In this episode, I’m going to review the primary print on demand platforms that many sellers use to fulfill their orders. I’ve had my Etsy print on demand shop since August 2020, and I’ve used several different fulfillment platforms. In fact, I’ve used all the platforms that we’re going to be reviewing today.
We’re going to break this down by comparing several key criteria across the platforms, starting with who is actually fulfilling your orders. Links to all platforms can be found at the bottom of the article and on our POD Resources page.
Order Production
You might think that the company you create an account with is handling fulfillment directly, but in many cases that’s not true. Printful is the exception here, because they own all their primary fulfillment locations as well as the software platform that integrates with your Etsy shop (more on integrations later). This has its benefits and drawbacks. One benefit is that their software is fully integrated with their production system, which allows you to do things like cancel an order right up until it goes into production, which is not always possible with other platforms that are not fully integrated with the production facility. Another benefit is that Printful controls all aspects of fulfillment, giving you access to things like a custom packing slip with your logo and gift messages, which Etsy customers appreciate and other platforms don’t currently offer those features. A drawback of this setup is that if a product you sell is out of stock, you have limited options: you can wait for it to be back in stock, cancel the order, or look to another platform to fulfill the order. You also only have one price option for each item, meaning you can’t look for a lower-cost provider within the platform because it’s just Printful. Printful does have production facilities in several countries including the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, Latvia, and Spain so they have international shipping covered. However, if your order is fulfilled at an international location, your cost is often higher so you need to pay attention to how much you charge for international shipping to make sure you have higher costs covered.
Printify gives you a centralized experience with their platform but instead of owning the production facilities, they provide integration with a large number of independent print providers. Meaning, your product listings and orders are managed by Printify, but the order is fulfilled by an independent company that focuses on printing for many customers. You are able to select the print provider that you want to use for each individual listing that you create, and you can even choose to switch provider for individual orders if needed. This gives you control over finding the best price and best quality among the providers. Printify also has print providers located in several countries so you can have orders fulfilled as close to the customer as possible, and pricing differences for international providers is easy to understand. One benefit to this besides different price options is that when your preferred provider is out of stock of an item, you can keep your customer’s order within the Printify platform and simply have a different provider fulfill the order. A drawback to this setup is that the level of integration with the platform can vary from one provider to another. This means that some providers can allow you to cancel an order until it goes into production, but some will not allow you to cancel an order after it is submitted. So if you get a request from a customer to cancel an order and it’s already been submitted, even if it hasn’t started production yet you may not be able to cancel it. Another drawback, although this one may not matter as much to everyone, is that because you have these options and choices, it can take more time to manage.
Gooten is kind of a blend of both of these business structures, at least as far as how they present it to you in their platform. Gooten offers a variety of products and only presents you with one price option per item, like Printful. But they still contract with independent production partners for order fulfillment, like Printful. Basically your orders are fulfilled by another company but you don’t select who that is. This keeps things simple for sellers, but offers less control.
Gelato is another platform that offers a smaller selection of POD products, and they also use independent print providers to fulfill orders. They have a pretty wide network of international providers, and in my experience they’ve been able to get international orders delivered more quickly (and at a lower cost) than other platforms like Printful.
Finally, CustomCat is a platform that is structured more like Printful, because they handle their own fulfillment. They offer a fairly wide variety of products but in my experience where they are behind competitors is their seller interface, as it’s just not as easy to use. Speaking of the user interface, let’s talk about that for each of these suppliers next.
User Interface
Printful and Printify are on pretty equal ground when it comes to their user interface. Both platforms are easy to use, have good design creation visualizers, and an easy listing creation & publishing process. They also both have a simple order management dashboard that enables you to quickly review, edit, and submit orders. I could nit-pick a few things about each, but compared to the other platforms I’d say Printify and Printful are in their own class as far the quality and ease of use of their web platform.
