design
onto the mug, and that is why this service
is called print-on-demand.
So what you do is you get them to make one of these mugs
and then you give them your customer's shipping address.
Printify charge you $5.46 per mug
with a Printify premium subscription
and $6 to ship the mug.
And then Printify's professional mug factory spoke
will print your picture onto that one single individual mug
that you ordered, and then they'll package it up
and they'll ship that to the customer.
When you add the cost of the mug, $5.46,
with the cost to ship at $6.
That means Printify charges you just $11.46
per mug that you buy.
And by the way, if you're enjoying this video
and you would like to learn even more
about starting your own print on demand store,
then you should be sure to download 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 my free ebook
in the video description below.
But anyway, back to the video,
and as you can see by using Printify's
print-on-demand service, you can sell products like mugs
online without having to make them yourself.
And remember, this, they're charging $23 per mug.
Plus if you use a shipping calculator,
and put in an American zip code, like 90210,
you'll see that they are charging extra for shipping too.
An 11-ounce mug has an additional $10.94 shipping charge.
So in total, theirs is $33.94 that they are charging
for each mug with shipping included,
which anyone, again, could have made and shipped out
to their customer using Printify for just $11 and 46 cents.
But there is a part that I skipped out here, isn't there?
Remember how I uploaded this picture to Printify
featuring my customer's dog picture
that they uploaded and gave to me?
How did I do that?
Well, first of all, I came to Printify and saw that, okay,
they have asked me to upload a rectangle
that was 2,700 pixels by 1,119 pixels.
And to place my customer's photo and text
on both the left side and the right side
so that it will get printed on
both the front and back of the mug.
Okay, that is easy enough to do.
So then I came to this beginner-friendly
graphic design app, Canva.
You can get a free 30-day trial to Canva,
and I'll have a link to that in the video description below.
As my subscribers know, it's my favorite graphic design app.
I use this to make lots of products that I sell online
with print-on-demand services like Printify.
So basically all I'm gonna do here is upload a picture
of my customer's dog face,
and then add the text featuring their name, Jamie, above it.
And I'm also gonna be just doing this
by dragging and dropping texts and pictures around,
because I'm not a graphic artist.
And so to make pictures like this,
I really do need a beginner-friendly tool
that just lets me drag and drop elements around.
So Canva is perfect for that.
And as you can imagine,
once you've created this mug template once,
it's very easy to just create a new one
when another customer orders a mug from you.
All you do is copy this template that you've already made
and swap out the photo with your new customer's photo,
and then swap out the text with the name of their dog.
So once you've made this template once,
creating new versions of it for customers,
it literally takes just one minute.
So you just swap out the text and the pictures
with new ones and boom, you're done.
So now you might be looking at this and thinking,
"Well, okay, Sarah,
"I see that you've uploaded a picture of your customer's dog
"with the head nicely cut out from the photo.
"How did you do that?"
Well, the answer is that I didn't actually do this.
Removing a dog's head from an image
requires graphic editing skills,
and I myself am not a graphic artist.
And so if you're like me and you are not a graphic artist,
that is okay, because, for a very small cost,
you can hire someone else to do this for you Fiverr.
So this fiver gig will edit five photos for you for $5,
plus a $2.25 cent fiver processing fee.
So that's $7.25 in total.
And they edited five photos for me.
So once you divide $7.25 between five photos,
it means that each photo costs just $1.45.
And if you want even more training about how to use Canva
to create print-on-demand designs,
it's something I teach
inside my premium print on-demand training program,
The E-comm Clubhouse.
To see if my course is right for you,
I'll have a link to it in the video description below.
So then these are all the costs involved
when we reverse engineer this business for ourselves.
So let's now go plug them into an Etsy profit calculator
to figure out profit margins.
So item price is $23,
and our shipping charge for the customer is $10.94 cents.
And our item cost is $5.46 cents for the mug,
plus $1.45 for the graphic editor
to edit the customer's dog photo.
So that's $6.91 in total,
plus Printify charges us $6 to ship the mug.
Well, whether our pays
with Etsy's credit card processing system
with slightly cheaper fees or PayPal, either way,
our profit margins are over 50%.
But as I said at the start of the video,
this is not the only mug design that is earning
the store big profits.
Nope, they have another one.
Yep, this here is the second mug.
I counted over double the number of reviews
compared to the custom dog mug,
which means it's probably head over double
the number of sales as well.
It's more popular than the custom dog mug.
And honestly, I'm not surprised.
This is an awesome gift to give
to grandparents or aunts and uncles.
So combined I estimate that these mugs have sold
around $270,000 in the past 12 months,
and when you account for them having a 50% profit margin,
it means that if you had been the one to sell this,
you'd have made over $100,000 in profit in the past year
selling these two mugs.
So hopefully this video has inspired you
with some ideas of mugs that you could create and sell.
As I stayed at the start of the video,
I myself got inspired while I was making it.
Because you know what?
There are all these mugs on Etsy that say things like
best mother, or things like that.
And that's fine and all, but you know what?
None of them feature custom photos.
So you know what would be cool?
A mug that let's you feature
a photo of you and your mother.
So yes, there are still tons of great opportunities
to use personalization to design
your own unique mugs to sell.
So did you learn something new?
If you did, please hit subscribe
and click that little notification bell
so you don't miss out on any of my videos.
And as I at start this video,
my favorite item to sell online is actually T-shirts.
And if you'd like to learn more
about how I do product research to come up
with awesome T-shirt designs,
then you should be sure to watch my video,
"10 Tips for Creating T-shirts that Sell."
So go ahead and watch my next video
and I'll see you over there.
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