Is Starting a TPT Shop Worth It? My experience

Last updated on September 27th, 2023 at 03:09 pm

Welcome to my series on my personal experiences in earning side income! Here I share details of my own stories in order to bring to light honest reflections. It should be noted that these are tales of my TPT experiences and not everyone will have the same outcomes.

As a new teacher scrambling for resources, I made quick friends with TPT (called Teachers Pay Teachers back then). As a more experienced, creative teacher who had a tendency to go overboard and create a lot her materials, setting up a TPT shop looked like an attractive and easy option to make some extra dollars. Here’s my honest reflection of my past eight years as a TPT teacher-author, how much money I made, and whether I consider it a worthwhile venture in 2023.

What is TPT?

TPT is a website where people can purchase or sell digital educational materials like lesson plans, learning games, units, presentations, etc. One can join as a buyer or seller (or both!).

This site was my go-to when I was teaching and needed a resource quickly. I’d try my luck first by using the Free price filter, and if I didn’t find anything matching my needs, I’d adjust the filter again. The site has been running for over a decade, with hordes of teachers contributing over those years, TPT is a trove of over 4 million resources.

Each TPT seller needs to provide at least one free product in his or her shop, which serves as a sample and what to expect for the rest of the offerings.

That means TPT can be a database of helpful free resources. My shop’s free resources were created in 2015 and revolve around my narrowly specific obsession with creating clipart minions (like Despicable Me minions) at the time.

For those that want to become what TPT calls Teacher-Authors, the Basic Seller Membership is free to anyone who wants to set up shop. A Premier Seller Membership costs $59.95 for a year, which includes extra features and allows the seller to earn higher commission rates on their products.

Setting up shop and riding that sweet passive income wave (maybe!)

My thought with starting my TPT shop went like this: If I’m already creating the resource, why not stick it up on the site and watch it earn some money? After all, I’d read famed stories of teachers turning into millionaires from this site!

But it isn’t that simple, of course.

Making the product was just one piece of my not-so-passive income puzzle. In my experience, earning money from a digital product on TPT requires the following efforts:

Shop setup + Product creation + Product formatting and listing + Marketing

… a few more steps than just slapping up your original 3rd grade Colonial Days unit.

Not to be detered, I forged blindly ahead. After putting a few products up in my shop and making pennies, I upgraded from the free membership option to paid. This made a difference.

But I was aware of the basics of running a business: my earnings had to exceed my expenses to be profitable. So, with a nearly $60 paid membership per year, I had to make sure I made at least $60 just to break even– and that didn’t include paying myself for my time.

With this drive to make at least $60 in one year, I threw together a simple teacher blog on Blogger called Whims and Woes of a Newbie Teacher. I blogged when I had a chance (which was seldom– I was in my second year teaching) and made posts highlighting the features of my products and how I used them.

Take my illuminating 2015 post about our Holiday Classroom Traditions, for example. In two poorly lit photos taken from my digital camera, I showcase our holiday countdown decoration and also expertly explain how we read “Gingerbread Man: Loose in the School” with a festive craft accompanying it, thanks to my Gingerbread Man template available on TPT.

I sold a little more that $60 that year, so I continued the paid membership for a second year, committed to staying on top of marketing efforts. I posted randomly on the blog and made pins of each product, sharing the posts and products occasionally on my Facebook page.

At the end of my second paid membership year, I downgraded to the free version with the goal of just coasting. TPT was no longer going to be a focus for me, but I wouldn’t be opposed to receiving a few dollars here and there from the sales.

How my TPT shop fared

My shop was complete at ten products. Its theme in the early days was minions. Lots of iterations of big-eyed yellow figures I created (to my delight!) in Microsoft PowerPoint. I crafted a one-eyed minion and a two-eyed minion and advanced to sophisticated versions like Disco Minion and Caveman Minion. These masterpieces are featured in several of the products, like my Minion Sight Words Games and End-of-the-Year pack.

My product with the most sales was a nine-page Minion Back-to-School worksheet packet that I priced at $1.25. This handy little packet has earned $87.88 to date. Though this product had the most sales, it wasn’t actually the highest earner– because of its higher price, my product with the highest earnings was my 50-page Primary Antarctica Unit to accompany “Mr. Popper’s Penguins,” which I listed for $4.50 and later reduced to $3.50. The penguins roped in $94.47 to date.

Because I wasn’t adding any new products, the shop became pretty much abandoned, though still running on autopilot. I’d get sales here and there.

An attempt to revive the shop

In 2022, when I was freshly postpartum and practically living on our couch with the newborn, I craved ways to interact with the outside world, to make money and contribute to the household besides the obvious providing for this infant’s every need.

I created more products for the shop in hopes of attracting a few more sales.

The last year I taught, pushed into the online platform by the pandemic, I perfected the Google Workspace and was able to create interactive games with Google Slides– the students could click on a picture or text that would land them on another page, in another scene, almost like a video game.

I drew on these skills to create what I thought would be three high-demand products– what I called “Plug and Plays” where teachers could input an instruction or task on each slide and have students would work through the slides like a game. I created these immersive and detailed scenes, in thematic settings, like my Haunted House product and my Fall Festival listing.

None of my new mom products sold– not even one.

Because time spent creating these was more rare as a mom to a newborn, I felt this disappointment more acutely. I felt I wasted my precious time.

The current state of my shop

Since my failed postpartum labor of love, I have not added any products to the shop. I don’t plan to.

I have to carefully consider how my time is best spent– and my recent experience is showing me that I probably will not get the greatest return on my time spent in this way.

But that doesn’t mean I’m closing up shop. I’m still a fan of the $1.52* payments that hit my inbox every month. I consider them my little tip, years later, as tribute for my dedicated time as a teacher.

