Print-on-Demand Challenges: How to Overcome Them and Build a Thriving Business

Sounds like a dream, but of course, as with any business — it comes with its own challenges. And you might have faced just a few of these in the past. 

Things like: 

• Monitoring and ensuring quality

• Automating the value chain

• Setting yourself apart from the competition

• Achieving lucrative profit margins

• Having control over shipping times

• Expanding your product range

It isn’t always easy — but when you've got it running the way you want it to, it sure is rewarding. 

In this article, we're going to walk you through how you can overcome some of these common challenges. As well as introduce you to tools and tricks that will help you automate and improve your business — without loading more work onto your desk in the long run. Let's dive in.

Why and how to automate the print-on-demand design process

A great way to ensure you can monitor quality, automate your business, set yourself apart from the competition, and increase profit margins is to automate the design process.

There are two ways you can go about it:

1. Your customers send you the design, and you use tools in the background to automate the design process. A lot of Etsy shop owners deliver their products like this:

It's a great way to operate, especially at the beginning of your print-on-demand business. The quicker you deliver, the higher your profit margin and probably the happier your customers are.

2. You build an interface that allows the customer to design the product themselves. This option takes a lot more time and effort.

Either way, we recommend investing the time to map out your workflow with a tool like Miro, define every step of your process, and find tools to automate these steps. 

To give you an idea of what automating a workflow step can look like, we're going to walk you through how to automate image background removal below — something most print-on-demand design processes need.

To do this, you can leverage a tool/ API called remove.bg; here's how.

What is remove.bg?

remove.bg is a photo background removal tool that removes any background of an image with precision in just a few seconds. The smart AI algorithm behind it identifies the foreground and background in no time. At the same time, the integrated Erase/Restore feature allows you to make custom adjustments if needed in just a few clicks.

It functions as a web app, desktop app, or API. So, no matter if you're looking to use it behind the scenes or build it into a front-facing design tool for your customers — it can be done.

Removing backgrounds can be time-consuming. Perhaps you and your team are doing this manually, and using remove.bg could save you a ton of time. Alternatively, you can allow users to upload an image and then remove its background with the remove.bg technology, and get it printed onto your print-on-demand items of choice.

A neat feature that's bound to set you apart from competitors and save you a ton of time. But there are also plenty of other ways you can use it in your business. Below, you'll find a full breakdown of the benefits you can expect.

Benefits of using remove.bg in your print-on-demand business

Using remove.bg for your print-on-demand business has a ton of benefits, including:

• Faster turnaround times: by integrating a tool that gives you or your users a chance to remove the background of images with precision automatically, you can hugely decrease the need for manual work and/or labor costs of your team. Especially when it comes to checking/reworking designs.

• Improve quality & consistency: perhaps you're already using or have integrated a background remover tool into your system, but you're not happy with the results, nor are your customers. With remove.bg you can achieve consistent, clean, professional background results.

• Add an additional feature for your customers & improve the UX: adding a background removal tool gives your customers even more freedom to be creative and customize their order — without having to code or build anything yourself. Simply integrate the API into your existing tech stack, and you're all set.

• Mockups: you can also use it to create professional-looking mockups by removing backgrounds from images of your products. This makes it easier to place designs on various products and show customers what the final product will look like.

• Enhancing marketing materials: apart from integrating remove.bg for your customers — you can also use it within your business to create unique and engaging content and streamline your marketing material workflow. For example, you can use it to quickly remove backgrounds from images you want to use in social media posts, ads, emails, and other marketing materials. This allows you to create eye-catching content with clean, on-brand visuals.

• Automate tasks: if your customers don't design their print-on-demand products themselves, you do it based on images/designs, and you can still automate the process in the background. With remove.bg, you can bulk remove the background of images for a collection, saving you a ton of time and reducing the need for manual editing. This is particularly great if you have a large catalog of products.

• Batch processing: with remove.bg, you can batch process a ton of images at the same time; it's built to handle a lot of images.

To explore a real-life example of how a company successfully implemented remove.bg's background removal technology, check out this success story.

Now that you have plenty of reasons to integrate remove.bg into your print-on-demand, let's show you how to get started.

Step-by-step guide to using remove.bg

Before you integrate the entire API into your business, you can test out the web app and see what it can do for your print-on-demand business.

Simply go ahead and:

• Visit remove.bg.

  

• Upload an image or design that you or your customers typically use to create a product design — by dragging it onto the platform. We're going to use this cat image as an example:

  

This would be a great example of a print-on-demand online shop selling customized pet merchandise, such as socks with a picture of your cat all over them.

• Once you've dragged and dropped your image onto remove.bg you can see it work its magic in seconds; the image or design will appear without the background. Like this:

  

• Usually, the results should be great from the get-go, but if it’s not clear, we also want to remove the cat’s body  (not just the background). You can make adjustments by selecting > Erase/Restore.

  

  

This is what we ended up with:

• Once you're happy, click on > Done > Download, and the image will download to your computer.

• If you want to download in HD (which is definitely the recommended quality for printing), go ahead and select > Download HD. You will need to sign up for an account and purchase credits to download HD images. Prices start at €0.07/  image, depending on how many credits you purchase.

• You can now use the image further — upload it to your print-on-demand vendor to see what it would look like, or continue using it in other design tools like Photoshop if you like.

• Et voilà! That's it. This way, you can at least get an idea of what working with remove.bg and integrating it into your workflow can look like.

How to optimize images for printing on demand after background removal

To ensure that your images are the best possible quality for print when using remove.bg we recommend: 

• Uploading high-quality images of at least 150 DPI

• Upload a PNG with a transparent background

If you plan on integrating the remove.bg API into your tech stack, you can give your users these restrictions to ensure the print-on-demand products are high quality.

Tools for print on demand: automating background removal

Automating processes with tools like remove.bg can be an incredibly powerful way to automate your business and raise your profit margins.

While removing backgrounds is probably only one step of your design process, it can take away tons of manual work. You can integrate remove.bg into your business by using the following:

• remove.bg web app (testing results)

• remove.bg desktop app (batch processing)

• remove.bg API (batch processing & integrating the tech into your design interface)

• remove.bg Command Line (automation on your desktop)

• remove.bg design & photo plugins so you can use it in and with other tools like Photoshop

Also, check out the remove.bg automation page, where you can find preset Zapier and Make automations — so you can connect it to your other tools.

Ultimately, overcoming the hurdles of the print-on-demand business requires a combination of smart automation, careful process mapping, and continuous optimization.

Convinced you'd like to integrate background removal automation into your print-on-demand business? Need a ton of images processed? Contact the remove.bg team to talk about your needs and how you can benefit from enterprise plan prices.