Gooten also has an easy to use UI, but I’d put it just one step below Printful and Printify. There are a couple things that I think are less simplified about Gooten’s UI such as during product creation, the process isn’t as intuitive as Printful & Printify, and the same for managing orders. Overall it’s still an easy to use platform, just not quite as easy as Printful & Printify.
Gelato is somewhere in between Gooten & Printful/Printify I think. Their product creation UI is simple but a couple functions are slightly less intuitive like aligning or centering a design. Their order management is simple and easy to work with, but the process of reaching out for support for an order is a little more confusing (we’ll cover support separately). In general though I think it still fits into the same tier as Gooten as far as ease of use.
CustomCat is the one that is far behind in this category. I’ve tried to use the UI a few times to create products or edit one, and it’s just not a modern-feeling UI. The process of creating a product and pushing it to your shop is clunky and not intuitive, and the same goes for managing orders. Ultimately this was the main reason why I stopped using CustomCat, I just couldn’t get past the lack of usability because it really slowed me down.
Pricing & Account Types
All of these platforms offer a free account with no monthly fees other than your order fulfillment cost. It’s as easy as signing up, syncing to your Etsy shop, setting up payment details, and pushing listings to your store. However, there are some different features and types of accounts on each platform so let’s walk through that.
Printify offers 3 account types: Free, Premium, and Enterprise. The free account allows you to connect to up to 5 stores and has no limit on designs/products. The premium account costs $29/month or $299 if you pay annually so that gives you a monthly cost of $24.99. The biggest benefit of the premium account is instant access to lower prices, up to 20% lower than the free account, depending on the product. You also can connect up to 10 stores so if you sell on multiple platforms that’s a nice benefit as well. It’s fairly easy to know if the premium plan is worth it for you – basically you just need to multiple the number of sales per month you are making x the price difference. If it’s greater than $29 (or $25 paid annually), then it’s worth it! For example, if you’re averaging 100 t-shirt sales per month and a t-shirt costs you $11 but the premium account gets you access to a price of $8.95, then your cost for 100 t-shirt sales would decrease by $205, well worth the cost of the premium plan because you would increase your total profit by $176 after subtracting the premium plan cost. In fact, using those two t-shirt cost figures of $11 vs. $8.95, you’d still have a net increase in profit even if you only make 25 sales per month. The last account type Printify offers is the Enterprise plan, which they indicate is only for merchants with 10,000+ orders PER DAY. So most of us don’t need to worry about needing an enterprise plan. If you do, that is amazing and congratulations because you’ve built a very successful business! The discount on pricing doesn’t change with the enterprise plan, but there is no limit to how many stores you can connect and you get a dedicated account manager along with a custom API integration for selling on your own websites.
Printful offers a free account, a Plus plan and a Pro plan. The free account offers plenty of features that will be enough for most POD sellers. You can integrate with many platforms (more on that in a minute) and there is no limit to the products you publish. You also have access to use their catalog of over 16k clipart images for creating simple designs, as well as very easy workflow for selling personalized items. Printful Plus costs $9/mo or $99/yr and expands your ability to create custom mockups and gets you access to their background removal tool. Personally, unless they add some additional benefits I don’t believe these two enhancements are worth $99 per year because you can remove backgrounds for free with image editing software (or if you already have photoshop) and you can get a huge catalog of really high quality custom mockups from Placeit for $89/yr (or even free if you don’t mind having a limited selection of mockups to choose from). Printful Pro costs $49/mo or $539 annually. That’s pretty steep in my opinion, because the Pro plan does not give you access to lower pricing for fulfillment. What it does get you is a larger catalog of exclusive clipart images, a promo-maker tool, their keyword research tool called “keyword scout”, a customized mockup generator, background removal tool, free digitization of embroidery files (free accounts have a one-time fee of $6.50 to digitize each embroidery file on the first order), and carrier-based shipping options. This is just my opinion, but the monetary benefit of these features doesn’t add up to $500 per year for me. The only thing that goes right to your bottom line is the free digitization of embroidery files. The other benefits are tools you have to actually use to see any benefit from, and I already have sources for those things that I like, such as Sale Samurai for keyword research, which only costs $79 per year if you use my podinsights coupon code. I also got a lifetime subscription to Vexels graphics service for about $400 during a Black Friday sale, so I’ll never have to pay for graphics again. Compare that to $500 per year and it just doesn’t seem worth it to me but if you like to have all those tools in one place rather than on multiple sites/services, I guess that might be worth something. One other thing to be aware of is that Printful does offer reduced pricing on fulfillment, but it’s based on sales volume. The free account has access to monthly discounts starting at $1k in total sales. Reaching that level of sales gives you a 5% discount on fulfillment the following month. The highest normal level you can reach is $10k in sales which provides a 9% discount the following month. There is also an Enterprise level which requires $20k+ in monthly sales and you have to be invited. While this is a nice potential benefit if you run all your fulfillment through Printful, the maximum non-enterprise discount is 9% where I can go to Printify and pay $29 to get a 20% discount instantly. I’ll take whatever discount I can earn of course, but I don’t think it’s as good of a structure compared to Printify.
