Selling Merch Online

For teams who sell merch, like tshirts, online what platform do you use? My team has designed some merch, like meme shirts etc, they want to put in an online store but I I don’t know where to begin. Thanks!

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From an eCommerce perspective, your options are either to hold inventory and handle fulfullment yourself (shipping to customers), create inventory and hand it off to a 3rd party fulfillment provider, or use a company that handles printing on demand covers fulfillment. In terms of effort, that third option is probably what you want. Check out TeeSpring, SpreadShirt, and Bonfire.

If you’re only trying to sell to your local community, you can also consider taking preorders and doing 1 run of printing at a local shop.

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Keep in mind there are tax consequences for selling merchandise. More and more the IRS is asking payment processors (I.E paypal) to report transactions. If you are a non-profit, make sure you follow the rules so you stay non-profit. If you are using an individuals tax ID (SSN) its reportable income. Small numbers often get ignored. But the IRS does follow up on these things.

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Depending on the designs I’ve used LogoSportswear for some of my sweatshirts and hats. You can submit artwork (screen printing was low cost or free, there is a fee for converting artwork into embroidery for hats) and they will make your items on demand instead of bulk ordering tons of items and storing/shipping them later. You can pick up to 50 different items with the same artwork and have it in a webstore. Your team can choose to take a 15% commission on items sold or offer a 15% discount to your customers.

The issue is it sounds like you have a variety of designs, not one design being replicated onto a variety of items. So it would work for your main team shirts and apparel but the “Meme” shirts would need a different solution. The upside is for the sales they handle all CC processing, shipping, returns, etc and you just get a commission check every so often that you report like income for the team.

Team 4414 Merch – Team 4414 | HighTide | Merch is built on Shopify. Amazing backend, really low maintenance. They have a nonprofit plan which cuts the cost some.

We source all our stuff locally and ship it out a few days a week from the shop. Much better margins than the print on demand services and let’s us sell the stuff affordably AND make it worth our time.

If viewing this as a fundraising effort should take some time to evaluate the effort per reward vs other approaches, it’s definitely a non trivial amount of work and have to deal with a handful of lost packages, mistakes etc as you would with any e-commerce business.

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