How can you carve out your niche in the Print-on-Demand industry? What about attracting new customers and standing out from your competitors? Customization holds the key.
SPOD's latest upgrade to our Customizer will help you make more sales, offer new and exciting products, and boost your profits without any extra work. Our app takes cares of all the heavy lifting. When your customers choose to personalize a product, there is no extra work for you— and we don't charge you anything, either.
With the Customizer, you have Shopify’s most powerful custom product creator at your fingertips.
Let's take a quick look at the Customizer's features, how to use them, and go over some tip and tricks on how to work with customization.
Use cases of the Customizer:
- The Template
- The Product Switcher
- The Optional Customization
The Template
This feature allows you to easily market products that need customization. With the template function, you make it easy for the customer to see that they are free to personalize. You can market a wide range of customization themes: from custom text or photos to additional designs.
To get started, open the Shopify product listing and activate the product.cyo-deeplink template (please see below). Now, when the customer clicks on the product in your store, they will be redirected straight into the Customizer with the correct product and design loaded.
The Template is activated in the product listing in your Shopify backend. “product.cyo-deeplink”. This is not an optional feature, but rather a requirement for customization, so create your designs accordingly. 
These customizable products can of course be marketed at an increased cost. If you are selling a non-customized tee for $27, you can easily price a customizable one at $30. The customer is experiencing and ordering something unique, so they are likely to pay a bit extra for this. However, we don’t recommend setting your price too high. It is better to sell more at a lower price than a few at a higher price. 
The Optional Customization
Now this can be activated with no profit on the product, but SPOD certainly recommends you add an up-sell price if you choose this feature for your store. A few extra dollars per sale will add up for you in the end. When you successfully market this feature to the right crowd, or run a successful ad campaign, Optional Customization can boost your store’s profits.
So how does it work? Open your Customizer settings and add a set commission price. This will automatically add the extra fee once the product opens on the Customizer page. This is something that should be clearly communicated to your customers in the product description, or the conversion of the product could be severely affected.
By making the customer aware of an extra cost for customization from the get-go, they are more likely to be willing to pay that extra amount once they click on the button. You could let your customer know that this function requires extra work to process the product by your brand’s team. This also reinforces the fact that your brand is strong and can process custom orders.
If you activate the up-sell commission, this will also increase the product price of any template products that you have created above with the Template function.
Inserting a small icon into your product photo is great way to communicate the possibilities.
The Product Switcher
We all know that with Print-on-Demand, companies offer so many products it is impossible to have your designs on every product that they offer. So, what can you do about it? Carefully select the products that you will think be the most successfully converting products for that given design. After that, keep an eye on your sales and notice which products seem to be doing better or worse.
With the Product Switcher function, you can allow the customer to change the product the design is on all by themselves. Add a little info about this feature in your product description. You can select the bestselling and converting products for your main image, but there will always be a customer who thinks “I would like to see that design on a mouse pad” or “I would like to have that design on coffee mug instead”.
By having a small commission set in your Customizer settings, let's say $3, each time the customer checks out with a different product selected, your store still earns that extra $3. And as always, SPOD will not charge for this service.
What can your customers add to your products?
With the Customizer, your customer has a huge range of possible customization options to add to your products. They can:
- add their own image
- add an image of your choice in your design library
- add one of our 50K free designs
- add text (in a huge range of fonts, colors, special prints such as glitter)
Extra Profit For Your Store
If you take advantage of the Customizer's many features, you'll see the difference in your profit margins. Below is a breakdown of example sales at different commission amounts.
We hope this inspires you to start selling customized products. We are already seeing successful merchants reaching these figures. Don’t miss out on extra earnings— join the action with Shopify’s most powerful custom product tool.
Design Tips
When considering designs to use with the Customizer, they will generally fall into two categories. Those that need customization (template designs), and those where customization is optional (up-sell designs).
Template Designs
Now template designs, as said above, need to be designs that require customization. So this should be key in your thinking before you create your next batch of designs. This means the design thought process and requirements are a little different. Here are a few tips for coming up with your next template designs:
- Customer should be able to imagine the customization, so give an example. E.g. “Name”, “Name Here”, an example name or an example image that could be replaced.
- If using example text, this should be placed in the design with the required font already chosen, so it flawlessly integrates into the design.
- The template design, excluding any example text or image, should be merged into one design and not added onto a product with multiple layers.
- The customization should be clearly communicated. This can be done in the product picture or the product listing title. By following the above tips and looking at the below examples, you should have a good idea of how to create custom designs that will convert. Regardless of your niche, the opportunities are there!
Optional Customization Designs
Now, the up-sell designs are a little different and require a different thought process. It is still key to keep customization in mind when creating the design, but the customer should also be able buy the design without customization. Here's how to create a successful up-sell design:
- Create a design that the customer could still buy without customization, but one to which customization can be added to create a special product.
- Leave enough space for the customer to add customization. Don’t fill the whole product with a design.
- Add in an example product listing image that has customization on it (not the main image but a secondary image) to help spark the customer's imagination.
- Explore gift topics. Customization is an appealing factor when the customer is considering buying a gift.
Take Action
Follow some of our tips to create successful customizable designs and start earning more for your business. With SPOD’s Customizer, there is nothing extra to do post-purchase. We will print the product as normal and charge you the same as normal.