Motherfunker Update! — End-to-End Fully Automated Print-On-Demand Store — Hands-Free Ecommerce.
Results from my last 6 months.
Results from my last 6 months.
First three months from December to February— I was trying to mess with TikTok marketing, but I decided to abandon TikTok.
I don’t really want to waste my energy growing that channel if it’s going to pull away from the USA, I have to admit I don’t know how to pull the levers on the TikTok algorithm at all yet.
And…… I have hit a major roadblock.
The first major issue has arisen in my “End to End Automated Store”
End-to-End-Automated Ecommerce Store, Print on Demand
The 4 Simple Tools I Use to Automate my Print on Demand Store End to End with Artificial Intelligence.
I foresaw this as a possibility, but was hoping I would be wrong.
Here are the numbers, approx.
Motherfunker has grossed around $3300–$4700 per month March-June.
I have been running ads on Google / YouTube during those months.
I Made $4700 This Month, Zero Customer Contact!
This month was a good one. My advertisements and blog-posting are finally starting drawing in bigger results.
Ad spend = $1200–$1450/mo approx.
Cost of products = I have a 100% markup, which means 50% of my gross. $4800 / 2 = $2400 is product cost. $2400 profit.
–$1200-$1450 ad spend = $950–1200 profit.
Then came the returns….
Out of 161 orders, I have received 29 return requests!
That’s 18% of my total volume.
Ouch Motherfunker, ouch.
Instead of asking for returned items, I just refunded them and apologized and offered a discount on another order.
Only two customers ordered a second time, and so far so good, they seem happy.
Why they they wanting to return the items?
Not because of size issues, changes of mind, etc — but because the shirts and hoodies they received did not look as good in person as they looked online.
And the customers were right — some colors were “washed out” and looked just faded compared to the bright and vibrant images on my site.
I am pretty sure I know why this is happening.
My AI prompt was made to crank out really brightly-colored art on stark black backgrounds. But the issue is that the printer needs BLACKITY BLACK as black can be — absolute black #00000 — to get the right printing results on a white piece of clothing. Anything else, and the end result might be a shade of darker gray, and the colors looked “faded”.
I remembered this lesson from reading about it when trying to learn about All Over Prints and the “gotchas” of creating/selling them.
Our eyes are tricked on screen — because bright colors make it appear on screen like all the black is much blacker than it might be.
In short — I did NOT order samples of every item I published to my store to inspect before sale, and that would defeat the purpose of this automation. And unfortunately the prompt/process as it is — is churning out different results that are sometimes not as clear and bright as what is seen online.
I can try modifying the prompt, or perhaps run some kind of additional app / module that increases the black levels in contrast to the colors before applying it to the clothes.
I am testing this out and seeing if I can solve the problems in this automation using a workflow based solution in Wondr AI.
I won’t be running any more ads for Motherfunker until I find a way to make all my blacks truly black.
If I can’t get the results I want, I will put this store on the back-burner until I can cherry pick a small selection and keep only a smaller stock and I will order samples of before I sell and promote.
Then I’ll create another store with a different product approach that avoids this pitfall altogether. Something like simple 2D graphics and sticking to 2–3 tone color schemes.
It’s not the automations or the AI that caused this roadblock, it’s the specific issues around the type of product I have selected.
All over prints that are brightly colored with black backing are simply harder to pull off without ordering proofs/samples, and because I am using neons on black, it simply has a much lower chance of what is on screen perfectly matching the end result.
If I was using colors more like what I see on the Wondr AI website, I wouldn’t run into this problem.
Simple colors that don’t blend in complex ways, as well as 2-d logo style shirts of 2–3 tone colors will be MUCH easier to automate this way.
Back to the drawing board I go.
NEW UPDATE! _ July 14th 2024 —new info
Thank you for reading!
Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris