How To Sell Digital Print-on-demand Products With Kunakify Fulfilment | #232 Simon Crack

In this podcast episode, we discuss how to sell digital print-on-demand products such as CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, or Vinyl Records on Shopify using the Kunakify fulfillment app. Our featured guest on the show is Simon Crack, serial online entrepreneur and founder of kunakify.com.

On the Show Today, You’ll Learn:

• What types of digital products can you create and sell.
• What file formats and artwork requirements are needed for product creation? 
• What are the advantages of using print-on-demand services? 
• How to handle product sales, printing, and shipping all at once.
• How to simplify the creation and sale of physical products on Shopify. 
• What are the benefits of white-label printing for your merchandise. 
• How to streamline the order process from Shopify for efficient fulfillment. 
• How to reduce customer service hassles with automated tracking. 

Links & Resources

Website: https://www.kunakify.com
Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/kunakify-automatically-fulfil-your-shopify-cd-dvd-sales-to-kunaki
X (former Twitter): https://twitter.com/Kunakify
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kunakify

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For inquiries about becoming a guest or sponsoring the podcast, email claus@clauslauter.com.

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Transcript

Claus Lauter: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Today, we want to talk about a topic or about a solution that I haven't heard before, two weeks ago, and I was completely excited to see that something like this is out there. We want to find out how you can do print on demand for digital products with Shopify, with the connectify app.

What that is, we will dive into this in a second. But I will introduce Simon Crack first on the show. He's the founder of connectify. com. He's a serial online entrepreneur. He has worked in the mobile app space, online teaching, children's books, software as a service, and print on demand. He's specializing in design and marketing, and he is behind this app that we're talking about today.

So let's dive right into it. Hi, Simon. How are you today? 

Simon Crack: Hi, thank you very much for having me. I'm very good. Simon, you're talking about 

Claus Lauter: something that is I have never heard before. And I think it's a great digital solution there. Tell me a little bit about, what it is first of all, and how you came on the idea to provide that on 

Simon Crack: Shopify.

 It's basically an app that connects to kanaki. com. So I don't know if you've heard of kanaki. com, but kanaki are like a print on demand. , manufacturing company, but just for DVDs, Blu rays, CD and vinyl records. So they do print on demand basically. So a bit like what you might get for T Launch or T Spring or, you know, print on demand for clothing, apparel.

They kind of do it for, physical products. So they've been in business since I think, I've been using them since 2009. And they've been in business a few years before that. the way I came up with the app basically is to go back. I used to work as a graphic designer, back in 2000, which is about my age.

So I used to work for a few years, in an office as a graphic designer. After about six or seven years, unfortunately I was made redundant from that company. But luckily as a little backup, I was working on a magic trick website. that was always my passion when I was younger no siblings.

So I used to do is learn magic tricks. And then as I got a bit older and as I could see the sort of end of my job coming. I decided to work on this magic website in the background. So I made a YouTube channel and created a website. And it really sort of took off at that time, which was just lucky for me.

So I could actually then just go from having no job to work on that full time. Basically I created DVDs, Blu rays, memberships, and just marketed it all via my YouTube channel and, you know, email marketing basically. And at the time my YouTube channel had Thousands of subscribers and a few million views at the time.

Eventually, there was a few magicians that weren't too happy about me giving away some of their magic tricks. So, a lot of my videos got taken down, but anyway, we digressed. So, you know, some of the products are things like DVDs and, Blu rays and things like that. So, I was working on my magic website, creating these products.

And if I, for instance, had a new DVD that I wanted to sell, I'd do a product launch, right? Now, obviously with the product launch, you do a big build up and then release it. Now, if I get 200 sales from, say, my DVD, I've then got to go into Kaneki, basically filling the customer's information and what product they've purchased 200 times manually, right?

So that was my pain point. I needed a solution basically when I sort of combined my experience with mobile games because after doing my magic website I sort of worked on some mobile games as well at the same time for a few years, got Apple featured a few times, so I kind of took my experience of The iOS app store and creating games mixed it with what I've been doing with my DVDs and and different products and combine them to create an Akif I, which is basically a Shopify app that connects your connect dot com account to your Shopify account.

 And if you get a sale from your Shopify store, say you have your DVD, that sale will go directly to Kanaki without you having to do anything.

