As the holiday season comes closer than ever, print-on-demand ornaments are voted as one of the best product types that help many merchants escalate their sales. And we understand that you're also seeking unique and high-quality products that will stand out and drive sales. Among many types of ornaments, custom-shaped wooden ornaments, are voted as one of the best choices because of their high demand and great profit margin for sellers.
At Printway, we specialize in crafting premium custom wooden ornaments that offer sellers a high-margin product and endless opportunities for creative personalization. In this blog post today, we’ll explore why choosing Printway’s ornaments, specifically wooden ornaments, is a game changer for your print-on-demand business. Keep updated till the end because we’ll share expert marketing tips to help you optimize your ornament sales and capture the holiday shopping frenzy in 2024.
Whether you're a seasoned seller or a newbie in the POD world, this guide will show you how to maximize the potential of wooden ornaments for the upcoming holiday season. Let’s dive in!
I- Overview of Print-on-demand Ornaments
1- Why Is Ornament A Key Product For The Holiday Season?
Ornament is considered one of the top gift items during the peak sales season. The number of ornaments fulfilled at Printway tends to grow strongly from the beginning of September every year, which shows that the time to choose to buy ornament products takes place early. Therefore, sellers need to plan daily sales during September and October to ensure that the product is always displayed during the customer's search process and meets their shopping needs.
Here are some outstanding advantages that make ornament a trending product in the 4th quarter of every year:
Special personalization: customers in the US, especially Gen Z, want to express their personality and creativity through the products they buy and the gifts they give. Ornament with custom image design and flexible messages has the ability to attract and increase customer retention rates.
Small - compact - affordable: Ornaments are practical gifts for relatives and friends during the Christmas season because of the habit of decorating American Christmas trees.
Diverse materials: Ornaments are made from many materials such as wood, metal, glass, and acrylic, and can be customized with many different styles and shapes, making it easy for customers to choose according to their own style.
Emotional and memorable factors: Many families in the US have a tradition of decorating Christmas trees every year with ornaments associated with memories, creating spiritual value, and making them a collectible item over the years.
Meeting the needs of the gift market: During the year-end holidays, the demand for gift shopping increases, and ornaments are a popular choice to give to friends, family, or colleagues because of their convenience and aesthetic value
Among many types, wood is always evaluated as an old-but-gold material because they are warm, cozy, and rustic, and especially popular during holidays like Christmas. The ability to customize the shape continues to be a big draw, and this line of products will continue to dominate the sales season this year.
Custom wooden ornaments offer several outstanding advantages that set them apart from other holiday products. Here are a few key benefits that surely help merchants captivate a lot of customers for the upcoming festivals:
Durability and Quality: Made from high-quality wood, these ornaments are long-lasting, providing customers with a keepsake they can treasure for years. Unlike fragile glass ornaments, wooden ornaments are more resistant to wear and tear, making them a practical choice for families.
Eco-Friendly Appeal: According to BusinessDasher's report, 72% of consumers said they buy more eco-friendly products than five years ago. In an era where sustainability is increasingly important to customers, wooden ornaments stand out as an eco-friendly product.
Various Personalization Options: This material is evaluated to be one of the most flexible types. Sellers can freely personalize products' shapes and thickness to be suitable for their ideal designs.
Premium Look and Feel: Wooden ornaments give off a rustic, high-end look that appeals to those looking for decor with a handmade feel. This aesthetic quality adds to their perceived value, allowing sellers to price them competitively while maintaining healthy profit margins.
In reality, in the home decor market, custom wooden ornaments are appreciated as an evergreen product, but their demand increases greatly during the holiday season. Here are the main reasons why many print-on-demand merchants choose this ornament to develop their design for every holiday as well as the whole year:
Perfect for Gifting: Wooden ornaments are ideal for gifting, whether it's as a personalized holiday gift or a keepsake for a special event. Their affordability, combined with the ability to personalize them, makes them a go-to product for gift buyers, providing sellers with excellent cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
Personalization as a Growing Trend: For many recent years, personalization has increased stably in e-commerce businesses. Customers value unique items, and custom wooden ornaments allow sellers to offer a highly personalized product that appeals to a wide audience. This growing trend is a strong signal that the demand for customizable wooden ornaments will continue to increase.