Gooten has a similar program they call the Very Important Merchant or VIM program. There is no access to lower pricing (that I could find after reviewing all the VIM information), but there are benefit tiers based on your annual sales volume through the platform. The first level is $25k in annual sales, and that gets you priority response times from their support team, self-service reprint access, and an annual sample credit. There are two higher tiers that add higher priority for support, additional escalation paths for issues and early access to new features, but no decrease in pricing.
Gelato offers a free plan with production in 34 countries, but it is limited to 2 users and 2 stores/integrations. They also have the Gelato+ plan for $7.99/mo when paid annually, so it’s a pretty affordable option under $100/year. The Plus plan gets you premium mockups and access to personalization, meaning your customers can personalize items with their own text or images, however that doesn’t work with all integrations, including Etsy. It also includes access to graphics, and Shutterstock essentials, as well as more shipping options. It includes 5 users and up to 10 stores/integrations. The Plus plan does not include lower product pricing, but they do have a discount program similar to Printful, based on sales volume. The discount starts at $5k Euros in monthly sales (about 5500 USD right now) which provides a 5% discount. It goes all the way up to $200k EUR (about $218 USD) which provides a 16% discount. One cool thing about their discount plan is that you can pay in advance for the month by funding your account to get access to the lower pricing immediately. So if you add $5.5k to your account a the beginning of the month, you’ll start getting a 5% discount immediately. Of course, this is only advisable if you know you’ll be using that $5.5k on orders within 30 days.
Lastly, CustomCat offers just the basic free account for most sellers, except for Shopify integration. They charge $30/mo for integration with Shopify. They also have a high-volume business account, which you have to contact them about. Their site indicates that high-volume accounts get volume discounts, but there’s not much more detail available without contacting their sales team.
Integrations
As far as integrations go, all of these platforms integrate with Etsy and that’s our primary focus, but they also offer integrations with other selling platforms. Integration just means you can create product listings on the platform and push them to your store, and that orders from your store will automatically sync with the fulfillment platform. This saves you a considerable amount of time vs. having to manually create product listings or submit orders.
Printful currently integrates with over 20 different selling platforms, including Etsy, Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce, eBay, Wix, and Squarespace. They are a leader in integrations so if you already have multiple sales channels or plan to, Printful can most likely integrate with them. The inclusion of Amazon seller central integration is significant because that is fairly rare among POD platforms. If you have an amazon seller central account, you can list your Printful products directly on amazon’s massive online marketplace. The integration with amazon is not necessarily something I’d recommend for beginners, because setting it up is a bit more complicated than say connecting Printful to Etsy, which only requires an active Etsy shop and clicking a few buttons.
