Printful is one of the most popular on-demand printing services in the world, allowing people to custom print on a variety of products both for business and pleasure. There are, however, some compelling alternatives. Here are the top seven powerful Printful competitors in 2020 for your consideration.
Printify
How it works and Unique Selling Points
Printify has worked hard to make its services as straightforward as possible for e-commerce businesses that want to print on merch and then ship it to their customers.
The first step is to select the product that you want to print. As with most quality custom merch printing services, Printify offers a wide variety of products on which you can print. The next step is to customize the design in with your personalized message or logo. Interestingly, Printify lets you select the print provider in your region and trial run a sample product to see whether the quality meets the standard you want.
After that, all you need to do is add products to your shop, and you’re done: Printify takes care of fulfillment for you.
Printify’s unique selling point is its production network. It allows sellers to choose their print provider location from facilities in a variety of countries, including China, the UK, the USA, and Germany. The brand also offers a higher product diversity than other services, including Printful, stocking more than 235 products in 2020.
Pricing
Printify has three pricing options: Free at $0/month, Premium at $29/month, and Enterprise, which has custom pricing depending on the needs of your business.
The Free account gives you unlimited product designs, access to the mockup generator, integration with popular selling sites, and 24/7 merchant support. Premium adds custom order import and gives you a 20 percent discount on all products. Finally, Enterprise offers things like a dedicated account manager and custom API integration.
Integrations
Printify offers a range of popular online selling platforms, including Etsy, Shopify, eBay, Woocommerce, and custom API integration.
Printify provides instruction for integrating each platform. For Shopify, for instance, the process is easy. You create an account, connect it to your Shopify store, and then Printify will sort out the rest in the background.
Teefury
Unique Selling Points
Teefury is an art-driven printing service, focused on exclusive tee-shirt prints. The brand regularly churns out new pop culture tees available for a limited time to give people who want to sell merch online more options.
TeeFury also focuses on ethical business practices and fairness. To this end, it pays its artists $1 for every tee that you buy through the platform. Some artists have earned up to $9,000 from a single tee-shirt.
How it works
So how does the TeeFury system work?
The basic idea behind TeeFury is to provide emerging artists with a platform that they can use to get the word out about their work. If you’ve got an inspiring design that you want to share with the world, you can upload it to the TeeFury platform and start earning royalties from every sale.
The great thing about the platform is that it provides an outlet for artistic talent. You can also build a fanbase and keep your copyright, meaning that once you create a design, you own it for life.
TeeFury has several submission guidelines you need to follow if you want to use its services. The images you upload to the platform need to have a minimum resolution and not infringe on the copyright of others.
Society6
How it works
Society6 is a platform through which aspiring artists can debut and showcase their work, all while connecting with other like-minded people on the web. The service brings both new and seasoned artists together to create beautiful artwork and print them on a range of products, including wall art, home decor, clothing, and lifestyle products.
The way it works is simple. First, you create an account with the site and then start uploading work to your artist’s shop. You can then choose which products you’d like your art to appear on, including things like rugs, cushions, wall art and so on. Don’t worry: there are lots to choose from. All that’s left is to start selling and, hopefully, watch the earnings roll in.
As with the other services we’ve discussed so far, Society6 takes care of all of the shipping and fulfillment for you, so you don’t have to worry about the technical details. This factor lets you focus on creating the art you love.
Unique selling points
It can be challenging for artists to get their work out into the market and earn a commission for their efforts, but Society6 makes it happen. Unlike many services, it focuses on helping artists focus on what they do best: creating art, while attending to all the administrative details in the background. It’s a simple-to-use one-stop-service that could provide a healthy income.
Furthermore, Society6 is keen to emphasize the role of community, providing artists with an opportunity to meet other like-minded people from around the world, and share ideas. Becoming a member helps individual members to learn what works and what doesn’t from others.
SPOD
How it works
SPOD wants to help Shopify businesses upgrade the products that they can offer through the platform by providing custom printing and product personalization.
