It has finally happened. I have officially sold my soul! You can buy pieces of it at my new webshop.
Yes, this article is my “marketing plug” for the new web store. Check it out. Maybe buy something you like, or not, I don’t know.
I’m not going to pretend I’m selling amazing merchandise that you absolutely need. I’m not going to use psychological tricks to get you to buy stuff you don’t need. I already sold my soul by even creating a full-fledged online store—I just can’t sell it even more. Thus, the rest of this article will be interesting backstory behind why and how this came to be!
There once was a blog
I put the webshop on my oldest domain (“nietdathetuitmaakt.nl”), which is that of my Dutch blog. The blog that was superseded (more than a year ago) by this website, when I switched to writing English almost 100% of the time. And yes, that means the webshop is predominantly Dutch at the moment. And Google still can’t figure out if it’s a webshop or a blog at the moment, but that will sort itself out soon.
Why?
Well, let me take you back to about two years ago. I was already talking about my lack of income and how, despite my productivity and output, I struggled to get the money I needed to survive.
In my updates, I briefly mentioned the possibility of a webshop. I’d be able to stay an independent creative while actually monetizing what I do. I’d be able to build on my online presence and experience building/running websites, and turn the thousands of designs/illustrations/stories/ideas I already created into something “sellable”.
But there were problems. There were gaps in my knowledge, as I had obviously never run any commercial enterprise, let alone an entire online store. I was too disgusted by money and the systems around commerce to really pursue the idea.
Over time, however, my skills and experience grew, which took away most of the roadblocks. I still despise having to commercialize what I do, but, well, the need slowly became too high to ignore.
And so, by the end of last year (2024), I made a small plan. If I were to launch a webshop in 2025, how would I do it? Nothing major. Just a single sheet with scribbles in the notebook next to my computer. (The same notebook that contains my entire planning for the next two years … on 2 A4 sheets, handwritten :p)
Well, you know me. Once I have even the semblance of a plan, the seed of “what if … ?”, I just do it immediately.
Leading up to New Year’s Eve, a few things became clear to me.
- Most of what I can sell are digital goods. PDFs with my games, with escape rooms, all the other good stuff I made.
- Where the real profits are, however, and the real support from existing systems, are physical goods. Aka merchandise.
There once was a plan
Both worlds were completely foreign to me. And thus the plan was hatched,
- I would repurpose my old blog to become a webshop immediately. This webshop would only do merchandise, using the existing (free) systems that I know and understand (… after some research perhaps)
- As I play around and learn using that website, I build the “actual” (or just “bigger”) webshop behind the scenes. That one will be international, sell both digital and physical goods, and launch later.
And so it happened!
- In the first week of January, I completely erased the old blog.
- Then I put the most common (free) webshop system available into that WordPress installation (which is WooCommerce).
- Then I stumbled around in the dark, discovering the thousands of little things to set up, check, register, connect, and more.
- Until everything worked, I got a handle on things, and the webshop launched at the end of the following week.
It launched with ~15 products. It has grown to ~75 products already since then, and those original products are mostly … gone. Because I realized better ways to create them, or wanted to create a better design, or something in that vein.
The entire idea was to make this a playground. Or, rather, a testing ground. A guinea pig webshop.
In the first week or so, I
- Tried 5 different “merchandise platforms”. (You can use them at the same time, but to keep things from becoming a mess, I knew I wanted to try them all and then settle on only 1 or 2.)
- Hastily dug into the source code of my default theme and system several times to add functionality I realized I really needed.
- Completely revamped the structure behind the scenes several times. (From dynamic shipping, to free shipping, to free shipping above a certain amount, to only shipping within zones close to Netherlands, etcetera.)
- Added and removed those initial ~15 products, as I figured out the best way to input new designs and products.
It was a mess. Things changed drastically seemingly every hour. I want to apologize to anyone who visited the webshop two days in a row (at the start of January) and was wildly confused about things disappearing and changing descriptions and whatnot.
But that’s the idea!
Doing and experimenting = learning
Within a week or two, I learned so much about running a webshop. I tried lots of different systems and approaches, experienced the upsides and downsides of each, and steered towards a pretty simple and streamlined system. Far from perfect, of course. Still learning a lot. But things are mostly automated, minimalist, secure, and well-documented both at the front and the back of that webshop.
I learned so much about pricing, finances, online payment providers, etcetera. If you add 50+ products in 2 weeks, while being scared of accidentally throwing away money, you’re going to be trying lots of different pricing schemes and checking all the fees and values multiple times. I can basically calculate profit margins, transaction fees and potential hidden fees with my eyes closed now. I am also verified and connected with the right payment systems now, which means that future webshop of mine should only take one step—which I’m already familiar with—to make fully functional.
