For Dye Sublimation Business - The

By Steve

Have you seen it? There are so many things Conde has offered lately, you may have overlooked it. Conde, in conjunction with a company called iPersonalyze are offering a way for you to let your customers actually design and order sublimated products from your website or even Facebook!   I have been playing around with these myself and these are very powerful tools you can use to boost sales and exposure. First, let’s get the bottom line out of the way: This ain’t free. However, if you sell even a couple of products, it will pay for itself. The ticket starts at $59 per month and runs up to $99 a month. Now, don’t turn your nose up like I did! Hear me out. Like you, I thought, “Well here is another $59 a month for some web gimmick that probably won’t work”. We have all been down that road before. But, this is different…   What is the most expensive thing you do with sublimation? Probably the design element. By the time you create a design, import a picture or two and move stuff around, it’s easy to have more time in a product than a single sale is really worth. But what if the customer could actually design their own product and just send you the file? No proofing…no misspelled words…no going back and forth about which shade of blue to use or which clipart looks the best. The customer does all the design work on their computer and when they are happy with it, they send it to you.   But there’s more. If you have ever set yourself up to take credit cards online, you know it is a boring hassle that ends up costing you a monthly fee whether you use the service or not and a percentage of each sale. There are also the regulations – pages and pages of regulations and certifications…. This “app” takes care of all that for you. Attached to the app is a credit card service group that does all the processing so you never see a credit card number and there is no chance of someone hacking into your site because there is no financial information there to hack! Of course, there is a percentage taken for each sale online like with any credit card processor but there is NO monthly fee so if you don’t get any sales in a given month, there is no cost to you. Of course, the objective is to make sales – lots of them and here’s how:   This app can be used in at least three ways: 1. It can be attached to your website as a page or category. When the customer clicks on “Design Your Own Product”, the software takes them directly to the link where they can select their product, design it and pay for it all in one place. 2. It can be attached to your Facebook page. People love social media and many people have a ton of “friends” on their page. Perhaps you are one of them. With this app attached to your Facebook page, people who visit your page, click on the app, select products, design them and pay for them and it’s all just that simple. 3. You can attach it to someone else’s Facebook page. With their permission of course, you can attach a link to the app from any Facebook page you want: A school, some organization, a sports team…virtually anything. This page might be filled with products using the organization’s logo or mascot plus the ability to personalize it. Perhaps a percentage of the sale will go to the school or organization but still, these are sales you would otherwise never see. Should a Facebook page not produce the expected income stream, just move it to another group.   Now, here’s the best part: Most of the work of setting up the pictures, basic information, part numbers and design templates has already been done for you. Conde has already sent all their product templates to iPersonalyze and it has been included for you to use at no extra cost.   Having never done this before and realizing that I am very clumsy when it comes to working with websites, I built a page I can use on both my website and Facebook in less than eight hours. That includes selecting the products, giving them a description, pricing them, setting up the credit card information, the banking information, shipping information, etc. My test page uses about 30 products with some size variations in many of them.   It is also possible to include your own products be they sublimation, laser or most anything else.   Selling our products isn’t as easy as it used to be. Twenty years ago, people came to us and asked, “What you got?” Today, they go online, especially the younger set. They visit social media, read reviews and really, really want to design the products the way THEY want them, not the way we tell them they have to be. This is only going to increase over time.   Is it for you? Well, don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself.