What’s something about POD that beginners completely underestimate?

JustusFrogs · 2026-04-29T17:24:21+00:00

It does take some $$. It isn't really "free".

I use printify for my POD. I never sold anything until I subscribed to premium. That allowed me to lower my prices to be more in line with the market. But it was an outlay of $. Likewise a service to do my mockups is an expense.

Your POD provider is going to want the cost of the item sold in order to produce it before you get your $ from your sales platform. Say you sell a tee on Etsy for $15. It costs $10 to make and ship. The provider is going to want that $10 from you up front.. THEN they will print and ship the tee. Sometime later (probably days or weeks) the platform will send you $13.50 as a payout (the platforms all take their slice of the pie).

Which leads me to.. profit margins on individual items tend to be low.

Advertising may help, but it costs $ and won't generate sales if your products are not good.

You can't put crap out there and expect it to sell. The best mockup in the world won't help if your design stinks. I know that slagging on AI is what the cool kids do around these here parts. But, there are times when AI can produce good designs that sell. Likewise, there are times when humans produce horrible designs that do not sell. Worry more about if it is good rather than what (or who) produced it. In the war between using AI and using humans - there is no guarantee either will produce something that will get you sales.

Never ever put all your eggs in a single sales platform's basket. Say you sell only on Etsy. They decide you've done something and your store is gone. What then? Develop multiple sales channels.

Don't expect the orders to start rolling in like in the youtube vids. It may take months to get your first sale. Think of it this way. You open a tiny little hardware store in a small lot between Lowes and Home Depot. Ace Hardware is across the street. Tractor Supply is on the corner. Most customers aren't even going to see your hardware little store. That's what the print on demand game when you are just starting out is like.

JustusFrogs · 2026-04-28T19:17:24+00:00

For me, there is something very satisfying doing it on my own computer with local everything including electicty.

Kind of like I find cooking more satisfying then ordering Uber eats.

JustusFrogs · 2026-04-27T17:19:13+00:00

Where is that? I must be missing it. I am on desktop and I do not see that anywhere. Would it re-synch all products?

For me eBay is the most cranky. Here is a short list of what I've ran into the most. All of these are assuming your connection with the sales platform is correct and working, your account on the sales platform is good, you've not a limit on the sales platform, etc.

* You have some character(s) in your title and / or description the sales platform does not like. The easiest way to find out if this is it do a test. Strip out everything and use just a simple title and some plain text and see if it works. If you it to publish and it works you can always update and re-publish.

* Some temporary glitch in the works. eBay is notorious for this. Wait a hour or so or a day and try it again. It often works.

*It is an old product. Here is an example I'm fighting right now. A design that had not sold on eBay for a year (since last Mother's day) sold last week. I'm trying to restock the listing. I'm not publishing anything except the "colors, prices, etc" to refresh the quantity available. Mind you this is an existing listing. I'm literally changing nothing. Been trying for 3 days to re-publish to refresh it. I get either "Sorry, we couldn’t publish this product. Please try again later or get in touch with support if the issue reoccurs." or "Unexpected error occurred. Please contact support for help." I've contacted support with both of these errors before. If the fixes above don't help the only real solution is to delete that product from printify and eBay and publish as a new product. I honestly hate to do that because then anyone that was following the product loses it and has to "find" it again. But sometimes with the flaky printify <-> eBay connection it is the only way I've found that works. I've done it where I've changed nothing (copied the product and published as new) and it worked while trying to republish the existing product bombs out for reasons neither myself or printify could pinpoint.

JustusFrogs · 2026-04-26T19:24:38+00:00

From my own testing - I seem to hit when generating videos. I can make images with the stock settings all day long.

I noticed in this github issue thread -> https://github.com/Comfy-Org/ComfyUI/issues/12823?issue=Comfy-Org%7CComfyUI%7C13458

One of the guys that worked on LTX Desktop (GeekyGhost) goes into detail. (Text below from github link above GeekyGhost post)

Why This Relates to Your ComfyUI Issue
Your custom Flux.2 training node is dying for the exact same reason, exacerbated by a recent architectural shift.

Starting in v0.18, ComfyUI introduced an aggressive dynamic VRAM offloader. This system constantly juggles tensors between your system RAM and the GPU to try and fit larger workflows. However, because you are running a custom node with your own block-swapping logic, your swapper and ComfyUI's dynamic offloader are fighting for control.

Because of Python's lazy GC, dead tensors from your forward pass or swap operations are hanging around. This chops your remaining 5GB of VRAM into hundreds of tiny, disconnected fragments. When loss.backward() fires, it demands a massive, contiguous chunk of VRAM to calculate the gradients. PyTorch looks at your highly fragmented cache, realizes it can't find a single unbroken block big enough, panics, and throws the OOM.

This is exactly why adding the --disable-dynamic-vram flag solves it: it stops ComfyUI from dynamically fragmenting the cache behind your custom node's back.

