Print on Demand Product Testing Strategy: What to Test First

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Let me tell you something, throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks is NOT a viable business strategy for print on demand! You don’t want to be spending hundreds of dollars launching dozens of products across multiple niches, only to watch most of them collect digital dust.

Although print on demand is practically a business model to test your product ideas with minimal upfront investment, you still need a deliberate testing strategy to truly validate their potential. Without proper testing, you’re basically gambling with your time and money.

Today, I’m going to walk you through the testing strategy that can help you identify winning products consistently while minimizing risk and maximizing ROI. These practical tips will save you countless headaches and potentially thousands of dollars.

Identify Your Niche First

Before you even think about testing products, you need to get crystal clear on your niche. This is the first step in starting a POD business. When you know exactly who you are trying to sell to, you will have a stronger sense of what they want and need, and hence, avoid many detours by testing what is likely to work first.

An important aspect to evaluate when choosing your niche is purchasing power. You confirm that they have the spending ability to purchase your products. This mostly happens when the target niche is students. They may love your designs but can’t afford them, so it will then be an unprofitable niche.

Choose Strategic Product Types to Test

Even when you have a clear audience in mind, it might be tempting to test all the product types you believe they are drawn to. Doing so can be inefficient, and it’s a wiser strategy to take a step-by-step approach to test different product types.

Start With T-Shirts

If you plan to sell POD apparel, there are several reasons why you should start with T-shirt:

They have universal appeal—everyone wears them
They offer good profit margins
They’re relatively inexpensive to test with ads
They provide valuable data that can be applied to other products

The testing process for t-shirts is pretty straightforward. Launch with 3-5 designs across different styles (funny, minimalist, statement, etc.), and allocate a modest advertising budget per design. Creating organic content on social media to advertise your products is another viable way to test your products, but it will be quicker if you run a small budget advertisement to get some insights.

Then Test Complementary Products

When you have identified winning t-shirt designs, you can start expanding to complementary products. If a T-shirt design captures their interest, there’s a strong likelihood they’ll appreciate it on other product variations.

Complementary products you can test on:

Hoodies and sweatshirts (great for upselling)
Mugs (excellent gift items with high margins)
Tote bags (low production costs, high perceived value)

The complementary products you should test depend on your niche. This logical testing sequence avoids the situation where you create numerous products but only one gains traction.

Create Strategic Design Variations

You don’t need to be a design expert in order to succeed in POD. You can test simple design variations even without design skill or experience. Here are some popular designs to test:

Text-based designs – Simple phrases that resonate with your niche.
Minimal graphics – Clean, simple designs often outperform complex ones. Less is usually more!
Humor-based designs – If appropriate for your niche, funny designs can go viral. Something like “Introverted But Willing to Discuss Plants” may work.
Seasonal variations – adding holiday elements to winning designs.

Discover which one works the best for your niche, or you can test designs that combine all the elements to measure how well they appeal to your audience. However, you should start with testing one design at a time so you understand precisely what works and what doesn’t.

Set Up a Proper Testing Framework

After knowing how you can test your products, you need a proper testing framework. Here is what you should do:

Establish clear metrics – Click-Through Rate (CTR), Add-to-Cart rate, and Conversion Rate for each product. Each metric tells you something different and what you can improve.
Use consistent ad spend – Testing your design with a consistent budget can make sure that the results you are getting are not affected by fluctuating ad spend.
Track everything in a spreadsheet – Record all metrics and notes about each design to identify patterns.
A/B test one element at a time – When you test variations, keep in mind that you should only change one thing at a time (color, text size, image placement) to get clear data.

Testing your products may seem like a tedious process. But it’s the only way you can determine what’s working. It’s an essential step for success in every business, including POD.

Use Mockups

The actual product appearance may deviate greatly from your expectation; not only that, you need to have a visual image of how it looks on a real person. Is your design too big or too small? Does it look better if you shift it down a little bit? Using high-quality mockups before ordering physical samples is a fantastic way to visualize your design before ordering a sample.

You can create professional mockups using tools like Placeit, or some print on demand services like Printful will have a mockup generator. Only order physical samples of designs that you are happy with in mockup testing. The cycle of ordering bad samples, redesigning, and reordering consumes valuable time and money and prevents you from finding your winning products faster.

Order Physical Samples

Mockup testing is useful, but it doesn’t replace the need to order a physical sample. The only way to make sure that the quality is good and consistent is by ordering a sample and feeling it in your hands. Furthermore, the samples you order can be utilized to create user-generated content if you plan to use social media marketing as one of your strategies.

You should never just order your physical samples once and forget about them. Instead, order samples on a regular basis to ensure that the supplier is maintaining their overall quality standards, and act before anything devastating happens to your business.

Conclusion

The POD market is competitive, so you need a smarter strategy to test your product without committing to a huge investment before finding your winning products. Start small, test methodically, and scale only what works. If it doesn’t, analyze the data and iterate quickly.