When we talk about print-on-demand, we can’t NOT mention Printify –– one of the leading players in the print-on-demand (or POD) dropshipping arena. With them starting earning with little to no monetary investment is quick and pretty straightforward. All you need is an internet connection and design ideas.
What’s Printify?
Printify is a POD service platform that allows you to showcase your custom designs on apparel, stationery, mugs, mobile cases, home décor et all, and not worry about holding inventory. For example, you can make your own shirt within just minutes, as the Printify user interface is so user-friendly and intuitive that even your aunt Suzan can probably figure it out within less than an hour. In this Printify review, we’ll reveal why you should choose Printify over its competitors.
Why choose Printify?
It’s simple – working with Printify is a walk in the park. It’s free, reliable, and lucrative as hell. Printify offers more than 300 different customizable products, including t-shirts, hoodies, sweatshirts, bags, socks, and even jackets and shoes. Printify offers custom printing (direct-to-garment or DTG and AOP or sublimation) and embroidery on their clothing products and provides a wide range of accessories and home decor items, such as cushions, blankets, bath mats, stretch canvas, wall clocks, mugs, and even pet beds.
What’s print-on-demand?
In classic brick and mortar stores, retailers keep an inventory on hand from the products they offer, often acquiring them in bulk at a manufacturer’s wholesale price. Dropshipping, also known as product sourcing, excludes this step. Instead, it allows the retailer to purchase products individually and then market them for a profit in their online storefront. You never have to risk large sums of money on a product you haven’t sold with dropshipping. You also don’t have to bother with storage or packing, and even about finding trustworthy suppliers – Printify has thoroughly vetted and checked all of their print providers.
The POD business model is popular for many different reasons. Customers can buy just one product for their own personal use or buy more than one thing and open their eCommerce store. Creating designs that resonate with the public can lead to many sales over time. These loyal customers can act as a kind of free advertising, encouraging others to buy from you in the future through word of mouth.
How does Printify work?
In the beginning, there was design. And the design was in PNG or JPG in at least 300 dpi. And this design became a piece of apparel or accessory with the brightest of prints. Your design can be anything from a PNG file for a reusable water bottle to a drawing for a t-shirt, shopping tote, or mug. To achieve the best print quality, it is necessary to follow Printify guidelines.
Printify allows customizing design placement on the product through an interactive design tool or mockup generator right in your browser, desktop, and mobile. You simply choose the blank item you wish to design, upload the artwork, and place it on the item. You will then see a beautiful mockup that you can use in your inline storefront. Until this moment, you don’t have to spend a dime because all items in your store are virtual; the production process only starts after a customer makes an order and payment is made. Printify will then take care of production, packaging, and shipment.
This is the great thing about Printify: they take all the hard work on themselves – production and logistics – and automate it to the extent that you can forget about it and focus on creating art all day long.
Printify’s features
Like we mentioned previously, you do not have any upfront costs. You only pay after your customer orders a product from your eCommerce store. And what’s great with Printify – they work with 90+ print providers, which means you can filter out the blank items by price, shipping time, customer ratings, etc.
Printify has printing partners worldwide, so you can offer goods to your customers no matter where they are: US, UK, EU, or China, which means, Printify can produce goods closer to the end customer and significantly reduce shipping costs.
Order routing
Printify’s network of printing partners offers tremendous flexibility when choosing the print provider of your chosen product. However, to adapt to the situation in times of uncertainty, Printify has developed a tool that automatically transfers the order to another print provider within their print provider network if, for some reason, the original choice is unavailable.
Order routing offers a smooth redirection of the order to another print provider. If enabled, order routing would occur in cases if the product you want is out of stock with the chosen print provider, or the chosen print provider has discontinued the ordered product, as well as if the chosen print provider has reached their daily order capacity, or have been temporarily closed.
An impressive 300+ product catalog
Yes, gone are the days when you could only print on t-shirts and baseball caps. In the Printify’s catalog, you will find hundreds of blank items to customize and sell. Apparel, home decor, accessories, stationery and so much more.
Mockup generator
Bring your ideas to life with Printify’s free design tool. The mockup generator lets you easily drag & drop the designs to upload, switch between colors, pick size options, and preview the designs on a 3D high-quality product mockup. And as we mentioned earlier, you can then use the mockups on your storefront for a sleek and professional look. The mockup is designed to add products to your store on Shopify and other online marketplaces.
Migration Tool for Shopify Users
For Shopify users, there is now an easy way for you to move their existing products to Printify without losing all the hard invested in SEO and building up the listing reputation. In short, it means that Shopify users can change the fulfillment partner while keeping the same product listing on their sales channel.
Customer Support
Printify provides every merchant with 24-hour support that handles all order-related questions and helps you sell more.
Printify’s competitors
Main Printify competitors are Redbubble and Printful. What sets apart Printify and Printful (fun fact: they’re both Latvian companies) is their business models. While Printful has its own production facilities in the US and Europe, Printify doesn’t produce anything. Instead, they connect merchants with a vast network of vendors worldwide. If we were to compare these two business models, we concluded the following: suppose something goes south with one of Printful’s facilities. In that case, they won’t be able to facilitate a quick solution, whereas, with Printify’s vast network and aforementioned order routing, merchants shouldn’t feel any hiccups.
While Printful’s product catalog is more extensive than Printify’s at the time of writing this article, Printify offers significantly better profit margins than its counterpart. Imaging spending more than $13 with Printful, when you can spend less than $7 with Printify for the same shirt – that’s almost twice as cheap! With Printify, merchants can finally offer affordable, custom-designed t-shirts which are made in the USA, and still earn a profit.
The difference between the two Latvian companies and RedBubble is that the latter doesn’t have a mockup design tool. However, they have a well-structured partner program for designers, freelancers, and artists who can make money for their work by selling designs. With Redbubble, designers can sell licensed fan art for well-known brands. Whereas nor Printful nor Printify allow using copyrighted artwork.
Altogether, if we compare these three companies, they each have their strong suits, but Printify comes out as a clear winner simply because it allows its merchants to earn more. Printify is free for everyone, however, they also offer a paid version in which merchants can save up to 20% on all items and have lower retail prices, resulting in more conversions, more sales, and more profit. In their own words, Printify Premium is for “anyone who is serious about running a successful online store.”
We have partnered up with Printify to offer our readers a free 14-day premium trial using the code ACQUIRECONVERT (case sensitive) after signup.