When considering which POD will get your business, what do you think is the most important factor to compare? You may think that it is the cost of running a shop – some PODs charge a fee while others are free. Or you may think that the most important factor is ease-of-use. How easy are the POD’s set-up templates and product creation tools? Cost and ease-of-use are certainly worth considering, but in fact they are not distinguishing characteristics of the PODs. Fees are usually quite small and not a “deal breaker”. And once you get comfortable with a POD, its templates and tools will become second nature to you.
The most important factor to consider when choosing a POD for your business is the volume of shoppers in its marketplace that match your target market.
Sure, you want to have your products in a POD marketplace that gets tons of shoppers every day. So the POD has to be pretty popular with the general public. But all these shoppers won’t be of much value to you if they don’t look like your ideal customer. If a POD’s marketplace is frequented primarily by baby boomers, and you are selling skateboard designs that appeal to teenage boys, a POD with fewer total shoppers but more teenage boy shoppers may be the best choice for you.
It also helps to choose a POD that does not already have a lot of shopkeepers who will be your competitors. In the skateboard design example, you would choose a POD that does not already have many shopkeepers selling products with skateboard designs. When a shopper arrives at your POD’s marketplace and types “skateboard” into the search field, you want your shop to come up as one of the first results in that POD marketplace. Even if the POD gets a million shoppers a day, it doesn’t help you much if it already has a thousand shopkeepers who will be competing directly with your shop’s theme.
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