Teachers Pay Teachers is a great way for teachers to start making some extra money. I encourage everyone I meet to start selling their resources online. That’s why I created this free ebook, to help you get started and to know what steps you need to take to begin.
Once you’ve decided to begin, and you’ve started uploading resources, you need to consider whether or not you will purchase the premium membership.
While the free membership is tempting, after all, you’re not even sure that you will make $60 on the platform, so spending that much money may seem scary.
Here’s why you definitely should purchase the premium membership on TpT.
There are three membership accounts on Teachers Pay Teachers. The first one is free and allows you to make purchases. The second is a basic seller account, which is also free and it allows you to sell products on the platform. Selling products on teachers pay teachers using the basic seller account allows you to keep 55% of the profit you generate from selling your stuff.
The Premium Seller Account costs $60 per year and allows you to keep 80% of your sales. The premium seller account has some other benefits as well: you can upload larger files as well as video previews for your products. The seller account also allows you to upload resources, and it comes with a smaller transaction fee than the basic seller account.
Why it Pays to Upgrade
Consider a $1 product. If you sold it on your basic (free) seller account, TpT will take the first 30 cents as a transaction fee. Then, with the remaining $0.70, you get 55%. Which totals 38 and a half cents!
If, however, you were a premium seller, your transaction fee drops to $0,15 and you would keep 80% of the remaining amount. you would actually make 68 cents (instead of 38). Almost twice as much.
Multiply that by 20 sales and we’re up to $6. Multiply that by 12 months and the Premium Seller account has paid for itself.
Do the same math on a $3 product, and the contrast is $1.49 versus $2.40.
My Second Biggest Regret
When I began selling on TpT, I had the same trepidations as you. Is it worth it to purchase the premium seller’s account? I decided that I wouldn’t purchase the premium account until I had made over $60 on the platform, that way it paid for itself.
It sounded good at the time.
What I failed to realize was that I had to sell over $200 of items on TpT to earn that $60 on the free, basic account. I then spent the $60 I had earned to upgrade. Meaning after I had sold that $200 worth of stuff, I had earned $0.
Had I, instead, purchased the premium account before selling $200 worth of stuff, I would have kept more than $120 worth of the sales. After the $60 to purchase the premium account, I would have made at least $60.
But because I didn’t upgrade until after I had made a decent amount of money on Teachers Pay Teachers, I lost a lot of money.
What Should You Do
It’s okay to start with a free sellers account and get your first product or two up on the platform, or to at least explore what it’s like to sell on TpT before you make the commitment of being a seller and investing the money. But once you understand what you’re doing, commit to being a TpT seller. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to upload a product a day (or even a product a week). But it does mean that you are going to continue to create and upload products to sell when possible, and you’re going to be marketing your products to start making money.
After you’ve made the commitment and you feel comfortable that you know what you’re doing, upgrade to the premium seller account. The sooner the better! Because every sale you make on the free account (as opposed to the premium account) is money lost.
My Biggest Regret
You may be asking, “if that was his second biggest regret, what was the biggest?”
When I began my TpT journey, I was all alone, and had to learn everything by myself. I didn’t know what I was doing, or what worked. It was all trial and error (and reading lots of blog posts).
I did find success, but it took me longer than it should have, and as a result, it cost me a lot of money (as a result of missed opportunities – like the missed opportunity of not starting with a Premium Seller Account).
If I had to do it over, I would start with a coach or a course. Here’s why, I am still going back into my product listings and fixing them. I spend so much time correcting the mistakes instead of creating new products or marketing my current ones. That time spent has an opportunity cost – the money I could be making by growing my store.
If I had someone guiding me, and showing me what to do, the right way, from the beginning, I would have made more money, faster, and would be in a much better place now than I am.
That’s why I created an online course to help educators start earning extra money. In the course, a group of students will all walk through the process of creating their own stores and products, but we will do it together – helping each other, sharing ideas, and celebrating our successes. And I will guide you through the steps you need to know and the actions you need to take to find success.
Learn more about the course, here.
And don’t forget to download the free ebook.
