Money Selling T-Shirts From Your Site

[Jason]

This seems like something trendy and profitable. Who has thought about it? Anyway, I heard about this from site by Lisa Irby, a popular internet guru who was into just website coaching, but then got into this stuff.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I never thought to sell merchandise alongside my site. This does remind me of the time when my 18 year old self thought I could revive Teen Titans and work on a new season, so I got people to start a shop that would add our logo which was "TeamRIA" (Team Ravenisawesome which was my old username) to help profit the project. Obviously this didn't go anywhere, and I don't even think anyone bought any of the merchandise lol. I would have most likely got in trouble by DC and Warner Bros even.

 

[Cam]

FP's homepage was attached to Shopify for a year or two, and we had a shop where you could purchase FP apparel. We had t-shirts, mugs, phone cases, etc. It's fun. We'll probably implement something like that within XenForo at some point.

 

[Jason]

It's not nothing I would want to do, but it would be cool to sell merchandise like shirts which are related to your own website

 

[Al]

Something like this?

 

[Joeychgo]

If you have enough membership that buys a t shirt, you can make good money. But, don't use the services... Use a screen printer.

What I do is this.

Come up with a design
Do a pre-sale directly to the members so you get the right size count. You can do this with paypal.
Order the from the screen printer - usually a minimum of 100 shirts to get decent pricing. More shirts=better price per shirt.
Printer ships all the shirts to you
You package up each individual order. Including postage labels from someone like stamps.com. Me, my wife, one of her friends and a few bottles of wine gets this done in an evening.

It takes a little work but you can make about $15 a shirt in profit if you do it right. So, 300 shirts=$4500 profit

If you intend to do this multiple times, there is equipment that can make it easier, like a thermal printer to print the labels, scale for postage weight, etc.

 

[cdub]

I did this for my first site. Sent a bunch out but still had shirts leftover that I gave to goodwill. Lol.

 

[Arantor]

I’ve definitely seen sites that do merch. One of the bigger roleplays I can think of has a store whereby you can buy merch that’s about the forum content, pin badges, stickers, that sort of thing.

Cheap enough to produce, cheap enough to sell at a modest profit to put the donations back into running the site (by their own admission, they treat it as a donation reward rather than a strict business transaction even if for many it is)

 

[JoshB]

Would love to have a merch store but the first hurdle would be if there was enough of interest for people to buy said merch in an amount that helps offset any costs. I use an online shop system that has integrations with live streaming platforms and it does have a robust membership system as well.

The key thing though is I would focus on the content for as long as I can before thinking about merch.

 

[cdub]

I built a cafe press page for my site as they do one offs as needed when people order and I think so far I've been the only customer 🤣

 

[Nomad]

If you want to do this the best way is by integrating platforms like Printify or Printful. You upload the designs on these platforms and customize on the products of your choice and then push the product on your website for selling. Once the product is sold, you pay manufacturing cost to your service provider and they will ship the product.

 

[Shortie]

I have created my own merch but due to not creating video game content as much as I used to, I have not been promoting it as much.

You can see my merch here https://shortiegamez-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp/collections/all

 

[Ravenfreak]

I did this for my first site. Sent a bunch out but still had shirts leftover that I gave to goodwill. Lol.

Not going to lie, if I ever seen a shirt with a website's URL printed on it at Goodwill I would buy it even if it couldn't fit me lol. I would even check out the website too! Maybe I should make some t-shirts with Thee Zone's logo and URL on it... Maybe someone would see the shirts in Goodwill and think to check out my website. xD

 

[Nomad]

I think merch with your website name, logo, and url will work only when you have committed users on your site. A random visitor might not buy these products. But if you have some cool designs that are not in any way related to your website, people might consider to buy it.