Hello,
Let me recall the components of my spare-time businesses before we move on.
1. It must be a long-term business.
2. Most tasks must be handled automatically by “technology” or “few people.”
Okay, the first point has now been made. This business model is mainly selling products in big marketplaces: Amazon and Etsy. It’s a long-term business.
So, how can selling products be handled automatically?
If you google the internet, you’ll find that most eCom sellers suggest that you dropship.
That is, buy a product from one seller, and sell it on Amazon at a higher price.
Nope. That’s not what I want.
It’s not a long-term business. It’s not your product, and the seller you got the product from can ask you to stop selling it at any time.
Even if this seller allows you to sell the product, other dropship sellers will be selling the same product as well.
It will end up a price war.
And you’ll have to sell another product.
Again, and again, and again…
But I don’t recommend creating your own physical product and selling it, either.
I don’t want to find or make a product, pack it, and fulfill it by myself.
That’s not the part-time business I’m looking for. It takes too much time.
Setting up a team to pack and ship the product is not a good choice. That will require many more people if I want to scale.
Your side hustle model must be as lean as possible.
That’s why it’s time to apply “technology” to the system.
What I sell in this business model is called Print-on-Demand, or POD.
There are many suppliers who provide products such as t-shirts, coffee mugs, shot glasses, travel mugs, etc.
When there is an order, they print the design on the item and ship it to the customer.
Here’s the Print On Demand (POD) Flow:
Nice, huh? I don’t have to do anything.
All I have to do is create a product in the POD provider’s system (I personally use GearBubble) and use the system to sync the product information to Amazon.
When I get an order, Amazon sends all the order info to GearBubble. GearBubble then produces the product and ships it to my customer.
I don’t need to make the product and ship it by myself.
There are many POD suppliers out there who can make and ship your products to customers.
Gearbubble, Printful, Printify, Teelaunch, etc.
These suppliers are the “technology” that will automatically do the production and fulfillment for us.
Cool, right? All we need to do is create a product on the supplier’s website, upload it to Amazon or Etsy, and then let the supplier do the rest.
The problem is, we still have to spend our time creating and uploading products to Amazon and Etsy.
This requires a lot of time.
We’re still missing the last piece of this business model.
In the next email, I’ll show you the most important part – the tool that will help you automate 95% of the entire process.
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To be continued tomorrow…
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Talk soon, Bank “Automation Marketer” K.
