How I’m Generating Passive Income through Dropshipping T-Shirts on Amazon and Shopify

Today’s post comes from Erik, owner of The Mastermind Within. He is working on building multiple income streams on his way to financial independence. In this post, he will share with you one of his side hustles and how he is generating passive income through dropshipping t-shirts on Amazon and Shopify. I asked him to do a step-by-step guide on how to set-up a dropshipping business, and he did a great job. While this has nothing to do with Real Estate, it certainly pertains to Early Retirement and online income. Enjoy!

You want to get rich and you want to sit on the beach watching the paper bills pile up in your bank account, but you don’t know how to start. Enter t-shirt print on demand businesses.

T-shirt print on demand businesses have been popping up over the past few years and are a good way to generate profits without needing much time or capital. The question is, what exactly are the steps that I need to take to get my t-shirt business set-up and how much effort does it take? How can I be successful as a dropshipper on Amazon and Shopify?

I want to share with you what I’ve been doing over the past few months that has allowed me to generate nearly $1,000 in passive revenue, and will hopefully be producing a few hundred dollars in passive income per month (revenue-expenses) in the coming year. You can see this at my Shopify store: Shirtspice.

In this post, I will give you a high-level overview for creating your t-shirt lifestyle business and after, you will have a good idea of what it takes to become a successful t-shirt business owner.

A High Level Overview for Creating Your T-Shirt Lifestyle Business

At a high level, there are 7 steps for creating your t-shirt business:

Build Your Online Store
- Leverage existing online platforms, such as Shopify, to build out a store with the appropriate shopping cart technology, catalog, and back end reporting capability to create a high powered store for your business.
- It takes less than 2 hours to set-up a Shopify site. Shopify has user friendly themes and high powered shopping cart and payment gateways, but also has good back end technology with reporting, support, and solid up-time.
Get Designs Created
- The beauty of your t-shirt lifestyle business is it is so to go from idea to sell-able product. You never own any inventory – you go from an idea and then make a design and put it on the web. You don’t need physical t-shirts – you can just post these designs on your store and let the print on demand companies do the printing and shipping!
Find a Fulfillment Partner to Print on Demand
- Fulfillment partners will print and ship your sold t-shirts. All you need to do is provide them the design. Think of these fulfillment partners as an extension of your brand – it’s crucial they are reliable and good customer service.
Add Your Designs to Your Store
- Integrate the fulfillment partner with your Shopify site and add designs on your Shopify site. All you need to do is upload your unique design to the fulfillment printer’s site!
- In addition, all variants of color and size are built out in Shopify – no need to duplicate your efforts over 50 different variants!
Market and Drive Traffic
- Connect your product to the right customers. There are two types of traffic: paid and organic Paid traffic, such as Facebook ads, is best – start with $5 and experiment.
- If you are getting sales, ramp up your advertising. If you aren’t getting sales, try something else. Organic traffic, such as social media and search engine results, is less reliable and isn’t recommended to sell lots of items in a short amount of time.
Make Sales and Follow-up
- After a sale, your fulfillment partners will take care of all of the work in the warehouse for you. They will print the t-shirt, ship and pack the t-shirt, and send the tracking information to the customer.
  - There will need to be basic customer service in place, but overall, there won’t be too much work to do once things get cooking. You need to analyze the reports to figure out if your business is profitable, though unlike other e-commerce businesses, you have little risk because you have no inventory.
Scale with more products, designs, and sales
- Once you’ve done steps 1-6, you can continue to post designs and let the print on demand companies do the heavy lifting for you! Scaling your business is as easy as posting more designs and marketing appropriately. The sky is the limit!

Where do you start?

To become a successful dropshipper, you need to find a great platform (this is actually the case with any type of investment, including real estate). Then you should apply the 5 principles of successful print on demand business owners.

Why do we need a great shirt dropshipping platform?

10 years ago, to create an e-commerce store, you would have needed to hire a developer and would have needed to work out all of the kinks of running an e-commerce store. You would have had to create, in-house, the back-end, and front-end of your store. Payment gateways, integrations with other partners, hosting, and shopping carts would need to be created and fully functional. All of this work today would take multiple months, and possibly, multiple years to create.

Nowadays, you are able to sign up and pay for all of these services and features on one platform. This helps entrepreneurs, like yourself, get up and running in hours AND for a fraction of the original cost.

What makes a great shirt dropshipping platform?