Year-Round Appeal: While wooden ornaments are a staple of Christmas decor, they aren’t limited to holiday sales. Sellers can market these ornaments for other special occasions, such as weddings, baby showers, graduations, and even birthdays. The versatility of wooden ornaments allows them to be a year-round product offering.
3- Potential Niches For Developing Custom Ornament Design Ideas
Because the type is made of classic material, this product type is suitable for almost all high-demand niches in the POD market. Whatever your targeted customers are, this product type can help your store be outstanding and captivate many customers for the upcoming holiday time.
Some popular niche sellers can take into consideration to invent new designs for these product types: family, pets, couples, anniversaries, hobbies, and even memorials.
II- How To Choose "Winning" Print-on-demand Ornament For Your Stores
1- Research Market and Customers Insight
Customer Insight researching: This is the first and also the most important step that helps you choose the "winning" products for your store. Especially in the POD market, the demand and interest of customers tend to change continuously and flexibly.
Update trend on different shopping platforms: Whatever platform you are launching your stores, you still need to update the trending products on others such as Etsy, Amazon, eBay, Walmart
Research Tools: One of the most practical ways is using some popular research tools such as Google Trends, keyword tools, etc. to collect and analyze data effectively.
2- Predict Potential Ornament Types
To pick the promising products, sellers need to research to have the right prediction of the potential of this ornament type. In order to achieve this, sellers need to analyze the following factors:
The consuming trend and competitiveness: Carefully evaluate whether your ornament is suitable for the majority of consumers in the market or not. Beyond updating common products that meet huge demand, you need to invent more creative designs, which makes your store outstanding among competitors.
Selling history: Sellers need to analyze the selling data from previous years to have the right conclusion of the market and target customers. Based on the real data, sellers will have the right prediction of the future market.
Potential development on various shopping platforms: Each platform has its own advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, after analysis, sellers need to have detailed plans to optimize their products to be suitable for each type, for example, listing, product description, etc.
3- Evaluate The Profit Margin
In order to have the exact evaluation of the profit margin, sellers can take a look at the following factors:
Manufacturing costs: Manufacturing costs often include materials, hiring employees, and packaging. With POD sellers, this fee is often the product's base cost because almost all fulfillment services take care of manufacturing processes.
Printway is confident to be the leading fulfillment service that provides sellers with the best ornaments at reasonable prices. Recently, we have offered many great deals applied for ornaments, which can help merchants gain a higher profit margin during this holiday time.
Shipping Fees: This is also one of the biggest fees that sellers suffer because the majority of POD merchants need international delivery. Choosing a convenient delivery service at reasonable prices can help sellers optimize fees considerably.
Suitable prices: Prices are one of the most important factors leading to customers' shopping behavior. Especially, during the holiday season, e-commerce websites need to make various sales events to attract shoppers. Besides, merchants need to calculate carefully to balance between their profit margin and the needs of customers.
Profit Calculation: To have the right calculation, sellers need to carefully analyze manufacturing fees, selling prices, and the profit they can get. Print-on-demand Christmas ornaments are estimated as one of the best choices that help sellers skyrocket revenue on holidays.
4- Evaluate Supply Chain Capability Assessment
Ornaments are always among the best-selling products during the holidays. Not only do consumers need unique designs, but they also need large quantities for this product line. Therefore, a reliable fulfillment service needs to ensure certain factors to maximize profits for sellers, especially during the year-end sales season.
Here are some sellers to pay attention to when deciding to choose fulfillment services for their stores:
Printing Quality: With print-on-demand products and especially ornaments, the quality of printing is really important because this ensures the similarity between the mockup design and the real product. When customers receive their products with high-quality designs, your stores will have more opportunities to get more positive reviews from them.
Optimized Costs: You need to ensure that your partners provide stable base costs because this factor directly affects their profits.
Shipping Time: During the sales season, delivery time is also one of the key factors that help your stores easily get satisfaction from consumers because they tend to shop not only to decorate their homes but also to buy gifts for relatives.