Besides the free time gained from leaving the shop open and doing absolutely nothing to maintain to it, it’s also there if I ever decide to pick it back up in the future.

The unexpected price tag of running the shop

My experience has been that selling on TPT is not a magical, effortless way to add a passive income stream. If anything, it was full of effort and added a passive income trickle.

People have had great success on the site, but I’d wager their accomplishments are in the minority.

(A consideration I find it helpful to ask when listening to these success stories is if the influencer is selling a product that helps people sell on TPT.)

Just like when I set out to run a home bakery business, I found there were unexpected time sucks when it came to TPT.

Formatting, for instance. You’re not likely to garner too many sales for throwing up a dated-looking Microsoft Word document with 8-point lettering and questionable fonts. Customers will sail by if your preview thumbnails are blurry or nonexistent.

Formatting is one’s packaging on TPT, and to get any attention, I suggest putting time into it. I frustratingly delved into it too much, envying the TPT stars and their cutesy cover pages and perfect-looking products with in-vogue borders and clip art and weirdly upbeat but ultimately incorrect fonts (don’t get me started on TPTers that use fonts mixing uppercase and lowercase letters like they’re constructing a ransom note out of Seventeen magazine instead of teaching young children print concepts!).

The clipart rabbit hole is how I got into creating Minions with shapes in PowerPoint, by the way.

Pricing is another element that involves time and thought. It’s worth researching products similar to yours in order to set something that would realistically be paid for by customers but also end up being profitable. The TPT site provides guidance on pricing.

Marketing is yet another time-cost (and an actual dollars and cents cost depending on how you go about it!) Simply putting up products unannounced will likely get them lost in the site’s sea of millions of offerings. Some time (this can vary on a huge spectrum based on what you want to do) dedicated to informing others about the products is necessary in most cases. I had a halfthearted blog and Instagram slightly dedicated to promoting my TPT products, and though I won some sales, my results were… halfhearted.

Verdict: Is selling on TPT worth it for me?

This sneaky accumulation of time spent on creating, listing and advertising products still has me baffled as to whether the TPT shop has been worth it for me.

Site user experience

The site itself is an easy-to-use platform– as a seller, I can look at my shop metrics for information that will guide my business decisions from pricing to where to place my focus in marketing or future products.

The ease of having a shop, once it’s all set up, is a major plus to the endeavor.

Earning potential

My shop’s all-time earnings were $354.33. This is for eight years of being open. Subtract two years of memberships (about $120) and we get $234.

Is the $234 worth the time it took to earn? I have no idea, and I can’t even put an estimate on that. Now that I’m on the free Basic Seller membership, I don’t expect to earn a whole lot. On the free plan, the seller keeps 55 percent of earnings minus a 30 cent transaction fee for each resource sold. This means for the sale of a $1 product, I’d see 25 cents. (If I calculated that right)

I could place more emphasis on this shop by upgrading my membership and investing in more advertising. That would both increase sales and increase the percentage I make off each sale, but I have my doubts that it would be worth the extra expense. I have other things in my life I’d rather focus on right now.

What I learned about succeeding on TPT

While I haven’t achieved enviable TPT stardom, I have made 356 sales at the time of this writing. Here is what I learned about making sales:

Choose a specific title for your products

Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the term “Plug and Play” with my 2022 products that didn’t sell. I made up that term, as far as I know. People aren’t searching for it, so they won’t know it exists.

In addition to making the title recognizable, it’s better to go specific than too broad. When I just searched “multiplication games” on TPT, 42,000+ results came up. But when I typed in “Rainforest multiplication games” only 10 results showed. So it’s worth advertising a theme or specific angle for your product in the title so your product appears in the first page or so of search (I think this is why my minion stuff flies of the shelves, so to speak! Teachers are apparently looking for good minion-themed materials.)

One tactic for specific titles I like to use is putting up products to go with particular books. I ended up searching specific book titles countless times on TPT to find extra games, resources and engaging, out-of-the-box content to go with novels we were reading in class. Aligning a product with a book title will help it stand out.

Market your products

Even if you don’t have a ton of time to commit, I think it’s worth letting the world know your product is out there, what it’s used for, etc. If you have photos of the product in use, that’s great. A whole blog or Instagram post detailing how you used it in the classroom is even better.

There are so many platforms and social media channels to market on, it’s easy to get flustered. If you need to be judicious with your time, I’d suggest trying maybe two platforms at once. The TPT seller dashboard allows you to see where your shop traffic is coming from, so you can check this for what’s working and focus your efforts on that specific channel. Platforms that I think work well for advertising TPT products are Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and blogs.

Have fun with it

It’s easy to compare yourself with other sellers, but let’s face it: We don’t all have infinite time and resources to pour into our products. If you want to compare your new shop with anyone’s, compare it with mine, and I promise you’ll feel better.

I like to offer up helpful, informational, time-saving products, but they don’t look like they were designed by a professional or anything close to that. That’s okay with me. I’m fine for now with my slightly frumpy products that don’t take over my life.

I hope you found this article to be illuminating– and, as always, I tried to convey my experience honestly. So many others have different outcomes than I did, so feel free to expand your research if you’re thinking about setting up a shop. If you do start selling on TPT, let’s follow each other. Until next time!

*What I make monthly is more like a range anywhere from $0.00 to $2.50.

Here are some other side hustles I’ve tried:

Babysitting for Extra Cash

Can a Home Bakery Be Profitable? My Experience

My Experience with House Cleaning as Side Job

Is Starting a TPT Shop Worth It? My Experience

My Side Hustle as a Substitute Teacher