Here are the criteria that I use for evaluating e-commerce platforms:

Easy to set-up and operate The shirt dropshipping platform must be able to get my lifestyle business up and running in a few hours and allow me to post my first shirt in minutes after set-up
No coding or technical experience necessary I don’t have time to code up a shopping cart! Just let me sell!
It has to be an E-commerce store out of the box I need a shopping cart, a secure payment gateway, and reporting and analytics for examining sales trends out of the box. This follows from point #2, you don’t have to do any technical work, all of this is taken care of.
Great technical support If there is anything I need, I can chat with a customer service representative and get my issue resolved.
Fully hosted, with 99.9% uptime If your site goes down, you will lose lots of money.
Fulfillment partner integration You need to be able to connect to Teespring to dropship your sold shirts.

Which shirt dropshipping platforms satisfy ALL of these criteria? Enter Shopify.

Why Shopify is the Best Shirt Dropshipping Platform for You

Shopify is the best shirt dropshipping platform for the following reasons:

Easy to set-up and operate It takes me less than an hour to set-up a new Shopify site and start publishing my products.
E-commerce out of the box I can start selling the second I’m done setting up the store. Shopify is partnered with Stripe and Paypal, and has the technology already set up to accept credit cards for your sales. You don’t have to do any technical work – I’ve never opened up the theme code for design or functionality purposes.
Great technical support Shopify has great live chat support Customer support can make customizations to your free themes!
Fully hosted with a 99.9% uptime Your site is hosted on Shopify’s servers
Fulfillment partner integration Shopify has many integrations that matter to us as shirt business owners. Connect to teelaunch and you can start dropshipping shirts instantly!

How does Shopify Compare to Other Platforms?

Shopify is the biggest and best player in the e-commerce platform space. When compared to WooCommerce, Shopify has advantages in hosting and support. With WooCommerce, you need to host the site on your own servers – there’s a lot of risk here if your servers go down!

Comparing Shopify to other hosted platforms is even worse. The integrations which are so crucial to your shirt dropshipping business are not always fully functional on other platforms. In addition, the customer support is typically not as good as Shopify’s customer support.

The worst case scenario is your site goes down and you are sending hundreds of dollars of paid traffic towards your site. You literally have 0 chance of making money in that situation. There is no faster way to get a 0% conversion rate than to send paid traffic to a site which is down.

5 Principles for a Successful T-Shirt Business

The 5 principles of a successful t-shirt business are:

Mindset
- Most important – do you have want it takes to be a successful t-shirt business owner? What’s the right mindset to be in to make a successful t-shirt business?
Design
- People buy t-shirts because they like the design on the front of the shirt, and will be proud to wear that design.
- These designs will typically have a profit margin of $4-8.
Partners
- Platforms and fulfillment companies that print your t-shirts on demand and do all the heavy lifting for you.
Marketing
- You need to match your product with the right customers. Without marketing, you could have the best product but never get a sale. Again, this is true for other businesses.
Operations
- Printing, shipping, tracking and customer service is all outsourced, but you still need to print those checks 😉

Successful T-Shirt Business Principle #1: Mindset

First, being able to focus in on a particular niche that has passionate people in it makes all the difference in the t-shirt business. You must find a niche where people are very proud and passionate about their interest. If they are passionate, they will be willing to share their passion for social media – even better if they are already wearing t-shirts that represent their niche! This can help your designs go viral.

For example, people are very passionate about their jobs – you could sell t-shirts that are job specific to various people and they will be proud to wear their job-related shirt across their chest.

Second, leave all of your assumptions at the door: let data drive all of your decisions. For example, if you are marketing shirts to teachers, don’t assume that only teachers in their 40s would buy your shirt. You MUST test to confirm your hypothesis.

Third, live inside your niche – get into the mind of the niche fans. Figure out exactly what your target audience is. Spend a couple of hours on Pinterest, Instagram, and competitor stores to find themes, colors, logos, and products that can give you a sense of the niche and existing products. No need to reinvent the wheel!

Finally, take action – ideas are not worth much until you actually act on them. Once you have your store set up, and a shareable and wearable t-shirt to market, you can launch. It’s never been easier to sell t-shirts – don’t wait to build your successful lifestyle business.

Successful T-Shirt Business Principle #2: Design

Design quality is essential to a high performing shirt business. Ask yourself: would I be embarrassed if I was wearing this t-shirt? If yes, time to start over with that design. If no, post it and start marketing! Without good designs, you won’t be able to make sales.

The designs need to be stylized enough so that people will buy. You can’t just take any old image off Fiverr and expect people to buy.

The successful t-shirt sales equation is a passionate niche + shareable product = big sales.