Scalability: In addition to considering product quality, sellers also need to evaluate the scalability of fulfillment services. For example, whether the partner can meet the demand if the number of orders increases greatly during the holiday season.
Printway is proud to be one of the ornament manufacturers most trusted by POD sellers because of our outstanding production capacity, meeting most sellers' requirements:
Modern UV printing techniques ensure sharp, vivid print quality for each design.
Large UV printing machines can print up to more than 1000 items at once. Always meet large quantities of ornament
Laser cutting machines ensure flexible cutting of small details while still ensuring high precision
QC system with superior technology helps to minimize the defect status of each product.
Integrating modern printing technology helps to optimize the time of processing print files, speeding up the production process.
III- Tips To Optimize print-on-demand Ornament Sales During Peak Season 2024
1- Test Ads By Last Year's Best-Selling Designs
One of the most effective ways to save time and optimize revenue for sellers who want to boost ornaments business in the fourth quarter of 2024 is to use the same best-selling designs from previous years. However, sellers need to take steps to test ads before deciding to promote ads.
Here are some notes that sellers need to pay attention to when choosing designs and testing ads:
Determine the winning designs and niches of previous years: Sellers need to have specific data from last year to ensure that the selection of "winning" designs is accurate. Some parameters that sellers need to pay attention to are total sales, conversion rate, and customer feedback on each design.
Analyze customer reviews: If sellers have enough data, try to analyze the personalized options that customers prefer on their designs, such as names, colors, and characters. By understanding customer insights, sellers can significantly improve their designs before launching ad tests this year.
Factors affecting purchasing behavior: Moreover, sellers also need to pay attention to other factors related to consumers' purchasing behavior last year, such as early or close-to-date purchases, or whether promotional factors affect their purchasing decisions.
Retarget ads: In addition, sellers can also consider re-approaching the group of customers who purchased last year through improved design versions.
2- Cross-selling and Upselling
The year-end sales season is also an opportunity for sellers to easily increase AOV by cross-selling or upselling due to consumer demand increasing greatly.
Here are some tips to help sellers optimize cross-selling and upselling for their stores, especially when selling wooden ornaments as well as other types during the holiday season:
Upsell for personalized options: During the holiday season, most POD sellers prioritize creating common designs, suitable for a specific target group to ensure quantity and shipping time during peak season. However, if sellers launch products early and can ensure the shipping time, they can completely create a personalized version of the product name or image and upsell for that option.
Create bundles for ornaments: Sellers can completely sell Christmas ornaments by creating combos of home decor products such as hanging signs, ornaments, or Christmas stock. One of the popular methods of creating bundles in the print-on-demand market is to combine products with the same design theme into one bundle. This not only helps sellers increase AOV but also helps optimize the customer experience because they do not need to spend too much time searching for the right product.
Discount when buying products in sets: Ornament is a very special home decor product that sellers can create sets of 3, 5, or 7 items for a package because consumers need a large quantity at the end of the year. If stores do not have too many designs, sellers can upsell by creating more options for a package of many products. *Note: And of course, to encourage the ability to complete orders, you can give more discounts to customers. Buyers will receive a more preferential price when buying products in bundles/sets instead of buying each product individually.
Discount when the order reaches a minimum value: This is also one of the popular cross-sell and upsell methods. Sellers can offer discount programs such as giving away an ornament for orders with a minimum value of $50.
3- Incentives And Promotions
One of the indispensable factors in big holiday seasons to captivate shoppers is discount programs. However, sellers need to have specific strategies for sales programs to ensure that they are suitable for their stores and attract customers. Overusing discount codes can make your customers look down on your promotional programs as well as your products' value.
Here are some discount types that sellers can refer to and apply to their stores during the fourth quarter of the 2024 sales season:
Flash sales: This is considered one of the most popular types with the fastest interaction and efficiency. Flash sales programs take place in a short time, and great deals easily hit the FOMO psychology of customers. And the challenge for sellers is to create an attractive offer to attract customers.
Free but in-time shipping time: One of the most important factors for consumers shopping during the holiday season is shipping cost and time. Therefore, one of the most practical ways to drive customers' attention during this time is offering free shipping codes while you still need to ensure the delivery time before the holidays.
