Printify is one of the leading Print on Demand providers in the market and in this article we’ll take a deep dive into their products and services and and give you a full walkthrough and review of their interface to help you decide if they’re the right POD for you!
What is Printify?
Lets say I want to set up an online shop on a platform like Etsy and I want to sell products like T-Shirts. If someone buys a shirt from my store then I’d either have to print the shirts and distribute them myself or I can find a partner to work with who takes away all of that hassle….
This is where Printify comes in…
Print on Demand providers like Printify are used to produce my products and send them to the end customer.
This means that I never need to hold any stock and I don’t get the hassle of distributing any of the products… this is all managed by the Print on Demand provider.
Printify offers a wide range of products from T-shirts and mugs to Iphone cases and backpacks. Pretty much any high street apparel product that you think of is going to be available.
Printify Walk Through
Step 1 – Choose Your Products
The first thing you need to choose is the product you want to sell from their huge catalogue. For example for T-Shirts alone there are 22 different products to choose from:
Step 2 – Choose Your Print Provider
Not all of the products will be provided by each print provider, however, to help you choose you’ll get a list of details from review score, delivery times and price to the different product options they have available:
Step 3 – Upload Your Design
Find the image that you want, drag it onto the T-Shirt, where you can re-size and position the image as required. In this section you can also choose which colors you’d like to offer the product on as well as different print areas including back, sleeves and inner label:
Step 4 – Add Your Product Details
In this step, you just need to add your title and the description for your product:
Step 5 – Configure Pricing
In this step you set your prices for your product and can add in different prices per color / size option:
Step 6 – Publish Your Listing
In this section you choose where you want to publish your listing. In the example below I have already set up the integration with my Etsy store so if I select the checkbox here, then it will publish it directly to Etsy and will sync any orders that come in from that platform:
Printify Integrations
Within the Printify interface you can set up integrations with the following providers:
- Etsy
- Shopify
- Wix
- Ebay
- WooCommerce
The benefit of doing this is that when you create a product listing, you can push the product directly into your store and do not need to create a separate product listing.
The other advantage of these integrations is if you sell a shirt on one of these other platforms, it will automatically push the product into Printify, who will print the shirt, ship it to the customer, send out shipping details and update the order status.
This means you can pretty much take a hands off approach after you have set up these integrations and you will only need to focus on customer service issues, and just checking that your order gets pushed through.
Printify’s Bad Points
Customer Support
Because you are dealing with an intermediary rather than the Printers themselves there is an extra step in the way of being able to resolve any issues.
You’re basically contacting someone to contact someone else, which inevitably slows down the whole process and makes it really difficult ot make any changes to your orders once they have been submitted.
I made mistakes on a couple of orders and the problem with Printify is that as soon as you click the ‘submit order’ button it is very difficult for you to stop this order as they’ve already sent this into someone elses system. Printful is a much better option in this respect as their customer support is awesome and can turn things around really quickly.
There is also no online chat facility which is a major pain.
Order Times
I had a few large orders that I needed to get out for St Patricks Day and when I looked at the average production times that were quoted I thought I had plenty of time to get the orders out.
However, that wasn’t the case and a couple of my orders were held up and completely missed the deadline. It was really difficult to get any information about what was happening with the order as per my previous point.
In the end I found out that because one of my orders have shirts of different sizes, they weren’t all printed in the same batch and they also had to reprint a couple of the shirts, so they held up the entire order… this could have cost me over $200 but my customer was really understanding and St Patricks Day was canceled anyway due to COVID-19!!!
Processing Manual Orders
I might be missing a trick here but I find the process you need to go through to process new orders, quite laborious as you have to create a brand new product listing every time, which seems kind of pointless.
I’d been selling a lot of personlized shirts so it would have been much easier to just create one product listing and swap the design out each time, but that wasn’t particularly easy to do.
Printify’s Good Points
Price
The biggest advantage for me and the main reason to use Printify will be its price.
For example if I take one of the most popular T-Shirts as an example, The Bella + Canvas 3001, then Printify is offering this for less than $10 per shirt + $4 postage.
This comes in $4 cheaper than Printful and is a lot cheaper than any other Print on Demand provider I could find, and because margins are so tight in this business, this has to be a compelling reason to choose them as your provider.
Choice
So, here’s the thing… Printify is not technically a Print on Demand provider themselves, they are more of an intermediary who use other Printers to fulfil their products.
When you choose which product you’d like to sell in your store you are given a range of print providers to choose to fulfil your product. Each print provider has a different price range, production times, range of colors and printing options, as well as a feedback score which will help you decide which printer to use.
I really like this feature because I can choose different printers depending on how fast I need the product and how much of a risk I want to take that the product will be a quality print and arrive on time!
Range of Products
Because Printify uses a collection of different printers the range of products that they have is simply huge. In fact there may actually be too much choice.
For example they have 22 different types of T-shirts that you can choose from!!!
My Summary
I recently made the switch from Printful to Printify, mainly because I wanted to offer a better quality shirt to my customers, yet I still wanted to keep my prices competitive and make a good enough margin per shirt.
This is why I switched to selling the Bella + Canvas 3001 shirt from Printify, which I can buy from them for less than $12 a shirt including shipping fees. On Etsy I can sell these shirts for $25, which gives me a pretty healthy profit per shirt.
So far things have worked well and my deliveries have been fairly smooth apart from some orders I tried to squeeze in for St Patricks Day. I think in general if you’re using Printify give yourself enough time and flexibility in your shipping times in case orders go wrong and you need to go through their customer support.
Printify Review Video
If you’d like to see Printify in action, here’s a little video I put together of the platform:
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