Six Print-on-Demand Tools and Services You Can Use to Automate Your Daily Workflow

7 min read

The easiest way to sell print-on-demand products on Amazon is to list new products consistently.

The more products you have, the more chances that people will see and purchase your products. It’s very simple.

But it doesn’t mean that you can upload just 1,000 products and you will make $1,000 every month.

You need to check the upcoming trends, do niche research, create new designs, and upload new products to your store consistently.

Then you will need to check the sale stats and make some of your products to be the Amazon FBA.

There is a lot of work to be done, but it’s the easiest way to sell print-on-demand products on Amazon, especially if you’re just getting started.

Thanks to technology nowadays, there are so many tools and services you can use to help you live a lot easier.

I actually rarely do anything for my own print-on-demand business nowadays, because I have a team handle it for me.

My team also doesn’t spend much time working for me as well because we have some tools that can do the work for us.

Actually, my team also works less than two hours a week.

In this article, I’ll share some print-on-demand automation tools and services I use to automate my daily workflow.

If you don’t understand the whole workflow for print-on-demand yet, you can read some of my old articles here to learn more.

Once you get it, continue reading the tools and services I use below.

Let’s get started.

Onlinejobs.ph

First of all, if you want to remove yourself from the working process, you need to hire someone to be YOU.

Although there are so many print-on-demand automation tools out there, the human who controls those tools is still required.

So, you need to hire at least one virtual assistant to handle your job.

This person will be the main guy who receives an order for you and he or she will use the tools to run your print-on-demand business.

I also recommend you hire another person as well to do the graphic stuff.

Creating designs and putting on print-on-demand products is still important work, so hiring at least one graphic designer is a good idea.

Even if the designs you can sell are simple text designs, it still takes time to create. It’s a lot better to hire someone to do it for you.

I have an article on how to find a graphic designer for your print-on-demand business.

You can read it here – How to Find and Hire a Graphic Designer for Your Print on Demand Empire

I usually find these people from Onlinejobs.ph.

This is the website where you can find people from your team easily and at an affordable price.

People from this website are mostly from the Philippines. They are very hardworking and easy to communicate with as they can speak English very well.

Create the job posting, declare the salary and working hours, and wait for someone to apply for your job.

Then, interview them and let them do some simple tests. If they qualify, you can start hiring them to manage your print-on-demand daily workflow.

So for the first step, let’s find 1-2 people for your team. One is the virtual assistant to replace you and another one is the graphic designer.

Skype

Next, I’ll use Skype as a tool to communicate with my team.

“Nahhhh… Skype is not professional. Why don’t you use an advanced collaboration tool like Trello or Basecamp?”

Well, I found that if you set up the daily workflow well, you don’t have to communicate with them much.

I actually send them just 1-2 messages a week.

Skype is enough and it’s free.

Most people also know how to use it too so there is no learning curve like other collaboration tools. You also don’t need to spend your money on these tools as well.

Here is an example of the communication between my team each week:

Me: “These are niches we are going to create products this week. [LIST OF NICHES]”

A: “Okay, these are the quotes for this week. Let’s create designs from these quotes. The size is 3000x3500px. These designs are for white coffee mugs.”

B: “Okay.”

B: [Send the designs]

That’s it. You don’t have to make it complex.

The print-on-demand working process is very simple, and Skype or any chat app is more than enough.

A.I. Quote

Okay, when I assigned the niches for my team to work on, the virtual assistant will start finding the quotes on those niches.

We use the tool called A.I. Quote to find niches for us.

The tool is built using OpenAI, the AI created by Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

It’s an open system we can program to do many useful things, such as write a blog post, develop a chatbot, or even make its own music!

My dev team just used this AI to build our bot, and we’ve given it a decent understanding of the print-on-demand market.

When using the bot, my virtual assistant just has to define the niche, gender, occasion, tone of the message, and creativity level.

Once it has all this info, the bot will come up with some unique messages. Then my virtual assistant can choose the ones that look good.

Here are some examples:

Then my virtual assistant will pass these quotes to my graphic designer to create designs.

Canva

The next tool that my graphic designer uses is Canva.

Canva is a simple graphic designing tool you can use to create nice designs easily.

You should rent this tool and let your graphic designer use it so he or she can produce nice designs for your products very fast.

These are some samples of the designs that my team created. They are just simple text designs that will take less than five minutes to create.

If your graphic designer is familiar with Photoshop, it’s fine too. Let your designer decide which tool he/she wants to use.

Google Sheets

Product title and keywords are the most important key that will determine whether your product will be visible on Amazon or not.

So, I create a product title and keywords template on Google Sheets and share it with my team to use.

This is an example of the template I share with my team.

As you can see, there are some fields that my VA has to insert such as “Receiver,” “Sender,” “Occasion,” and “Gender.”

The product title and keywords are almost complete.

When my VA inserts all these fields, the formula I inserted in this sheet will use these words to complete the product title and keywords automatically.

My virtual assistant doesn’t need to think about the product title and keywords. I like doing it this way because I can make sure that the title and keywords will be created in the way I want.

PODTurbo

When the designs, product titles, and keywords are ready, the next thing to do is to use them to create and upload print-on-demand products.

I taught my team to create and upload products using PODTurbo – which is the print-on-demand automation tool.

I wrote the instructions on what my team had to do and also created the template in Google Sheets.

Right, Google Sheets makes the workflow easier again 🙂

This sheet is different from the sheet that we use to create product titles and keywords.

This sheet will be used to create the CSV file to upload to PODTurbo.

If you don’t know how PODTurbo works, basically, we will upload a CSV file that contains the product info to the system and then upload the designs in a single zip file.

Like this:

CSV File:

Zip File:

Then, PODTurbo will create the product mockup with the product titles and keywords provided in the CSV file.

My VA will just insert some words into this sheet and the CSV file with all product info will be ready for PODTurbo.

Then, my VA will upload this CSV file and image zip file to the system.

PODTurbo will take a while to create the product mockups. Once they are ready, my VA will check the product preview.

If everything is fine, then my VA will press the “Publish” button and the system will schedule the time to publish products automatically.

This process will take 30 minutes to one hour to upload over 1,000 products a week.

PODtomatic

Okay, above are the tools and services that my team and I use daily to grow my print-on-demand business.

Anyway, apart from the work from people, I also use bot to create and list products for me as well.

When I assign my team the work, I mostly assign them to create products in famous niches like family events or holidays.

But there are still many small niches like professions, such as engineering or nurses, and animal breeds, like dog breeds or cat breeds, we can create products for.

Although these niches are not much popular and have less traffic than the famous niche like family, don’t forget that there are a lot fewer competitors in these small niches too.

In fact, most of the winning products I send to the Amazon Warehouse (Amazon FBA) are products in these niches.

Most of them can be sold at any time of the year because they are evergreen niches and 80% of the yearly sales are from these niches.

So, I also use PODtomatic to upload products in these small niches for me.

As I’m the owner :P, I create two PODtomatic accounts for myself and upload 100 products a day to my Amazon account.

Okay, these are all the print-on-demand automation tools and services I have been using to build my own print-on-demand business.

You can see that there are just a few tools needed and my daily workflow is very simple. I rarely have to do anything and my team doesn’t have to spend days and nights working as well.

When you set up the daily workflow well and put some people and technology into it, your print on demand business can grow automatically 🙂

—Bank K.