Early Bird Discount: Sellers can create early sale programs for those who quickly register and follow your event. In this way, sellers can collect a quality customer segment with a higher conversion rate before officially starting to promote the sales program.
Loyal Customer Discount: A discount program for loyal customers is indispensable on a big holiday like Black Friday or Christmas. This customer group is often considered to help sellers achieve a high conversion rate as well as AOV. So, do not hesitate to create a separate discount program for this customer group. Sellers can offer some programs such as exchanging points to receive exclusive gifts for these special occasions.
4- Promote Products By Using Photos and Images On Different Shopping Platforms
At the end of the year, a large number of consumers often choose to shop on e-commerce platforms such as Etsy or Amazon. And if you are still hesitant, you should not hesitate to promote your products on these platforms.
However, there are some notes for sellers when promoting their products:
Invest in high-quality images: On online shopping platforms, one of the first factors that helps sellers captivate their potential customers is product images and videos. High-quality images will help consumers have a more intuitive view of the product. Therefore, investing in high-resolution images can help shoppers get a closer look at your products when they zoom in. At the same time, sellers also need to optimize the size and number of images suitable for each platform.
Various Angles: Instead of just providing ornament images with front-facing camera angles, sellers can provide images or videos with more diverse angles or contexts. For example, sellers should add images from a horizontal angle so that customers can see the thickness of the product.
Video Integration: Videos with a length of 15-60 seconds on e-commerce platforms are considered an important factor, being applied by many stores to optimize customer experience. Videos should be introduced first in the product promotion image series so that customers can access the most concise and complete information.
Putting UGC into images/videos: Instead of focusing on product promotion content, sellers can consider implementing UGC into their images/videos. For example, you can make some videos like unboxing products or decorating a Christmas tree by using your ornaments. And by providing visual images or videos from real experiences, customers will evaluate the product with higher credibility and trust.
5- Post-purchases Marketing
Post-purchase marketing is the last and also one of the most important steps. Not only optimizing the customer experience during the shopping process, but post-purchase marketing also helps sellers significantly increase revenue in this sales season.
Currently, most sellers choose email as a channel to promote post-purchase because of its highly personalized message function. Here are some notes that sellers should not ignore in the process of optimizing post-purchase marketing.
Thank you email: Through an email thanking customers for shopping at their store, sellers can add a limited-time discount code. This will motivate customers to quickly return to shopping at your store.
Order Confirmation Page: Immediately after customers complete an order, sellers need to send an email confirming the customer's order. On the order confirmation landing page, sellers can make recommendations for their other products. These suggested products should be optimized based on the customer's previous purchase history.
UGC Campaign: For those who have completed orders, sellers should not miss the opportunity to promote UGC campaigns, encouraging them to share their shopping experiences or use their products on social networking sites. At the same time, sellers should not forget to offer small gifts such as a gift card or free ornament to motivate customers to participate.
Post-holiday offers: For those who have purchased, sellers should maintain interaction and offer offers even after the holiday campaign ends. From late December to early January, many sellers are preparing to promote products for the new year and this is the time to boost marketing to this customer segment. For example, sellers can offer discounts to customers registering early when your collection is officially launched.
Conclusion
As we move into the holiday season, print-on-demand ornaments present an incredible opportunity for print-on-demand sellers to offer personalized, meaningful products that your customers love. Whether it's a cherished family keepsake, a unique pet ornament, or a design celebrating milestones, custom ornaments are versatile and have broad appeal across a variety of niches.
We hope that our recommendations, from tips on choosing "winning" ornaments to marketing strategies, can help you increase sales considerably during this holiday season of 2024.
At Printway, we’re dedicated to providing you with high-quality products and top-tier customization options to help your business thrive. Explore our wide range of custom ornament products today and get ready to meet your customers' holiday needs with unique, one-of-a-kind designs!
Written by
Dieu LinhI fall in love with finding creative ways to promote print-on-demand products online. If you need more creative ideas to optimize for your e-commerce business, especially for POD stores, you can check my posts published on Printway's blog.