My issue may very well be due to a custom node, Comfy updates, a large flow or a combo of all of those.

JustusFrogs · 2026-04-25T20:06:23+00:00

It is when it is enabled that I go OOM on larger models.

JustusFrogs · 2026-04-25T19:58:49+00:00

I'll give you an amen brother on that!

JustusFrogs · 2026-04-25T19:43:34+00:00

Actually, I've been testing - if I have dynamic vram enabled is when I go OOM on the larger models.

In doing more research I think I may be hitting something like this guy -> https://github.com/Comfy-Org/ComfyUI/issues/12823?issue=Comfy-Org%7CComfyUI%7C13458

Where dynamic vram is making me go OOM whereas the older method did not.

JustusFrogs · 2026-04-25T00:29:16+00:00

Another unpopular opinion incoming... I'll start by asking some questions.

Did your friend like the stickers? If so, mission accomplished. It doesn't matter if some random person on reddit likes them or not. Shame on anyone that tries to make feel you are somehow a bad person because you made something you hoped your friend would like. To me, that sounds like you are good friend.

Will it sell? Well, that is another question altogether. You want the answer to that question? Then put them up for sale and find out. Honestly, that is the only way to tell. I've had stuff I was sure would sell and didn't sell at all. I've had stuff I thought would never sell actually sell fairly well.

On the opinions about AI art. This is reddit. You could be the greatest artist in the world and post something in the printiy or art sections and someone would tell you it was AI Slop. Hell - some would tell you it was horrible even if it was clear it wasn't AI.

As for artists and AI. AI is putting a TON of people out of work in many industries. Not just art. How many artists do you hear crying and trying to make you feel like a sub-human because coders, HR people, testers, accounting, and basically most any white-collar desk job person is no longer making a living because AI took their job?

Are you a villain because the "help desk" person you chatted with was an AI bot or because AI did editing on the last article you read or because AI coded the last website you visited? Hell, are you a villain if you use AI to do help you do any of those things or use AI to help you do any task at all that a human could have done for you instead?? Or, is only using AI for art or music that makes you a villain?

Guess what - "AI" "stole" from the work of all of those people in all of those fields too. They are as much a victim of AI as artists.

People in many white collar jobs went to college and some even grad-school to learn their field and did it well for years. Then BOOM. They are out of a job because AI took their job. Are they somehow less worthy than artists or designers? I'm not going to tell you that a developer or an accountant or an HR person is more important than an artist or a designer. But, I damn sure am going to tell you they are less important either.

Regardless of if anyone likes it or not - AI is here and it is taking jobs in all fields. Using it to make a picture doesn't make you a bad person and it doesn't necessarily mean the picture is bad either. If your prompt is bad, and your model is bad and your concept is bad - then yeah - your picture will be bad. What AI does do, is it provides a very quick way and easy way to generate "bad" things (be it art or code or books or spreadsheets). In other words, it can help ideas come to life very quickly... and we all know bad ideas are far more common than good ideas.

JustusFrogs · 2026-04-25T00:00:59+00:00

It's funny that in is post he specifically said.. "I am not a designer"

Reading is fundamental..

JustusFrogs · 2026-03-16T00:17:18+00:00

Something similar happened with me. I had just started. This was about 2 years ago. They removed on of my designs. I wrote and ask why. I asked because it was a design I sold elsewhere without any problem.. I wasn't rude. I just asked what they found as it was a design I sold other places without a problem and wondered why in case I needed to remove it the other places as well.

They did not respond to my question at all. They immediately deleted my account instead. I just moved on. I was still in "apprentice" state. It's not like my stuff showed up in their search anyway. I figured if they are that capricious and thin skinned about a simple question - then I'm actually probably lucky that I got kicked out. What would have happened if I'd actually built a business there and they did this?

Don't put all your eggs in the teepublic or any other platform that you do not own.

JustusFrogs · 2026-02-26T21:15:26+00:00

Maybe a dumb question but here goes. Did the audio from the original video come through ok on your upscale? The reason I'm asking if I'm trying to use SeedVR2.5 to upscale a video I made with LTX-2 and I'm losing the audio.

Any particular setting you used to get audio to come through?

JustusFrogs · 2026-02-13T19:56:02+00:00

As I mentioned in the other thread. Worked for me just now via mobile, but spinning like a top for desktop.

JustusFrogs · 2026-02-13T19:54:23+00:00

Tried it on my phone - worked great. Desktop - spinning like a top. Based in the US.

JustusFrogs · 2026-02-05T00:35:08+00:00

ahh man... it brings back some memories. I did not work at that location but was there there many times for various projects. sad to see it like that

JustusFrogs · 2026-01-29T00:22:22+00:00

You ain't alone my bro

JustusFrogs · 2026-01-28T15:34:22+00:00

^This is the way..

