T-Shirt Business Automation

All beginnings are difficult

You’re new to the T-shirt business or you’ve only done it on the side and you’re wondering how to make print on demand one of your mainstays. Inevitably, you have to come to grips with the terms outsourcing and automation. In this article we will take a closer look at the topic of automation and guide you on your way to automated uploading.

Mindset

“What? Mindset? I thought this article was about automation?”
Yes, however, first we need to talk about your mindset on the subject. There are a few things you should keep in mind and think about:

Get used to upload manually

Before reaching for an automation tool, like LazyMerch, you should definitely know what it even means to manually upload designs and listings to POD platforms on a regular basis. It will help you understand what inputs are required and what things you can set on your desired print on demand site. In the tool you will later notice and know which values you have to enter in LazyMerch which makes it a lot easier for you to get started. In case of need there is always our helpdesk and the contact to our support.
Another reason why you should deal with manual uploading is that you will better recognize and appreciate the performance of such an upload tool. You will get a feeling for how much time and how many repetitive clicks such a tool saves you when uploading. So you can use the time for more important things while LazyMerch takes care of your uploads.

Think like a POD provider

Try to put yourself in the role of a merchant like RedBubble, Spreadshirt or Merch By Amazon. How do you want your users to behave so that you can offer good quality to your customers and thus generate revenue? Do you want the uploading users to offer dozens of scaled variants of the same design on your marketplace or would you rather want them to consciously contribute to your offer diversification?
We at LazyMerch also love automation but it is also important to us to make clear to each of our users that a conscious use of the tool is important. Understandably, you want to get countless designs out to a wide audience as quickly as possible but that doesn’t have to be with unnecessary and thoughtless scaling. If you disregard content policies of POD providers or consistently deliver questionably scaled designs, you could lose your accounts on those platforms. Please do yourself a favor and take a moment to think about how you want to handle the newly acquired superpower of automatic uploading.

Automation

Get started

When getting started with an automation tool like LazyMerch, you should first familiarize yourself with the user interface. Especially LazyMerch contains countless functions, a dashboard with news and statistics as well as an own trademark checker. It helps if you get acquainted with it in advance and get a feeling for how you can use the tool as efficiently as possible for your own workflows.

Preparation

Once you’ve had some exposure to the tool, it’s now a matter of preparing for the uploads. Usually this means importing the designs and listings or creating them in LazyMerch. In the installation folder of LazyMerch there is an Excel folder where you can find all table templates for the respective platforms. If you want to use your own tables or already use your own tables to manage your designs and listings, you can also use our Custom Excel Import feature. With this you can import your data into the tool and don’t have to use our suggested templates.

Check your entries

If you have successfully imported your designs and listings into the tool or created them directly in LazyMerch, it is now recommended to take a look at them. LazyMerch shows you with various warnings and color signals, which are based on the traffic light system, whether your entry is ready for upload or not. You can find more information here.
After you have noticed all warnings and corrected all possible input errors, you are ready to upload.

Automatic upload

There is little to say about the upload itself. Start the upload, sit back and save time. That’s it.

Final word

We hope that with this small article we could give you an insight into the automation of the t-shirt business and help you with your decision, whether to automate or not. If you have any questions or other concerns, please feel free to contact us on our Discord channel and the support. We wish you all the best for your journey with Print on Demand and invite you to a free trial of our tool.