All you need to do is send the company your design. It’ll then select products from its warehouses, take them to its printing hub, and, hopefully, faithfully recreate your design. The company currently has 45 printing machines and has printed an incredible 35 million products since its founding in 2002.
Unique selling points
SPOD isn’t a do-it-all company focused on selling every product on every platform. What makes it stand out is its incredible efficiency and reliability.
The company offers three main selling points: high quality, fast turnarounds, and competitive prices. It currently has a less than 0.5 percent return rate and can send out products in less than 48 hours, allowing sellers to take advantage of flash trends. What’s more, it’s bulk model enables you to achieve higher margins for every product that you sell.
Shipping and Prices
SPOD prides itself on being transparent about its shipping and prices. The company, therefore, lists all of its costs in full on its sites.
SPOD offers three shipping types: Standard, Premium, and Express. Standard aims to get your delivery out to you within three to nine days and offers Saturday delivery. Premium will ship your goods within three to five days, and Express will get them to you in two to three days.
The total amount you pay for shipping depends solely on the order value, not the type of merch that you want to ship. All the details provided upfront and no hidden fees.
Integrations
While SPOD might not offer native integration with your shopping cart, you can integrate it via a service called Order Desk. Order Desk imports orders from the shopping cart on your e-commerce site and automatically sends them for SPOD to fulfill. From there, SPOD takes over, shipping your products to the customer. While the integration is a little more fiddly than some of the other Printful alternatives, it works like clockwork once you’ve set it up.
Spreadshirt
How it works
Have you ever wanted to design your own products? If so, then Spreadshirt might be the platform for you.
Spreadshirt offers a variety of user-friendly tools designed to let you whip something up in a matter of minutes, without having to use your own design software.
Your first option is the Spreadshirt Marketplace. Essentially, this is a place where can pick up the best designs of the Spreadshirt community, paying a fee to the artists who created them, alongside the regular manufacturing and shipping costs involving sending out merch,
The second tool is Personalization. This tool lets you build personalized products from scratch using in-browser art tools. You can import art, use clip art, write custom text, and do pretty much whatever else you like, without having to know the first thing about computer-aided design.
The third option is to use Spreadshirt to create your own designs and market your brand all within the platform itself. Spreadshirt does all of the background work, like providing payment systems, doing fulfillment, and taking care of shipping. All you do is focus on selling. The platform integrates with Amazon, eBay, Rakuten, and other marketplaces.
Print-On-Demand
Spreadshirt’s store is an offshoot of SPOD – Spreadshirt Print-On-Demand. You can, therefore, take advantage of SPOD’s printing prowess to print products on-demand and ship them out to customers within just 48 hours.
Spreadshop
How Spreadshop Works And It’s Unique Selling Points
Spreadshop is on a mission to help customers quit their day job by running their own business, selling products on the side and, eventually, making it their primary source of income.
First, you upload your design to your Spreadshop store and choose the products that you’d like to sell. Then the Spreadshop team deals with all the usual hassle in the background: payments, production, shipping, and fulfillment. What’s great about the service is that there’s no direct cost to you: the customer picks up the tab. You’re then free to come up with artwork as you please and sell it on the online store.
Spreadshop tries to put you in control. You’re able to modify the appearance of your store in line with your brand goals and can use the provided tools to make quick changes. You’re also able to get a customized URL – you don’t have to stick with the one that Spreadshop gives you. Finally, if you’ve got a website, you can quickly integrate Spreadshop using a plugin. Plus, if you’re not sure what to do, then Spreadshop can take care of the process for you.
The ultimate goal of the service is to help you make the highest commissions possible. The company promises that you’ll receive at least a 20 percent on every sale that you make, and that you’ll get additional bonuses for selling at volume.
Spreadshop Pricing
Spreadshop pricing is undeniably customer-friendly. The service claims that “you’ll never pay a penny” and, in a sense, they’re right. You’ll never have to fork out for a monthly premium for the service.