Printify also integrates with several platforms including Etsy, Shopify, eBay, WooCommerce, and SquareSpace. Printify does not currently have an integration for amazon seller central. For most POD sellers, the 9 integrations offered by Printify will cover the platforms you want to sell on, but there are not as many options as Printful.
Gooten integrates with Etsy, Shopify, Big Commerce, and WooCommerce, so they have fewer options than Printful and Printify and most of them require your own website (except Etsy).
Gelato integrates with 6 platforms, including Etsy, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Squarespace. This puts them in the same realm as Gooten, meaning many of their integrations require your own website but they do connect to Etsy.
CustomCat integrates with 4 platforms, Etsy, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Big Commerce.
It’s also worth noting that all of these platforms offer a custom API integration, so if you are knowable on web programming and have your own website, they can also be integrated that way. You can also create an account and place manual orders without connecting to your store, which is not very efficient in the long-term but you could always do that just to test a platform out.
Product Selection & Prices
Product selection is an important consideration, as well as pricing. I’m going to combine these two aspects as the last main consideration because they really come together as kind of a deciding factor when selecting which platforms to work with. Before I continue I just want to make one comment about pricing – I can really only speak to general pricing differences I’ve noticed between the platforms from 2020 to 2022. Prices have increased on all platforms over the last two years because of inflation and supply chain issues as well as shipping expense increases, and I expect that to continue, so I’m not going to be quoting specific prices since they’ll become outdated rather quickly.
Printful offers a large catalog of products for you to choose from, currently over 300. As as the most common POD items such as t-shrits, sweatshirts, hoodies, and mugs, they offer a good variety of each. They do offer slightly fewer mug options than some other platforms though. Where Printful tends to shine in comparison to other platforms is on embroidery products. They offer embroidery on several products including some quality hats which tend to sell pretty well with a good design on them. The quality of their embroidery is very good, however they do charge $6.50 per design as a one-time fee to digitize the design for embroidery, so you’ll basically lose your profit on the first embroidered item that you sell for each design unless you order a sample. They also offer several all-over-print products, but the prices are a bit steep. Speaking of pricing, in my experience Printful’s prices are higher than Printify for most items, especially once you factor in the Printify premium account. I would say prices are on-par with or maybe just slightly higher than Gooten and Gelato. Basically, Printful is not a “cost leader” in POD platforms – if your business plan is to sell high volumes by offering really competitive prices with a lower profit margin, Printful may not be your first choice. That being said, their prices aren’t ridiculous or anything, just not the lowest out there.
Printify offers some of the best pricing among the large POD platforms, especially with the premium account that gives you access to lower pricing immediately. Printify is my primary platform and I’m able to offer competitive prices on Etsy for many products while still making a consistent 25-30% profit margin. Printify also offers an even bigger catalog of products, over 500 currently and they consistently add new products and print partners. Some providers do offer embroidery products such as hats, and they also have a variety of all-over-print items. Their providers offer some great prices on items like posters and art prints as well, compared to the other platforms. One nice thing about the platform is that because they partner with many different production partners, if one partner raises their price for an item you sell, sometimes you can switch production to another provider with a lower price. It doesn’t always work that way because sometimes everyone raises prices, but at least it’s nice to have that ability sometimes. However, there is also a caveat to each production partner offering different pricing – it means you need to monitor prices and be sure you’re selecting a provider that balances the quality and price you’re looking for. Personally, I find Printify’s combination of product variety and competitive pricing to be very appealing.
Gooten offers about 150 products currently, so definitely a smaller variety compared to Printful and Printify. They have the basics covered with t-shirts, hoodies, sweatshirts, and mugs. One reason I like Gooten is that even though their catalog is not massive, they offer a few products that I cannot get from Printful or Printify, at least not yet. For example, Gooten offers a 20oz steel insulated tumbler that my customers on Etsy love, and it’s only available through Gooten. They also have some more unique items like garden flags if you create those types of designs. Gooten’s pricing is generally somewhere in between Printify and Printful – most basic items I find to be higher priced compared to Printify, but maybe a tad less to Printful although Printful does beat Gooten on certain items.
