In one month on the popular POD site TeePublic I have begun forming a few opinions on the site and figured I'd share my very early thoughts about using them to list my designs.
First off, TeePublic makes it very easy to upload your designs and prepare them to list offering both single and multiple upload modes. I particularly like the multiple file upload option allowing you to work on several files at a time. Their listing interface also make it easy to add keywords for your design making suggestions based off of the initial keywords you select.
Another nice advantage revolves around how TeePublic adds your design to all their product offerings. Unlike Red Bubble, which usually has me making adjustments to my design for every single product, TeePublic seems to handle this task with ease making the submission process a whole lot quicker and easier. As for those product offerings, the have a few but when again comparing to their parent company, Red Bubble, they come up a bit short.
As for the minuses beside the product offerings, TeePublic makes it frustratingly difficult to get traffic from their millions of visitors. As of the writing of this post I am still not listed on the site search function meaning that if someone doesn't know how to find you directly, you will never be found. This is a common complaint with TeePublic with scores of how to videos and posts supposedly telling you what you need to do to get listed. They say you need to add a header and an icon for your store, add 10-15 designs, etc. and then just shoot them an email.
Well I have had a storefront setup as suggested from day one and I currently have over 80 designs and still cannot get listed on the site search. When contacting TeePublic I get the standard boilerplate response telling me that not all designers get listed on the site search and that I should utilize paid and other options to drive traffic to my store.
Now putting aside for a moment that when I sell something they profit as well, why would I send paid traffic to their site when I could setup my own site instead and send them there? Also why would I pay for visitors to my product pages on TeePublic when they advertise other designers designs on MY products page making it very easy to see how my paid traffic could convert for other designers!
Again, this is after only a very short period but I am having a harder time being able to justify spending much more of my time adding designs to TeePublic or to be honest on T-Shirts in general. I am certainly not going to shut it down but for now I think my efforts would be better served going in a different direction. More on that in a future post.