It’s a little disingenuous, however, to say that you’ll never pay. The reason for this is how the pricing works. Whenever you make a sale, Spreadshop keeps more than 40 percent of the proceeds in their words, “to continue to keep Spreadshop free.” What this means is that money that you would receive from customers were you to sell to them directly instead gets siphoned off by Spreadshop.
Spreadshop pays out monthly for all of the sales that you make, a bit like a regular salary. You start by receiving a 20 percent commission for every transaction, rising to 40 percent if you sell at volume. The platform also provides you with the ability to promote your products to customers, grow your customer base, and start making real money. There are no fees to pay ever, make it risk-free.
Teespring
How it works
Teespring is a turn-key solution for creating customized products and running an e-commerce business. The service offers a range of customizable products and provides all the tools that you need to get your e-commerce company off the ground.
The first step to making money on the platform is to open the Teespring launcher and start designing the product you want to sell, choosing from things as diverse as tablecloths to smartphones. Next, you use Teespring’s marketing tools and network to advertise to customers and get the word out about your product. Teespring then deals with all the complexities of printing and order fulfillment in the background, allowing you to sit back, relax and, hopefully, collect a profit. Should things go wrong, there’s a dedicated customer service line to call.
Unique selling points
Teespring’s name is a little misleading. While you can sell custom tees and apparel, the platform’s main selling point is that you can ship just about any product you like to practically any country in the world. Leggings, rucksacks, phone cases – it’s all there ready and waiting for customization.
Teespring also offers what it calls its “boosted network.” The platform knows that the main stumbling block for aspiring e-commerce businesses is getting their shops off the ground. It, therefore, allows sellers to get their products in front of potentially millions of people around the world relatively quickly while at the same time protecting brands, providing review features, and doing so at zero upfront cost. Not bad.
Integrations
The standout feature of Teespring is the ability to sell pretty much anywhere you like. The platform lets you integrate with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Walmart, eBay, YouTube, Etsy, and many others.
Of particular note is the integration with YouTube. Teespring’s “Merch Shelf” is a tool that customers can use to position their merchandise directly underneath the video, putting products on prime screen real estate to grab the attention of prospective customers.
The Google Shopping feature is impressive, too, allowing you to create campaigns and take advantage of the current underutilization of the platform by other merchants.
Redbubble
How it works
Redbubble is a global marketplace for independent artists, allowing thousands of people to upload their artwork and reach new audiences. The purpose of the site is to make it easier to sell your work and receive a commission for every piece that you produce.
The first step is to create and upload your work to your Redbubble profile. Once you do this, your art is then viewable by millions of people who visit the site every day. From there on out, Redbubble does the rest. It handles the payment for your work, coordinates the printing for your products, arranges delivery, and manages customer service issues too. What’s so exciting about Redbubble is how it makes your creativity scalable. You upload the creative design, and then the platform deals with the practicalities of delivering your work to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of customers.
What’s great about it is that the earnings potential is potentially limitless. If customers like your art, they’ll buy more of it, and you’ll get a margin on each product sale.
Unique Selling Points
The main selling point of the service, besides the fact that it deals with all the payment and fulfillment issues, is that you have control over your margins. Redbubble sets a base price covering the costs of their services and then gives you complete control over the premium that you want to charge for each good. If you think that your design is worth a lot, then you can charge more for it, while retaining complete copyright control. The base price for Redbubble’s service plus your margin is the final price that the customer sees at retail. The average artist on the platform earns around 17 percent margin on their products, with figures ranging from 10 to 30 percent.
Conclusion
Printful is the most dominant player in the print-on-demand market, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t valuable alternatives out there. In fact, many of the options we’ve discussed here are actually more suitable for niche groups, especially budding artists. What’s more, it’s often possible to make a more lucrative return with these alternatives, primarily because they cater to specific audiences. Companies and individuals all stand to benefit. Be sure to explore your options thoroughly.