I learned so much about merchandise and marketing. As usual, I had no plan. I tried to tell myself “just make T-shirts, ignore everything else, or it will become a mess” But that’s just not how my brain works. And, in general, that’s not how we actually learn most quickly and efficiently.
And so I made designs for EVERYTHING on those 5 different platforms. Clothes, mugs, slippers, stickers, hats, plush toys, whatever seemed sensible for the “branding” I was going for. I purposely tried to not keep making the same types of designs multiple times in a row. Different colors, different product, different size, different fonts—experiment!.
I learned all the right sizes for things. I learned all the weird gotchas that they don’t tell you about beforehand. Again, I changed my approach (document settings, file type, color profile, etcetera) several times as I discovered new mistakes I was making along the way.
How does merchandise actually sell?
Most of all, however, I am slowly learning how to actually make things people could sensibly want to buy.
At first, my ideas for merchandise were basically built on jokes. I could come up with a few funny puns or references I could put on a shirt. That’s like … the first thing anyone thinks of when it comes to merchandise, I guess. Putting a funny though you had onto a shirt.
This can be fine. And for some jokes—if they look good and are quite interesting—this absolutely works.
For the most part, however … this isn’t what people buy, right? :p
People buy stuff that looks good on/with them and shows their identity.
They either want a T-shirt that proudly proclaims their favorite band/music/art style OR a T-shirt that just looks cool, or pretty, or sexy.
Hastily adding some jokes or interesting lines onto clothes is not that.
And so, as I made those first ~75 products, I quickly learned how to make more sellable stuff. My designs quickly fell into TWO distinct categories.
CATEGORY 1) Find something that could be recognizable or fit the identity of someone. Of course, I look at myself for finding authentic ideas for this.
For example, I made a Valentine card precisely for those people who say things like “Valentine is so commercial” and “I don’t need Valentine to show love!” Because those are my sentiments and a clear extension of my personality, and I know others out there feel the same way.
Similarly, I started a certain “brand” of mine with general imagery/jokes of animals and nature. People were like “cute?”, but said they’d see no point in buying something like this. Then I pivoted to make it about identity. Focus on connecting with people who care about nature, who find themselves natural and in touch with nature. Now you get a REASON for actually buying that merchandise: because it fits with your personality and aesthetic, because it portrays your identity and how it cares about nature/animals/climate.
CATEGORY 2) Find something that looks pretty and recognizable. This one is rather simple in theory, but obviously needs some effort in practice. You don’t just stumble onto something that looks good on clothes, mugs, hats, etcetera.
This was mostly a natural consequence of trying the first approach. For example, I drew some cute animals (and other figures) to support my “jokes”. Until I realized … I could just put them on a shirt WITHOUT the joke? Like … duh? They looked cute, or funny, or striking. Placing them on their own, with absolutely nothing around it, looked good and professional. Now you get a REASON for actually buying that merchandise: it looks good, and you want it to show off or impress (or as a gift).
For now, the webshop is still filled with my first attempts. The “jokes”, the things where I overcomplicated stuff, the designs that look fine but nobody will (probably) ever buy.
Over time, as I move forward with the lessons learned, these are hopefully replaced by merchandise fitting those “sellable” categories I explained above.
I’m still proud of what I made, even if nobody ever buys it. Because it fills the webshop and makes it look more alive and professional, and also because it taught me these lessons and how valuable they are. It basically saved me from writing another list of 20 “puns” or “jokes” to put on a shirt, because now I know they aren’t worth much.
What does the future hold?
Of course, I have other stuff to do. Books and games with planned deadlines. Updates to my other websites. Projects that are 99% finished, and which I wanted 100% finished before 2025 rolled around, but then the webshop project came along!
And so, after ~3 weeks of non-stop webshop work, I have to take a break from it.
I made as much as I could in that short timeframe, with my initial ideas and energy, then wrote down the remaining ideas for later. This means I had to leave my “best” ideas, but that’s fine. They’ll be made a few weeks or months down the line. I mostly wanted any “Valentine’s day”-related merchandise out there well before the event rolled around.
As I said, this is mostly experimental. You can absolutely visit the webshop, browse, buy things, and everything works 100% as it should. It’s a fully functional webshop and there are good designs on there. But, as stated, it’s not the “end goal”. It’s not like I made my webshop now, I have income (ha, ha ha), and we’re done :p
No, all these lessons have already made my actual webshop better. Learning from these merchandise platforms, from how to collect ideas into recognizable “brands” and make them more sellable, from how to setup the entire funnel (from client->secure payment->order delivered) has been invaluable already. They improved my designs for the custom, international online store a thousandfold.
That webshop will not be built on some old domain, using existing built-in systems (like WordPress and WooCommerce). Precisely because it is slow, messy, and keeps a lot of things out of my control. After switching to a much better setup for all my websites, I became increasingly annoyed at how slow and error-prone that WordPress website is! I just hope it doesn’t scare away too many visitors, but there also isn’t much more I can do about it.