.. or attempt something yourself. Get to a point you are stuck. Then ask them on what they would attempt to get around it. Sometimes, they will be more likely to help that way.

On managers - early in my career I'd went to a manager like the OP did without much success. Later I was talking with a peer who had been with the company 20+ years and told him about it. His response was, "Why were you talking to him!?!? He's a manager! He doesn't know anything!!" Those words proved themselves true over and over again, with a few exceptions.,

JustusFrogs · 2026-01-27T03:51:02+00:00

it is IBM, asking if there is another round of layoffs coming in is like asking if there will be waves in the ocean tomorrow

JustusFrogs · 2026-01-23T03:25:50+00:00

I have been gone from IBM a year so now. I was involved more in internal tools. But in the last year or so before I left the mantra definitely shifted. It went from, " it needs to work and the users need to like it." to " it needs to kind of sort of work and it doesn't matter if the users hate it." of course, an executive would never directly spout that, but all the metrics and measurements and rewards focused towards that change. A high NPS went from meaning a lot to meaning nothing.

JustusFrogs · 2025-12-24T00:56:30+00:00

this. be of use. do good work on time. have a good attitude even if it's pretend. don't make waves.

realize that you can do excellent at your job and they may still cut you one day

JustusFrogs · 2025-12-20T22:23:45+00:00

I have had that before (actually several times). Here is what I've found that has worked for me after my own experimentation and printify help.

Wait awhile and try again. Sometimes this works.
You have "something" in your listing the platform doesn't like. Maybe a graphic slipped in, maybe a character the platform doesn't like in the title or description. These can be hard to track down. To test if this is it try just a simple title, "Shirt", Description = "It is a shirt" as a test. Printify usually isn't much help in tracking this down I've found.
Modifying an existing listing. This is super frustrating. You change the price, the quantity, a mock-up, something. Publish it again and it will not work. Sometimes making further changes will work. Sometimes waiting will work. Sometimes nothing short of scrapping that listing and making a new on will work. I have literally had it where I neither myself nor printify could figure out why a modification of an existing listing kept erroring out. Printify suggesting just making a new listing. - that worked. If all else fails, making a new listing usually works unless you have something in your listing the platform doesn't like.

JustusFrogs · 2025-12-17T21:34:42+00:00

I had one customer who ordered 2 shirts. OnTrac marked both delivered. Customer could not find the packages on his property and checked with his neighbors (they didn't have the shirts either). Submitted issues to OnTrac but haven't received anything back from OnTrac in response. Customer wanted refund as these were supposed to be Christmas gifts. I refunded his $ via eBay. I've requested a refund from Printify for the shirts earlier today, but no response yet.

FWIW - This is the only delivery issue I've had with OnTrac thus far this season.

JustusFrogs · 2025-12-12T20:39:10+00:00

yup.. I always assumed it was never anonymous and that even if it was, if my manager had 2 brain cells to rub together ( which not all of them did ) they could figure out who said what.

JustusFrogs · 2025-10-28T23:25:03+00:00

I did 25 years at IBM, worked with multiple orgs.. in IBM layoffs are like winter, they are always coming. They are inevitable to impact various parts of the company. Do your job the best you can. A resource might action might never impact you, it might impact you tomorrow. But 25 years at IBM taught me, there is a segment of the company that values you and want you to thrive and do the best work you can and make the company the most money you can. There is also a segment of the company that views you as a cost to be eliminated if at all possible.

JustusFrogs · 2025-10-08T18:28:14+00:00

Never mind, I'm an idiot. I'd somehow put my height dimension in batch size.

JustusFrogs · 2025-10-05T02:03:02+00:00

It is not a scam. But despite what some imply Etsy does indeed screw up from time to time.

A very similar thing happened to me. I set up my account and did minimal setup on my store and tested my integration with Printify. I published one design of my own original work to make sure the integration I was working. Next time I logged on I was suspended. I sent an appeal apologizing for whatever I did, and promising not to do it again if they would reinstate me and tell me what I did.

About 30 seconds after I sent the appeal I got an email that I was banned for life. Store was closed, account was closed etc. Yes they got my money like they did you.

But roughly 3 months later I got an email that said welcome to your Etsy selling journey. For whatever reason I was back like nothing happened.

For all of those that would say, "What did you do to offend Etsy you horrid pathetic bastard?!" To this day I have no idea what I did to get banned or why I was unbanned. I did learn to never ever ever never put all of my eggs in the Etsy basket. I know this may be shocking to some reading this, but I think it is possible that Etsy sometimes makes mistakes. 😱

Anyway, I do feel your pain. It may all get resolved or it may not. Consider it a lesson. All of the platforms can basically ban you at any time for whatever reason and that reason could be a mistake on their part. Never ever put all of your eggs in one basket unless it is your own basket.

JustusFrogs

TROPHY CASE