Redbubble India: How to sell and make money on the platform

RedBubble is a print-on-demand website that makes and sells products based on user-submitted artwork. They have an extensive catalog of items and depending on your popularity, proceeds can be a small side income to a full-on living!

About RedBubble India

Redbubble is based out of Melbourne, Australia with offices in San Francisco and Berlin. They have over 70,000 publishers catering to customers primarily from the United States, Australia, and Europe. Their products are expensive and if you factor international shipping charges, too costly for us Indians.

So why does Alexa show that nearly 7 percent of Redbubble’s traffic comes from India? Most of it has to do with how much we all love T-shirts but some because there’s an exciting money-making prospect!

How to sell on Redbubble?

Inorder to sell products in Redbubble, you have to follow three simple steps:

1. Registration
2. Adding Artwork
3. Promotion

Registration

The registration process is simple enough. Verify your email, complete the necessary fields in the profile section, and you are good to go!

You can now access the dashboard!

The Redbubble dashboard shows the creator’s earning summary and traffic, as well as a few other matrices. You can also customize the shop setting, tweak product pricing, and choose different payment methods from here.

Before clicking the ‘Add new work‘ button, here are a few things you should know:

1. Redbubble is a Creative Network
2. Upload large and high quality images
3. Don’t steal

Redbubble is a creative network hosting independent creators. Customers in the platform demand something that’s unique, creative, quirky, or witty for the extra money they pay. Keep that in mind while making your art or trying to find a niche. Also, these artworks are going to be printed on T-shirts and even blankets, so make them of high quality with no traces of pixelation (Unless you are a ‘pixel’ artist).

While Redbubble says that they have a stringent no-piracy policy, copyrighted material sells in the hordes here. There are borderline IP-infringements at every corner, and people don’t mind stealing from others on the platform or similar websites. The company is treating such violations more seriously each month but the system is still far from perfect.

Uploading Artwork

Redbubble has a highly optimized product showcase interface which is, arguably, one of the best in the industry. After uploading the image, you can see previews of your work on each product and can customize them according to need and fit. You can go for the default artwork placement but it’s better to take some time and optimize each one individually.

The next important step is to provide a relevant title, description, and few search tags. Tags should be consistent with what you think people will search for in Redbubble (related to your product). Additionally, you can add manual translations of these information (German, French and Spanish supported)

Promotion

Redbubble has millions of people visiting their website each month, and that’s the only promotion they give. For a successful conversion, it is up to you to make stand-out products, be in-tune with the latest trends, or carve out a niche.

If you are social media famous, that’s another great opportunity to reach more people. Organic searches also play a significant role in the traffic coming to your store. So always give titles and descriptions that will help you stand out on Google and other search engines!

Can you make money on Redbubble?

It depends on how creative or unique your ideas are, or in general, the way you approach the platform. Some people make money by sharing their ‘unique’ artworks and having a huge fan-following, while others just ‘borrow’ popular designs and exploit prevailing trends. These two categories make a lot of money- enough to sustain a decent living. However, they are but a few people, and most ‘earners’ only make enough for Redbubble to be a side-hustle. An even larger percentage don’t make anything and quit within one or two months!

Redbubble works on a markup system where a percentage (called Artist’s margin-20% default) of the base product’s price is added to it to get the retail price. For Example, if a blanket has a base price of $100, then its retail prices is $120 ( base price $100 + the 20% artist margin of $20).

What does this mean for Indians?

The obvious plus point of having your art on Redbubble is that you will be paid in dollars. So, if you have a USP and sell 100-150 products a month, you will earn a decent living (Rs.15,000 to Rs. 35,000) and that will keep you motivated. In comparison, most people from other countries will only treat this as a side-hustle and might even lose interest in the long run! This is also why you see a lot of popular creators from South-East Asia in the platform.

Payment Options

Redbubble offers two payment options: Paypal and ACH Direct bank deposit

Their payment cycle begins on the 15th of each month and creators will be paid once their earnings reach a $20 threshold.

2023 Update: Is Redbubbe still treating me well?

I started RedBubble in 2019, and I still make decent sales in some of my older products. However, there has been a massive increase in competition, and personally, the sales are not enough to justify taking time off some of my other projects. I feel like you need to make even more effort these days to stay relevant on Redbubble, and you can see a lot of profiles posting 3-5 designs a day and have 1000s of designs on their store. It’s harder to find a niche topic to focus too because there are at least 10-20 top-notch creators already on it.

I am not saying Redbubble doesn’t work now. It does! The platform doubled its organic traffic in just one year, and more people than ever buy things on it. You still make a lot of money too. It just takes more effort than it used to.

Image: Elijah O’Donnell, Glenn Tan, Tamara Bellis, Malcolm Lightbody, Sofia Guaico