Gelato is interesting, because they don’t offer quite as large of a variety of “traditional” print on demand products, but they offer an expanded selection of prints like posters, canvas, acrylic prints, wood prints, photo books, calendars, and stationary. They do offer a pretty good selection of mugs at low prices with competitive international shipping costs, largely because they have production partners in 34 countries which is why I actually tried Gelato for my Etsy shop. Shipping mugs internationally can get pretty expensive due to their weight, so if you can have an order fulfilled locally in the customer’s country it saves you money and gets the order to them faster. This alone makes Gelato worth a look. In general their prices for apparel items range from pretty competitive on t-shirts to slightly above average for hoodies. I’d say it nets out to being a little more expensive than Printify Premium pricing, but averages less than Printful. It’s a little difficult to compare on a general level because as I mentioned, sometimes with international orders it can be the shipping that makes one platform more or less expensive than another rather than the item price, and Gelato offers great International shipping prices.
CustomCat offers a large catalog of products fulfilled in the US and shipped worldwide, they state “hundreds” on their site and I believe it. Their pricing is similar to Gelato in that some items are lower cost compared to Printify and Printful. Generally their mugs and drink ware have very competitive prices in my experience, but for apparel it’s a mix of some items equal to Printify’s pricing and some items priced higher, you really would need to look at specific products to know which is better.
Lastly, one comment about production quality. None of the platforms I talked about today have consistent problems with “bad quality” in my experience. Every POD service has a quality control issue once in a while, and they have support in place to help you resolve them. I mentioned that Printful’s embroidery is consistently high quality because I’ve offered embroidered hats for a while in my Etsy shop and rarely have had any quality issues. When it comes to DTG printed apparel, sometimes a print comes out off-centered or the color slightly off, and with the high volume of orders being processed at fulfillment centers they don’t always catch it. That’s where you come in as the shop owner and work between the customer and the platform to resolve it, it’s just the reality of running a business. That being said, I have not had any large-scale quality issues with any of these platforms.
Conclusion & Recommendations
So what’s the right platform for you? Ultimately I can’t answer that but I can offer a few thoughts and how I use them to fulfill orders for my Etsy shop. As of March 2022 my shop has had over 5,100 sales so I have a decent sample to consider the benefits and drawbacks of each one.
First and foremost, you can certainly use more than one platform for any online store that you run, including Etsy. Of course, you lose the simplicity of only having one place to go manage your orders, but ultimately you want to be able to offer the right products at competitive prices, and that could mean you need to use a couple POD platforms to achieve that. There’s nothing wrong with that!
Personally, as I’ve mentioned Printify is my main fulfillment platform. I use Printify for most apparel items, mugs, posters, tote bags, and stickers. The premium plan allows me access to great pricing that more than pays for itself. I also have a Printful account to offer some specific items, such as embroidered hats and sweatshirts. Customers generally expect to pay more for embroidered items, so even if the cost is slightly higher it still works out. I also still use Gooten as I mentioned, again for a few specific items that aren’t available on the other platforms. I no longer use CustomCat because I found the user interface to be clunky and not efficient, but they do offer some good prices. I don’t have any real “active” listings specifically with Gelato, but I occasionally use them to fulfill an international order because they can usually have it fulfilled locally and with a lower shipping cost vs. Printify or Printful. Printify is the only platform where I pay for the premium account. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend beginning with one of the larger platforms that can service most of your needs, and then explore others who might offer specialized items that you want to offer. One benefit to at least having an account created with a few platforms is that you may be able to get an order fulfilled when your main provider is out of stock and you would otherwise have to cancel the order or ask your customer to wait.
Well that’s it for our comparison of the top POD platforms out there for 2022. I hope this helped you consider your options, whether you’re just starting out or already selling online. Don’t forget to subscribe to be notified of future episodes and check out the POD Insights YouTube channel as well.
Platforms