It will send all the customer's information. And if you prefund your kanaki. com account, which is basically just, they put 20 into the account, as long as there's some money there, then as soon as the order goes in, Kanaki will print, press ship within a couple of days and send it directly to your customer.

And it's basically white label, so they never put their names all over it. When you could drop ship it basically without the worry of. Logos or receipts or anything like that. So that's basically the idea behind, Knappify. It's to be able to sell at scale, really, physical products without having to hold loads of stock.

In the past, know, if I've got a DVD and I was making 200 sales, I'd have to think, Oh. You know, I'm not sure how many sales are going to make, should I buy 500 DVDs? Should I buy 50? , with this, you haven't got to worry about that. You print the ship on demand and you only have to pay Kanaki when you have made your sale on Shopify.

So you get the money first before you then have to pay out. So that was really the main benefits of, of the app. Like I say, print on demand for physical products. That's. Loads of different features that we've added over the years, because this app originally came around in about 2017, when I first built it, and we've just been adding new features as and when customers and users have said, Oh, can you do batch orders?

For instance, say you've got three CDs and they all go with a group. Now, ordinarily, you'd have if the order got sent to Kanaki, it would be three separate orders, right? So we needed to come up with a solution. So that if you've got three CDs and say a vinyl and you want to package it together and send it to the customers one package.

We can now do that. and. Other features delay sending orders. So sometimes you might want to do a launch, but you might just want to hold the orders and then just send them at a later date, or you might need to have to modify some information. So sometimes, customers use that. You can also change your shipping preferences because Kanaki can obviously ship You know, first class mail, UPS ground two day one day.

So we have the options within the back end of the app to be able to choose what you'd like your just to go via it just links with your Shopify account. It's quite easy. You just enter your kanaki. com login details into the Kanakify app. And then the only other thing you need to do is when you create your listing in Shopify.

you d your pictures and your description. You take the product ID that you get given from Kanai and you paste that into the S K U field of the Shopify listing. And that's pretty much all you need to do. And that just links the two accounts. You can go to kanai.com today, you can sign up and you can start creating, know, a STD product, A D V D product.

Maybe it's instructional videos. And then, like I say, you can link it to your Shopify account and basically be up and running pretty quickly. Now, the app is free for 30 days, the users can use it for a whole month, make sales, see that it's working, contact me if they've got any issues.

And then it's just 5 a month on the, basic plan, which is like 25 process sales a month. So if you're doing under 25 sales. It's 5 a month. And then for up to 100 sales, it's 30 a month up to 250 sales. It's 49 a month. And then for unlimited sales, it's 59 a month. If you're just selling. loads and loads.

And the good thing about our pricing structure is say you sell 25 one month, you'll be charged 4. 99. Then say next month you sell 250, you'll be charged 49. And then say you only sell two the following month, you'll only be charged again, back at the basic 4. 99. So it moves where your sales go.

Claus Lauter: Definitely, I find the concept amazing because, you see always that people say CD, DVD is dead, but I think it isn't. And the new actually is coming back.

This is a growing market. I think there's, at some point I read that, renewed sales in some areas are higher than CD So it's really a market. Now, tell me a little bit about your customers. I can imagine that musicians, people who obviously work in the field of audio and video and have some kind of merchandise stores, that's a perfect solution for them.

 Who's your customer and how do they combine this with other physical products in their Shopify store? 

Simon Crack: like you say, musicians. So if you're selling other merchandise, selling t shirts. I'm a band related materials. They can then list their CD on this Shopify store and we just handle that style.

So if they get a sale of that's DD, then they obviously it goes through our anything else can be kept separate, and they can deal with any other sort of print on demand people. We've got guys that sell, for instance, yoga teaching DVDs, right? Apparently, that's really popular because they sell quite a few DVDs on a daily basis.

, and they sell I think they sell them by Facebook ads. Successfully we've got a lot of guys like me where, they may be giving away info products yes, a lot of things have shifted to online and downloads, but quite often you can have like an upsell or an added bonus. With this product, to basically give you a higher order value.

