Printify vs Printful: Which is a Better Place to Sell Your T-shirt Designs?
When you own your own T-shirt business, everything regarding it needs to be handled by you. Most small businesses and startups don’t have more than one or two owners, and almost no other employees to take care of the formalities.
You might have to end up becoming the designer, the printer, the seller, as well as the distributor and the marketing expert.
Even a small, beginner business needs to be handled with care and attention. Whether your new business will survive and flourish depends on a number of aspects that has to do with both your talent as a designer and your decidedness as a marketer.
As well as a good designer, you need to know about the best places to sell your products to get the best prices and the most appreciative clients.
Of all the Print on Demand (POD) companies that can help sell your T-shirts to potential clients, Printful and Printify are the most popular ones.
They are both similar and different in their approach to clients and providers, and you’ll need to know all the details before choosing one of them for your business.
Before that, you’ll also need to know what these POD companies are and what exactly they do.
What is Print on Demand (PoD) Companies?
Print On Demand (PoD) companies act as the middleman between the T-shirt designers and providers and the clients, cutting back on the risks and mismanagement in between.
You can simply submit your designs to these companies and wait for a potential client to like your designs and place an order; you need to only print a T-shirt after you’ve got an order, which means that there will be no loss from your side.
Printful and Printify are two such PoD companies these days, both extremely popular with clients and T-shirt providers.
Whether you are a designer or if you have your own T-shirt printing business, it is important that you know the important similarities and dissimilarities between these two companies.
1. Method
With Printful, the website itself automates the whole process, where the owner of the business only sells the design. With Printful, you can advertise your designs which, once selected by a buyer, the website places into their own products and delivers to the customer.
The product can be delivered to a paying client anywhere in the world, completely the responsibility of Printful.
The owner of the T-shirt design doesn’t have to occur any kind of loss or management of the product; you only sell your design and Printful does the rest.
Printify has a similar operation. With this website, you can customize your own store with your personal information and designs, and choose the kind of products you can associate your design with.
Printify has a large collection of products, i.e. T-shirts, polo shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases, caps, canvas prints, laptop cases and bags, etc. – in a number of colors and sizes for you to associate your designs with.
Although both Printful and Printify have similar operation techniques, they are also a little different in their methods.
2. Subscription Fee
Both Printful and Printify is free to register, subscribe to and use. However, with
Printify, you can upgrade your plan to pay up to $29 per month after your membership expires. This option is not available in Printful as it is free to use for as long as you want to.
This free subscription refers only to the monthly fee of using Printify and Printful. There are other fees, i.e. fees to connect to Etsy or Shopify, payment gateway fees, etc. that you’ll have to pay to use these websites.
3. Production Network
Printify lets you choose any print provider for your designs, depending on their quality, location and experience. You can choose a provider that is close or to your client so that the product reaches them as soon as possible.
With Printful, you can’t choose the print provider. When a client orders your designs, Printful chooses the print provider who will make the product and deliver it to the client.
As the seller, you will have no say in the quality of the end product, as you won’t be able to choose the company who’s going to make the T-shirt.
4. Ease of Use
When you are the seller, all you need to do is to upload your designs to the website and the rest of the work will be done by the website itself.
In Printful, the process is easier than any other Print on Demand (PoD) company; here, with the special design tools, you can upload any kind of logos, images, designs and pictures to be transferred on to T-shirts, fabrics, caps and mugs.
Your artwork can also be moved around, dragged, resized and relocated to fit the fabric and the size of the clothes. You also get different shipping options with Printful, which is not available in other similar websites.
Printify, on the other hand, is harder to use and takes longer to execute. You have more color options on Printify that you can choose from, which takes longer to customize your designs with the products available on Printify.
5. Price Options
Printify is comparatively cheaper than Printful. With Printify, the cheapest product costs around $5.62 while the most affordable T-shirt from Printful costs around $7.95.
6. Product Diversity
Although close to each other in product diversity, Printify has more product options than Printful.
You can choose between 254 products and colors in Printify, but only from 222 products in Printful. Printify is adding new products almost every month, so the options are always increasing with Printify.
While Printful has options for different men’s and women’s T-shirt, jackets and bomber jackets, towels and other fabric-related products, you can also get completely unique products such as laptop sleeves, wall clothes, tote and canvas bags, backpacks, etc. to print your designs on via Printify.
7. Number of Facilities
Printify has a much wider production network than Printful, as well. Printify operates through a total of 90 providers while Printful only has 5.
Printful operates with print providers from USA, Mexico and Latvia as well as many other countries, and this makes it easier and faster to produce a large number of products in a very short time.
On the other hand, Printful only has 5 providers in USA, UK, Germany and China, and they take longer to produce and complete their orders.
Although both companies promise to complete their orders within 2 to 7 days of production, Printify is often late in completing production.
8. Support
Both Printful and Printify has 24/7 real-time phone support; besides, both companies ensure quality check control before releasing their products to the clients.
9. Quality of Product
The quality of the product, of course, depends on the print provider that is making your product. As the seller, you can choose your own print provider with Printify, which you can do so by researching their product quality, experience and ratings.
You can even change your suppliers if you don’t like their product. Printful doesn’t give you the option and your clients can end up with a bad product, and you can’t help in the decision.
10. Connectivity
Both with Printful and Printify, you can connect your store to Shopify, WooCommerce or Etsy, as well as Amazon, BigCommerce, Inktale, Weebly, Gumroad, Storenvy, BigCarte, ShipStation, Ecwid, TicTail and other such stores.
Connecting to these stores can expose your store to more clients and help increase your business in the future.
When it comes to selling your designs, both Printify and Printful happens to be the two most popular Print on Demand (PoD) company you can connect your business to.
They are both great in context to product quality, diversity and price, but as a seller, Printify gives you more options than Printful.
With Printify, you can:
- Choose the print provider that suits best with your designs
- Get your products printed and delivered faster, especially if you live outside the US. Since Printify has print providers all around the world, your clients can get your products within a very short time.
- Get automatic order fulfilment.
- Get access to a large range of T-shirts, other clothes, and merchandise.
- Get 20% discount if you are a Premium account holder.
- Customize the neck labels of your T-shirts, polo shirts and hoodies.
- Make a profit without any kind of risk or investment.
- Print your designs on clothing, T-shirts, shoes, accessories, jewelry, home decor, and stationery items.
- Choose from a large range of cuts, materials, sizes and colors.
- Connect to 5 stores, mock-up generator, get access to unlimited products and integrate your products to Etsy, WooCommerce and Shopify.
- Upgrade to a Premium account for $29 to connect to 10 stores, get 20% off products and custom order import on your products.
- Further, upgrade to an Enterprise plan and connect to unlimited stores and unlimited products, get a dedicated account manager and branded customer support.
- Make transactions without any hidden or commission fees.
- Ensure quality by choosing a print provider yourself.
While both Printful and Printify, sellers get to sell their designs to potential clients by printing them on T-shirts, hoodies, polo shirts, bags, caps, mugs and many other products.
However, it is Printify that gives both the sellers and the clients a better service and smoother transaction.
