Transcription
So, I tried Printful and Printify to figure out the truth between the two of them. If you're considering making a print-on-demand store and you're not thinking about your supplier, you're missing out on a huge aspect here.
It doesn't matter if you're selling on Shopify, Etsy, your own website, or anywhere else; choosing the right supplier can absolutely make the difference between a successful store and a failed store. A bad supplier could really be your worst nightmare. They could drive up shipping costs by having multiple packages, have individual products that cost too much, result in low quality, lost customers, inconsistent products, and a lot more.
A lot of people out there recommend either Printify or Printful. They're kind of undisputed as the two biggest ones. There are other options as well, but I wanted to get to the bottom of this. I've tried each of them individually, but I haven't done a proper comparison until now. I want to find out once and for all which one is actually better.
To do this, I've already done a lot of research. I have an idea of what other people say is better, but I want to find out for myself. I plan to order some samples, go through the software, check out the shipping times, test out the packaging, test out the quality of the products we actually get, and of course, compare the pricing, customer service, and other things like that.
But before we go placing orders, let's take a step back. If you're like me, when I first heard about these two companies quite a long time ago, I thought, "Alright, Printful, Printify, the names are so similar; they've got to be doing the same thing, right?" But they're actually fundamentally different. The way they manage orders is so different, and that influences pretty much everything we'll talk about throughout this video.
So, kind of run through this with me. If you're going to make a print-on-demand store, the way it works is you make your store, you list the products on there. It could be on Etsy, your own website, Shopify, whatever. When a customer goes and places an order, they are buying from you, but that money goes and directly places an order automatically with the supplier. Then the supplier makes the product and sends it out.
But that is where things are different. Printful is the one that probably is what you already think it is, where the order goes to Printful. They have a big warehouse, they make your product, they package it, and then they send it out. They do everything in-house. That's Printful.
Printify, however, is the different one. They contract out to third parties, and you can control who the third party is. Essentially, this means that Printify doesn't make anything; they don't print anything, they don't ship anything. They're just the middleman that connects you and your store to the actual supplier. They have a lot of suppliers on there, and like I said, they go about rating them, and you can kind of choose your own.
As you can imagine, this fundamental difference gives you some pretty different stores. Competition on one side is going to drive the prices lower, which is why Printify is often a lot lower. But Printful might have better quality or better customer service because you're working directly with who is actually printing your product.
There's a lot more we'll talk about later on in the video. So, starting off on my laptop, I'll be using our affiliate link to set up Printful as well as Printify. It doesn't matter which one you use; we have affiliate links for both of them in the description below.
Okay, so going to sandalmedia.com/printful on this one and sandalmedia.com/printify on this one, you can see the homepages here are really not all that different. They have a slightly different layout; this one is trying to tell you to start for free, while this one just wants you to look at products.
Let's start off by creating an account with both of these so that we can generate our designs, place an order, and start to learn a little bit more about which one is actually better.
On the top here, I'm going to click on the little person with the plus. We're going to sign up with email, and I'm going to type in some information here. Now we can say we are selling online, we are individual entrepreneurs, and maybe so far we have no sales. We can actually skip this as well; it doesn't really matter what you say with this.
While we're waiting for that email, let's go over to Printify and set that up. We're going to sign up, click "Start for free," and once again, we're going to create our account with an email and a password. Again, they're going to ask you some very similar questions. We could say we have our own e-commerce store, we are going to start our first online business, and I don't know, just whatever. You can skip all this if you want, or you can add some certain things there, and you could say you heard about it from YouTube.
Alright, so I went in and confirmed my email on both of these accounts, and you can see the dashboards look pretty different. You can see that Printful is trying to push their limitless profit and memberships right there. I'll talk about the memberships a little bit later, but let's dive into the catalog available for both of these because that ultimately is really quite different.
On the left side, looking at Printful, we can actually go and check out the product catalog. If you click on "Product Catalog," you can choose different categories. They could be different faster delivery things, eco-friendly products, or what I'm actually most interested in is something I want to search for, which is the Gildan 5000 t-shirt.
Gildan 5000 t-shirt should be popping up; it's a very common one that a lot of people purchase and use. It starts at $6.47. You probably won't be getting that price right away. If we say order a sample product, we can check out their catalog and again browse through everything. Right there, as we would expect, the Gildan 5000, a very common t-shirt, is selling for $7.99.
Now, on the surface, you might think that's a little bit more expensive, but again, there are a lot of variables going into this, so let's dig a bit deeper. By the way, Printify, as you might expect, has so many different suppliers, and I'll show you the suppliers in just a second. They therefore have substantially more products—like an order of magnitude more products available.
I highly recommend if you don't know exactly what you're selling, at least make an account with both of these and really check out what products are available. Some products might only be available on Printify or Printful, in which case your decision would be much, much easier.
So, let's check these out a little bit more. You can see they both have just some model wearing the shirt, and you'll eventually be able to see your design on this shirt. For the most part, there's not a whole lot different here. They offer the same sizes; it goes from small to 5XL. Most of these go from small to 5XL.
You have 24 colors on the Printful version, and down here it looks like we have nine colors or 23 colors. Different suppliers have different quantities or different amounts of colors you can choose from.
