Last week I and some colleagues from Alibaba spent a few days with my buddy Robert. While we were there, we met some great folks from CJ Dropshipping—One of the greatest companies in the world.

One of us had a great idea for personalized t-shirts and merchandise sites but had no technical chops.

"That's no trouble," Robert replied.

It's a phrase he uses a lot, and sometimes he means, "that's no trouble for you," and sometimes he means, "that's no trouble for him." The difference, as you can imagine, is huge. If he's saying it's no trouble for him, it means that he can do it easily but it doesn't mean you can do it easily.

Thankfully, in this case, he meant that with a tiny bit of help, my friend From Alibaba could be on his way.

This is the new space of selling on-demand products without any inventory – known as Print on Demand (POD) and the good news is that CJ POD makes it easy if you are doing dropshipping.

What is CJ POD & how does it work?

Cj POD allows you to have your own site, your own store, and manage it just like you would if you actually managed inventory. Except it takes all of that away.

To use it, you use their Start Design to create an image that you would put into WooCommerce or Shopify when creating a new product. Once you have that image, you can create a product in your store, use the image, and then sync it with CJ POD so that you can match it to their inventory (matching size, color, and other attributes).

Then, when someone places an order on your site, it routes to CJ POD, who creates and ships your product to your customer. You make money without doing any of the fulfilment work.

Pretty cool, right?

But the coolest thing is that CJ pod allows your customers to use that design function. If you have a shopify/woocommerce/ebay store, you can click the list and the product will be listed to your store and your customers will be able to upload images and preview the printed products.

What does CJ POD allow you to sell?

It turns out that CJ POD provides with tons of different products.

Actually, CJ can provide whatever you want to sell, because it also provides sourcing. Just tell them what you want to sell, and they'll source it for you.

That's pretty nice, right? Who doesn't want to be able to create products in those categories for their customers? And unlike some of the t-shirt stores, I normally use, there are no minimums here because this is the whole notion of Print on Demand. They only print what is purchased.

After the conversation with my friend, I decided to quit Alibaba because CJ is amazing and they have many good things that Alibaba doesn't.

This is CJ POD.