 There's a broad range of, people that use it. Obviously in the indie band, they forgot their only website. Right up to, all different spectrums of people customers. We've got around 200 users of the connect by app. At the moment, we have daily installs, and then obviously some people cancel their stores or don't keep things up, we've got, like I said, around 200 users, at the minute that we look after and make sure everything's running smoothly. 

Claus Lauter: That sounds great. Now, obviously the connection you need to first set up your kunaki. com account. What kind of file formats do you need to have to create your product?

Simon Crack: say, I wanted to create a CD, for example. You'd obviously need your audio files that can be pretty much any audio file, WAV, MP3, WMA connected pretty good with just accepting and converting into the proper audio format on the other end.

So you haven't got to worry too much about, that image wise it's, JPEGs. Save this high res that you can then upload and the good thing about when you're creating a product on kanaki. com, you actually see an online representation of how it's going to look and you can then flip the artwork around and make sure, oh yeah, the front's on, the back's on, the CD artwork for a CD, they print on the front cover back cover.

On the actual disc itself for a DVD, for instance, they print on the cover on the insert and on the actual disc. Now, for a DVD, you can upload what is a video file and they're pretty good. You can upload. Separate files you can upload if you've actually created it saying movie or something where it's got menus and everything.

You can just upload that ISO file, right? So they're good with either accepting individual files if you need to, or if you've created an actual, proper thing. Mainly files that you pretty much deal with every day. They can accept. so it's not usually a problem. Okay. 

Claus Lauter: That sounds very straightforward.

 It's a huge market for people who haven't thought about that. I mean, just imagine you create a specific CD or vinyl for specific celebration or something like that. And then people can order it through your app and don't have to have any production cost in advance and it's just print on demand, but in a different way.

how does the onboarding process work? 

Simon Crack: in Shopify, obviously there's an app store. You go into the app store, search for connectify. As soon as that pops up, you hit install. Then it shows you the plans, three for 30 days.

You just hit click. Install. And then you'll be taken what you need to go into the app section where all you can see all the apps. But basically, you click on the connect by app. It takes you to the main homepage. There's a tutorial video on there with me from YouTube that kind of walks people through.

You need to enter your Jackie login. password here. That's the main thing really until you then set up your listings in Shopify and all you need to then do is obviously the product ID. Is the thing that kaki.com will give you when you've created a product. So say I create a vinyl record product, Kaki give you an id, which is like a string of say 10 numbers.

And all you need to do is copy that into the SS K U field of the Shopify listing, and that connects everything. And that's really all you need to do is put your hands. And then any sales that come in, like I say, just go straight to Kanaki. Now, you can decide not to pre fund Kanakis, and that's what I tend to do, so that , I can just check over, make sure, see how many customers I've got, and then just pay Kanaki in bulk, maybe once a day.

 But many people prefer to have it hands off, throw 100 into the Kanaki account, costs. And then they can then just basically sell and not have to worry about shipping and printing, you know, and everything else and tracking, because the other thing, which I guess I haven't really had is once.

Obviously, the order goes to kanaki. com and it is printed and shipped and Kanaki then sends back a tracking link through our app, which automatically goes into the order in Shopify, marks as complete and emails the customer the tracking link so they can actually click on it and see where their packages that cuts out all the customer service nightmares that you can have where people are, Oh, where's my package?

What's the tracking number? So it really does help because like I say, it's an app that I needed and I felt like if I needed it, some other people might too. 

Claus Lauter: That's the best example that you just gave is like, if you have a problem, then there's probably other people out there who have the same problem.

And then coming up with a solution, it's basically a no brainer. I like the concept. It just shows that there is much more than printing t shirts on demand out there. And I think there's a huge market for people specifically, if they have audio files as a musician or something like that to get a product out there that the world wants and needs Simon, where can people find out more about you?

Simon Crack: Yeah, so you can learn all about Canacify at www. canacify. com, which is K U N A K I F Y dot com. That's the website that tells you basically all about it and goes into more details. That's it. And there's a, chat bot on there if you need to. Send me a message. 

Claus Lauter: Okay.

I will put the links in the show notes and you just want to click away and then people can go straight on also install the app in their store. Simon, thanks so much for your time today. I think a great solution for a very interesting product out there, and I hope a lot of people will try it out. Thanks so much.

Thanks very much for having 

Simon Crack: me.