Drop Shipping – No Stock? No problem…

Confused? We get it. It doesn’t seem to make sense how you can set up a printed merch business and not keep any stock or do any of the printing yourself.

But it is possible.

Not only is it possible; it happens all the time. Custom printed and personalised merchandise is often printed, packed, and sent by a third party.

Talented illustrators, artists and designers have been widening their offering for years by adding their designs to products. How often do we see fun mug designs, branded totes and hoodies or packs of cards? In many cases, the designers don’t have the equipment to print themselves and that is where a business like ours can really help.

We print all day, every day so we have all the kit and all the stock and all the warehouse space. We also have relationships with couriers. In essence, the only thing we don’t have are our own designs to sell and that is where we can become a team with those who do.

We can offer several different levels of drop-shipping and it depends on your own set up and the volume of print required. It’s worth noting that all of our orders are shipped white label so your customers wouldn’t know that we were your print fulfiller.

At a basic level orders can be placed on our website “on-demand” whenever an item is purchased from a designer’s website, in person or on social media marketplaces or affiliate sites such as eBay, Amazon or Etsy. This is best for personalised items or for testing the popularity of an item. It’s also the easiest and least time-consuming way to start off a drop-shipping business.

A second option is to place an order for a large quantity of items; an example would be a hoodie design in several different sizes. This is a great option when you know you have a best seller and space to hold stock. This works whether you have a web presence or not. If you don’t have a website, we can help with our partners VB Media who can set you up with a white label version of our own site – yes really…your very own version of Tradeprint but in your own branding.

Further to this, you may already have a burgeoning online business of custom printed items that are moving faster than you had ever imagined – we hope this is true for you, dear reader. In this case, we can help you with an API integration or via our Order Desk integration. In this instance, your orders would come through to us and we would print, pack, and send on your behalf, all white labelled so no one would know we were your fulfiller.