Your niche specific t-shirt designs can be created on your own or sourced from a designer. You can find designers on websites such as Upwork. You should look for freelance graphic designers who are talented but are still building their portfolio. These designs will be hungry and will want to pump out high-quality designs for your store. You should ensure though that these designers understand how to design for printing, otherwise they might struggle and your store will struggle as a result.

As you become more experienced, you and your designer will work to produce good designs and you will be pumping out high-quality designs that you like and are excited to sell.

Pricing is key here. Most shirts cost between $8-11 to make, and there is a $4 shipping fee. To achieve a margin of $4-8, you will need to price these shirts at $18-22. We price our shirts at $18.99 and have found success at this level.

Successful T-Shirt Business Principle #3: Partners

There are two types of partners: a website partner and a printing partner. As I mentioned above, Shopify is what we use to run a successful print on demand business.

Shopify: your go-to Website Partner

Shopify is an easy to use platform with a fantastic backend – Shopify will fulfill orders, produce in-depth reports, has highly functional payment gateways for credit cards and Paypal, and has many integrations to the print on demand companies.

Many people ask why not use a free service such as WooCommerce (a WordPress Plug-in). I advise against it because you have to worry about hosting. If you are driving 10s of thousands of people to your WordPress site and your site goes down, you are on the hook for hundreds of dollars of lost revenue from wasted dollars on ads and lost revenue from store browsers. Shopify has 99% uptime and has fast-acting support.

Like I said above, Shopify has great customer support, secure and solid payment gateways, and all the required integrations to get your lifestyle business going.

Selecting a Printing Partner

After signing up on Shopify, you need to connect to a print on demand company through an integration application. I use Teelaunch and also like Threadmeup.

For a printing partner, you need to find someone who is reliable – these printing partners are an extension of your brand. If you pick an unreliable print on demand service, you will damage your brand.

A good printing partner will be reliable, scalable and will have superb customer service.

Successful T-Shirt Business Principle #4: Marketing

The number one goal of marketing is to match the product with the right customer. If you can’t get your product in front of the right people, you can kiss your advertising money down the drain and any dream of that Ferrari goodbye! 🙂

Matching the product with the right customer is marketing 101: if you have dog t-shirts, show the shirts to dog people! But, you need to get into the head of the people buying your shirts. It’s not enough just to target people who like dogs. Creating some sort of avatar for the person you are targeting is key.

For our t-shirt business, we get 90% of traffic from Facebook ads. We also are leveraging Amazon’s wide-ranging and amazing website to help market out t-shirts. While organic reach via fan pages are okay, paid traffic which is targeted is fair superior to driving traffic and getting sales. We are able to target such specific niches of people because Facebook has so much information on people from their liking, commenting, sharing, and other behavior. Remember the winning combination: passionate people + a shareable product = big sales.

Successful T-Shirt Business Principle #5: Operations

Shopify and the print on demand platforms will take care of the printing, shipping, and tracking – all things that are incredibly time intensive for a t-shirt design business. The benefits are your business is low risk and doesn’t need to worry about these things.

On the back side of things, you will still need to run reports to determine profitability, analyze the markets and current trends, and identify any new niches to get into. You have the time and ability to think big picture since all of the operations are handled by the website platform and print on demand platform.

Does this actually work?

As I mentioned above, this actually works and is profitable. Once we put up our designs, we don’t have to do any work except for some customer service here and there, and some marketing if we think one shirt is a good one.
As shown above in the first section, my business has made nearly $1,000 in revenue in 3 months, and hopefully will make a few more thousand in revenue in the coming holiday season. I’m very excited to see where this experiment goes and hopefully, this will be a passive income stream for me and my business partner going forward.

We price the majority of our shirts at $18.99. This provides a profit margin of $4-6 per shirt. On the sales below, we have made about $300 in 3 months. While this isn’t fantastic and I’m not going to be able to leave my 9 to 5, I’m still confident that we can grow this and make this into a $1,000 a month income stream.

Conclusion

By following these 5 principles, you will be on your way to building a successful t-shirt empire and a profitable lifestyle business.

The most important are platform, mindset, and marketing – make sure you have the right mindset and set-up, and make sure you are getting your designs in front of the right customers – match your design with the right customer and you’ll be successful.

There are a number of steps to do to start a t-shirt business, but none of these are difficult. I wish you the best of luck in your side hustles and hope that you enjoyed this post!

Erik

Erik is a blogger over at The Mastermind Within where he shares his thoughts and actionable advice about self-improvement, entrepreneurship, and personal finance. He is interested in financial independence and is working to build up multiple income streams in small business, real estate, and the general markets. Check out his content at The Mastermind Within.