The “actual” online store will be …
- Built from scratch by myself. I already have most of the fundamentals and outward design in place.
- Be a static website, as usual, which is faaar faster, more secure, and easier to update and maintain for years.
- Actually have a custom visual design (and general rules/vibe/policies) by me too. I intend to make it feel like some magical fantasy store that sells one-of-a-kind goods, like, I don’t know, some cozy shop you might find a story like Harry Potter. That’s far more interesting and fitting than just another bland, grayscale, dime-a-dozen webshop.
- Sell both digital goods and physical goods. (WooCommerce can sell digital goods, but it’s very clunky. Besides that, there isn’t much to “learn” about digital goods: you just get the link to the file and that’s that. I’ve been sharing digital goods, for free, for ages :p)
- Actually serve and ship international customers. (While keeping prices/costs constant, reasonable, transparent and profitable for me.)
That last point is far more complicated than you might think. Shipping fees, taxes, they easily make up the bulk of actual costs for an online store. The reason I “locked” my current webshop into only serving local customers is the only way I could make it work for now, as shipping to someone in, say, America would have unpredictable shipping fees that might bankrupt me.
In other words, the international webshop needed a solid system behind the scenes for saying something like “If the customer lives in the USA, only present/ship product A to them; if they live in Europe, ship product B instead”. This allows me to print and ship everything locally. Which is both better for the climate AND makes shipping fees low and controlled.
I researched this for days, trying all sorts of things. But there is just NO WAY for a (small) online store to have any financial guarantees when a product could be printed ANYWHERE and shipped ANYWHERE. You need to lock it down. You need to separate offered products (roughly) by continent. For example, I can sell you a T-shirt (delivered at your doorstep, no shipping fee for you) for 15 euros if you live in the Netherlands—and make a small profit. But if you lived in the USA, that same shirt would cost me 40 euros to produce and ship there … which means I’d be selling at a massive, unpredictable loss.
I could talk about a 1000 more lessons learned and improvements to my original plan here. But I’ll stop now. The point I’m making, really, is that this is the way to actually quickly learn stuff. Others always laugh at me, call me insane from diving into a webshop without planning for 6 months, or call me stupid if my very first designs aren’t immediately amazing and sell well.
If I had made an actual planning beforehand, it would NEVER have looked like the system I ended up using. Even if I’d given it all the time in the world. Even if I’d been really patient, and careful, and researched for months … my plan would have been rubbish the moment I actually started doing it. Actually making the webshop, making the products, taking the specific steps needed. The structure I landed on (in terms of image formats, design templates, file-folder structures, data meticulously tracked behind the scenes, etcetera) is nowhere close ANY structure I used before. And I would never know HOW to do it or WHY this is so useful if I hadn’t experienced it in practice for a few weeks now.
And the real beauty of it is … that this never stops. I’ll probably make massive mistakes on this web shop again at some later point. I’ll learn from that and become even better at creating good merchandise and selling it.
Conclusion
Anyway, the Dutch webshop is online and fully functional. It has a bunch of products. I manually designed all of them, pouring my soul into them, vowing to experiment instead of focusing only on output and “how can I make the most (expensive) products as quickly as possible?”
The stream of products for that shop will be silent for a bit, then new ones will be added in batches.
Basically, I see this as one “project” now. I work on it for a few weeks, then go away and plan when I’ll work on it again next season. It has become another part of my overall planning, slotting in the task “Webshop Update!” wherever it fits next.
Included with that task (vaguely titled “Webshop Update!”) is the building of that other online store, of course. It’s come a long way, but also still has a long way to go. Both the website itself AND the digital goods I would sell on it.
The current target is Summer 2025. A lot of things are lined up right; a lot of things will probably be a tight fit for that time frame.
At least I have this other webshop now. To try things. To already set up merchandise, which I can just “reconnect” to the new webshop when the time comes. To use as my main webshop for a bit longer, if the other one is delayed! I’ll need at least 6 months to actually discover how well certain products sell—if at all—and any other long-term costs or changes needed.
That old blog domain was set to expire at the end of April, but I’ll certainly keep it on for longer now. At least a year, then the other webshop should be up and running. Longer, of course, if things start selling really well and I keep having new ideas for Dutch brands and products.
That was my latest “Tiamo sells his soul and is now deeply invested into the world of online stores, payment providers, merchandise and marketing”.
When I have more data about cost, profit, number of orders, what works and what not, I will surely post it here. I am honestly very interested myself if I will actually earn income from this or it’s just another nice experiment that ultimately shows me it’s not the right path for me. At the very least, I tried something different than what I’ve been doing the past few years.
Until next time,
Tiamo