Quick Guide to No Inventory Drop Ship Sales For Musicians?

For all of us looking for the best ways to earn from our musical endeavors Drop Ship Sales is a strategy we should consider. But What is Drop Shipping and what can Drop-Ship Sales do for musicians?

Drop Shipping is a print on demand merchandise fulfillment process where in a third party product provider prints and ships the products purchased on your website. Your website collects the money and you are billed the cost.

Recently I have been in the process of setting this all up for my own music project. I set up my music site using WordPress and with the WOO Commerce plug-in I built my website’s store. After that I did a search for the beset recommended drop ship specialist and made an account. After doing that I integrated into my own website, with little to no difficultly. I decided it could be helpful to others to write an article about a few of the important takeaways. I hope it’s useful to you.

The Major Benefit of Drop Shipping For Musical Artists

What makes this great is that it puts you into a game. And you get into that game at a level that would otherwise have been entirely inaccessible without a budget. The possibilities of what can be done with drop shipping is exceptional. In fact what you can do now is something that used to be exclusive to fully funded artists.

All of this implies that you do have your own website and you do have it set up. Your website can be a great place for you to sell merchandise and your music. For more about making money with your music on your website we have a great guide. Check it out!

Opportunity Cost

What really makes drop-ship sales for musicians a great opportunity is the cost. Think about it… With a drop ship store, the number of designs and options are unlimited. The only limit you do have is the extent of your imagination.

You can create great merchandise for any event or milestone you want to promote. I’m fully on board with creating fresh T-shirt designs for each new song. This can make product placement in your promotional videos a strategic necessity.

Graphics And Merch for Each New Single

I would use the title of the song or the big hook phrasing as a textual design element. Couple that with some interesting graphic and feature it on the website. All of that going hand and hand with a brand new single and music video. You can do something like this because you have no inventory to keep. There is no need to bulk order anything in advance.

What’s more, it allows you to fill your store with a lot of interesting products. That goes along way in your overall presentation to your audience. You may be able to make your website look indistinguishable from that of the well funded artists on big labels.

Finally, Since you’re not obligated to moving stacks of inventory you’ll be free to experiment and see what ideas work for your audience.

What Goes Into Setting Up Drop Shipping

Set Up An Account With A Drop Shipping Partner.
Create A Few Designs.
Configure Your Drop Ship Partners interface with your store. (easier than it sounds)
Select Your Products.
Set Your Prices.
Promote Your Website’s Store.
Don’t Worry About The Shipping, Ever!

Choosing Your Drop Ship Partners

I decided on a drop-ship sales partner that would be good for musicians after watching hours of YouTube videos discussing the topic. I made an account with a company called Printful. While I’m not an affiliate partner with Printful, I still think it’s a service worth considering.

It is free to make an account with Printful. Since they only get money when you do, they are incentivized to make it convenient and intuitive.

In addition to all of the benefits with inventory and shipment logistics, Printful has graphic design tools and templates to help you dream up your designs easily. What’s especially cool is their built in “mock up” tool that superimposes your colors and graphics onto models wearing the particular articles of clothing that you have chosen to sell on your site.

Effectively what you do is, Make your design, position it on to a t-shirt, and select a model. Then suddenly a professional photograph of a model wearing your newly minted design is rendered and displayed on your screen. You’re left standing with your shoes knocked off thinking “How cool is that!!!”

With world wide distribution centers, Printful is equipped to move your goods to customers anywhere in the world, in a timely and cost effective manner.

This is a photo from my store to give you an idea.

Design

If you are not really into attempting your own graphic design for fear it will result in products as ugly as mine;) You can always seek help from a professional designer. If you haven’t got the spare cash for some local expert you may stand to gain from having a look on Fiverr. I am not an affiliate for them either, but it seems to me that you can find cheap graphics help there.

If you do decide to try for yourself there are some other sites that have graphic design tools and templates available for you to use to create your T-Shirts designs. Once you have created something cool you can download the file to computer and when your ready, log back into your Drop Shippers Website and upload the graphic into their system, place it on the garment you have chosen and Voilà.

Here is a link to two, neither of which pay me money.

These are two great tools, I have a paid for an account with Placeit to try for the year and so far it seems of value, but we’ll see with time. If you do want to try it for yourself there are templates that are available for free so you won’t have to purchase a subscription to get started.

How About Drop Shipping Printed On Demand CDs or Vinyl

Printful which I recommended before doesn’t have music delivery formats on offer in their product catalog. I haven’t finished the mix on this new album yet so I haven’t completed this particularly thread yet. But I have done some research in advance of the step and I am happy to share that with you.

There are companies that do this and how great is that. Now you can have the experience of pressing your music on Vinyl for yourself and you can offer that Vinyl and those CD’s on your site to your fans in addition to the digital downloads you already have on offer. What’s best is while they cost you a bit more per Unit you’re not in it for the cost of a bulk order and you are not responsible for shipping.

Here is one example of a company doing that work, again I haven’t any monetary affiliation with them and as I haven’t used their services I can not review their business. However I wanted to offer the link to Artglider to you as a starting point to help with dreaming up all the potentials that a service like this presents.

All of this revolves around the relationship between musicians and entrepreneurship. If you are beginning to see that for yourself; then you are on the right track. We have an informative article about how to embrace entrepreneurship as a musician. You should read it. Reinforce you incredible knowledge here!

In Close

All of these drop-ship sales tools are so very liberating for an independent musicians as it frees them to be able to explore their own potential without any requirement of financial assistance from a label. It’s pretty Great.