Start Your Own Custom Product Printing Business with LiveArt. Part One.

We frequently work with both startups that normally consist of an individual designer, who thrive to get their designs online, and mature companies that know what they want in order to streamline online design ordering process and boost their online design sales. We hear different stories and feel like it would be useful to share our view on what we consider a good preparation for starting your own custom product design website or adding online designer to existing website. Since the topic is quite huge to cover up in one post, we’ll split it in couple of stories.

Starting online presence for own printable business involves couple of easy yet important steps. As for any project, planning is important for launching a successful online design website where people will be able to design your product online and finalize their purchase. Accurate planning is also important to spend your budget most efficiently to get faster ROI.

First things off, decide on which budget you have in your disposal for building online presence. This will hugely affect all further steps on whether you will be planning a quick project to jump into online design market, or build a solid solution for constant operation.

One important note here is that in trying to accomplish the same as online printing market leaders do does not mean you will be able to achieve the same with a common budget. Leading the market, offering unique product content, usable online designer is always expensive! We frequently have requests like "do it same as zazzleink.com, but I have just $XXX to spent". Remember, market leaders have involved years of work, large teams to accomplish like what they have now and constant investments for support and maintenance.

Depending on the budget, you can now look for a web development company to build you a website, build website yourself or simply rent a common template from online website builders like wix.com. What we might say here - the more you spend here, the more unique you will be and the more customers you’ll have who’ll like your uniqueness. At the same time you may start to care about SEO and unique selling points you will offer to your future customers.

Uniqueness is something you would care about since there are numerous ready-made website templates ready to be sold for a budget less than a $100. Unless you are really tshirt design genius, consider your online presence to be different than those of your competitors.

In the next part we’ll tell more about adding online product designer to your website and how to plan support and maintenance of your online design website.