Selling t-shirts and merchandise online

The cool thing about the sites you mention is you only have to design them once and the site does the rest. Yes they only pay you low comissions but it's passive income.

The site is also doing all the marketing and putting your designs in front of lots of targeted traffic. This would take a lot of time, effort and money to do on your own.

Also check out Amazon Merch https://merch.amazon.com

I do know someone who makes decent money selling T shirts but they do everything themselves; silk screen and DTG printing. They also do lots of Comic Cons, so they work hard.

Do a search for forums and Facebook groups in the T shirt industry to learn the pros and cons of different systems.
Good luck

Sites like Zazzle are free so it's worth creating some designs, opening a store and trying to sell them. You've nothing to lose financially.

It is possible to make money, but, as with any business, it will take time. How much you make could vary greatly though. You could sell one item and make £1 in a year or you could sell hundreds of an item and make £5 a time.

For each item you get a percentage of the sale. With Zazzle you can decide on a percentage, but the higher the percentage the higher the cost to the customer. You have to work out what is the right percentage for what a customer will be willing to pay and an amount you will be happy with. They also have a wide range of items. Other sites will work differently and have different products so you have to look at each and decide which you prefer.

It's also not as simple as just sticking a design on things. Obviously, you have to create the design first (and it needs to be a high quality image of the correct size so it'll print well). After that you have to write a description and fill in details for your product. You need to upload the image and make sure it all looks fine. After that you need to market the store/items.

For printing items and selling them yourself, there's even more work, but potentially more money to be made as you set the prices and get all the profit. However, you need to find a company to print everything, find somewhere to sell them (e.g. own site, which will cost money) and still create the designs, write descriptions, market it all etc.

For getting them printed, it can be costly. The more you buy the cheaper it is per item, but that is only for one design. You may get a design printed for, as an example, £1 a t-shirt, but only if you buy 2000. If you only wanted 100 they may be £3 each. If you have 10 designs you want to sell it's going to be costly and that's only to get 1 type of t-shirt.

Plus, you also need to remember it is a business (whether using a site or selling yourself) so you do need to be registered as self employed and be declaring it.

As soolin says, you do also need to be very careful about copyright. Never used a copyrighted image or character, even if you've re-created it yourself. This not only includes the obvious like Disney characters, but any image at all. Just because it is online does not mean you can use it. Make sure all designs and images used are yours or you do risk legal action being taken.

Overall, it is possible to make money, but it does take time and effort.

I remember it was mentioned in the MSE weekly email a while back and was wondering if anyone had had a try?