Thinking about starting your online crafting business and wondering what is the best print on demand site – Printify vs Printful? Keep reading!
Did you know that you can start an online crafting business with $0 in your pocket? Yes, you read that right – for free.
We all know that one of the biggest challenges of getting started with a crafting business is inventory, right? You may already have a Cricut at home, but what if your budget is tight or you just don’t have the space to store the products you want to sell? 🤔 This is a problem I’ve faced way too often. But…
You don’t have to give up on your dreams of launching your business. Print-on-demand services like Printify and Printful make it SO easy to start selling products with your design. Today, I’m going to compare Printify and Printful to help you choose the right one for your business.
But first, let’s answer one important question –
Print-on-Demand? What’s That?
Print-on-demand services allow you to upload your designs and put them on t-shirts, mugs, tote bags and more.
These service providers handle:
- The printing
- The shipping
- The inventory storage
- Everything!
The only thing you have to do is add your design and choose the product you want to sell.
Don’t forget that I have lots of great designs in my shop for print-on-demand products! Check them here.
So, what’s the catch?
Each product comes at a cost (of course). If you want to turn a profit, you’ll need to sell at a mark-up. But the trade-off is that the service handles all of the fulfillment process, and they typically have huge catalogs of products you can customize. We’re talking candles, hoodies, tote bags, bed sheets, eco-friendly products – the whole nine yards. While there are lots of print-on-demand services out there, two stand out in the crowd: Printify and Printful.
Printify
Printify has a massive catalog of products that you can customize and sell (even stickers!).
But what makes them different is that they use a network of sellers instead of having all of their own inventory.
They kind of act as a middleman between you and a supplier.
What’s great about that is that there’s competition, so this helps keep supplier prices lower and ensures that they offer quality products.
Plus, if a printer is unable to fulfill your order for some reason, you can enable Auto Rerouting to have another supplier fulfill it so that your order arrives on time.
And they have hundreds of products to choose from:
Designing is fun and simple, thanks to their editor. Just choose a product, find a provider that interests you, and click the “Start Designing” button. You’ll be taken right to the editor, where you can upload your design. SO EASY!
If you purchase a design from our shop, you can upload your PDF right to the editor in seconds.
You can edit different parts of the product, too. For example, you can add graphics to the front and back of a t-shirt.
I will say that customization is a little more limited compared to Printful (more on that shortly), but it’s really not a deal-breaker.
Once you’ve made your design, you can even create mockups. Printify has a number of different options for mockups, and you can even add your own background if you want.
And if you want to judge the quality of the products for yourself, you can order samples right through Printify under the My Products section.
💥To make the selling process even easier, Printify allows you to connect your store right to their platform. 💥
Printify’s easy setup and store connection make them a great option for beginners.
They also have a super thorough Help Center area where they answer just about any question you can have about using their service.
Here’s how it works:
Printful
Printful is similar to Printify in many ways. The biggest difference is that they don’t have third-party suppliers. But they do have fulfillment centers around the world, and their products are high-quality.
They have over 300 products to choose from in a wide range of categories:
One advantage of Printful is that you typically have more customization options, especially with apparel. For example, with a hoodie, you can customize the:
- Left chest
- Center chest
- Large center
- Left wrist
- Right wrist
- Back
Similar options are available for shoes, t-shirts, hats and more.
Like Printify, you can easily integrate your store to make order processing easy as pie. They also have lots of resources on their website to help make your print-on-demand business a success.
If you really want to make a unique and custom product with your designs, then Printful may be the right option for you.
What About the Pricing?
Both Printful and Printify have a free plan. This means that there’s no monthly fee for using their services. You’ll only need to pay for the products you buy, after the order is made + shipping. Having said this, both sites offer a monthly plan/subscription that gives you discounts on the product costs. This is especially good if you already selling your products and making money every month, which can help you increase profitability. In their paid plans, they also offer some additional tools that you can unlock with a monthly subscription, but all of these are optional.
You can check Printify’s pricing on their site here. And Printful’s pricing on their site here.
If you want more information the pricing and how it can affect your revenue, check out this review below:
What About Designs?
I think that if you want your shop to stand out, you should make your own designs. If you’re not sure where to start, you’ll need to make a market research to understand better what people are looking for and what are the best selling products and designs on the market.
This will also help you make more money by increasing the chances of selling the most popular designs and products. You can easily make this research with tools like Alura, that can tell you exactly what are the most popular products soled on Etsy. This doesn’t mean that you should copy them, but you can definitely learn a lot from them and check things like, best selling type of clothes, most popular quotes, style of designs, etc.
Tools that you can use to design your products are Canva, Photoshop, Illustrator and even AI image generators. You just need to make sure you have the right plan that allows you to print the designs on products, from the copyrights aspect.
If you’re not a great designer, or just want to save time, there are plenty of shops on Etsy, and other digital marketplaces, or sites like DesignBundles.net where you can buy ready designs that you can use to print on your products. We have some great designs in our shop that you can use for your print-on-demand business – Check out my latest files here.
Once your shop is set, make sure to read my Pinterest guide – where I share my full Pinterest strategy that helped me reach $1000 on the third month after starting my new Etsy shop.
Related: 17 Unique Cricut Projects to Sell and Make Money from Home
Questions to Ask and Things to Check Before You Choose the Best Print on Demand Site?
- What products do you want to sell and what site offers them? You can open a demo shop or calculate all the estimated expenses to see the total revenue.
- What is the quality of the products? After checking the most popular type of product, I would order a sample to check the quality. For example, when I looked for the best type of t-shirt that people like (which also has the lowest chance people return it) I found that Bella+Canvas 3001 are a great option people like. If you’re not sure, look for reviews on YouTube, there are so many great tutorials about this.
- What is the cost of the delivery? If it’s too pricy, it might affect your pricing model (include or exclude delivery costs) or maybe you’ll need to look for a different supplier.
- What delivery destinations are available?
- What product colors do they have?
- How long will it take to deliver the products? People don’t like to wait and will want to get their order asap. If the production and delivery takes time, you’ll need to update your clients.
- What users say about their service? Look for more YouTube reviews from sellers who share their stories.
- Is the monthly paid subscription worth it? If you have an established website and lots of traffic you can send to your shop, calculate the revenue if you subscribe to their monthly plan.
- Can you integrate the your shop to their website easily? I tried them with Etsy, and I found that Printfify was pretty fast and easy to integrate. If you want to open your own shop, Shopify would be the best option for you. Here is my guide on how to open a Shopify shop fast and easy.
- How good is their support? This is crucial because you need them to be available and reply as fast a possible when there is a problem and you need help. For example when there is a problem with a product they sent or your client didn’t get their order. Try to contact their support and see how fast they reply and how hard is it to reach out to them.
Final Thoughts,
Printify and Printful are both great options for starting your online crafting business. They work in similar ways, but each has an advantage.
👉 Printify has lots of suppliers to choose from
👉 Printful has more customization options on some products
You can get started with either service for free!
If you’re worried about inventory and having to invest a lot of cash upfront for your online crafting business, consider print-on-demand services like Printify and Prinful.
And then, once you start building up your business, you can think about handling the fulfillment process yourself – if you want.