That brings me into what the supplier thing going on here is. Printify, like I said, uses third-party suppliers that are going to do the printing and the shipping and really the entire fulfillment for you. They rate these on their own three metrics. You can see here if you hover over it or if you click on it, they rate them based on production speed, quality, and stock reliability—how often do they go out of stock?
Looking at these, you obviously want one with a higher score. I generally aim for something better than 9.3; ideally, like a 9.7 would be great. But with that, you are going to be looking at a much higher price, and you want to keep in mind where the location is for shipping times. You can actually go to the top and say "only offers express delivery," and that'll rule out a lot of the ones that are not in the United States.
Again, you have faster delivery; sometimes with that, you get lower ratings, and sometimes you get higher prices. So, it's worth looking at both, but I always choose express delivery. I think that really makes a big difference there.
Going down here, you can see we have the first one at $10.81, which is actually more expensive than the Printful one. Now, a lot of people say that products are always cheaper on Printify, but here's an example of one that isn't. You're looking at $10.81 with $6.89 of shipping, whereas on Printful, you have $9.25 as the default price, and you have $4.69 worth of shipping there.
Even with that higher price, that is cheaper. They do have a little promotion going on right now, so we are getting a lower price right now, as you can see there. Of course, Printful growth would save us some money as well, but like I said, the prices are so variable among Printify. You can go down here and find the cheapest one, so if we sort by the lowest price, the cheapest one is selling for just $7, and that's regardless of how many you're actually selling.
Now, if we go over to Printful, this actually does matter how many we sell because the bulk pricing calculator down here says the first one we sell is going to be $9.25. As you start to sell more, if you sell more than 300 per month, it'll go down to $8.60. Similarly, if you qualify for one of the memberships or if you pay to join them, you can save money there as well.
There are just so many things moving around, so many variables to find that price. But let's start designing this and see what the interfaces actually look like.
On Printful, we can choose printing; there's also embroidery, and they have all these different colors. I'm going to go with the white one. We're going to choose a men's large, and we're going to just go down here and say "create product template," or we can actually say "start new order." Let's start a new order; we're just going to order a sample here and see what this actually looks like.
So, let's create your order, and I'm actually going to make this full screen just so you can see the interface a little bit better. We'll go back to split screen in a minute, so let's start designing.
If we click on "drop your design here" on the right, we can upload a new file. I'm going to upload just some logos that I have. We'll upload two logos that we can use; they're both right here, and we can insert both of them. So, I can select both, I can say "apply," and we will have actually that only applied one.
Let's go to uploads; let's apply that other one we want. This one, click apply, and they'll both end up on the shirt. Now, I want these just to kind of be on the shirt pocket top right, so just move them up here, make them kind of small, just to kind of test this out and see what it looks like.
We want to see some details on this print quality. We also have different placements. If you click on placements with Printful, you can print on the front, the back, the left sleeve, the right sleeve, outside label, inside label, and so having, for example, an inside label of your logo would definitely drive the price up, but that could be something that really strengthens your brand that you are able to do with Printful.
So, let's actually stay here; we don't close out of that. Go back to design view, and let's actually move these up a little bit, maybe right there. It's really hard to tell where things are when you're designing a shirt like this and trying to figure out where the pocket would be.
On Printify, let's start off with the Printify ranking. The one that ranks the highest is going to take 2 to 9 business days to produce it. It's going to take a little longer to ship it, but let's just see what happens. We're going to try this one; we're going to try a couple different here.
Let's start off with "start designing" with their top-rated one. We're going to choose a design from—there are a lot of options here: Fiverr, AI generator, Shutterstock, Google Drive. Let's go for my device; we're going to upload those same two logos. Let's upload those two logos we just have, actually. Once again, I only uploaded one; we're going to have to do a second one in a second.
But let's make this smaller. So, there we have our logo on the top right. We can save the product; overall, pretty easy. They also have these nice mockup views you can look at and see what it looks like when someone's wearing that.
I think that's a little bit too far to the right. We can actually go back to the design. I really like that they have this, so we have this ready to go. We can also customize the listing; it's kind of auto-populated. We could just say "Sandal Media," and now it's going to be a lot easier to import.
We could do this on Printful as well, but they have the prices down here. We could save this as a draft. Let's save it as a draft, and now let's create an order. We'll go down and create a sample order. So, we're going to order this one; it's $10.81, and we want this ordered in large. It's fulfilled in Latvia, so again, it will probably take a little bit longer to get this, but this was the highest-rated one, so we'll see how this one actually performs.
We'll continue to check out. It looks like our shipping here is going to be $16.69, so that's pretty expensive to get just one t-shirt over here. Now that has been ordered, we're going to see how long that takes to ship.
So, let's go back to my products. I want to create a new one. We're going to make a new product using a different supplier. I want to test out some other suppliers here, so let's go back up to the catalog, go to men's clothing, and we're going to go to t-shirts once again. I want to find the Gildan 5000. There it is; we're going to try the cheapest supplier now.
Same exact design; we're just going to try the cheapest supplier and see how that goes. So, let's go to Printify ranking; we're going to go to lowest price. That's this one right here. They don't have a great rating; they're 9.1, which is still, you know, it's not the best.
We're going to start designing with this. They are in the United States; they are a pretty low price—2 to 31 business days—that's pretty long. They have a lot of printers, and they also have 38 different colors, which is substantially more than Printful has.
So, we're going to start designing with this one and see what we can do here. Now, let's order this one. Let's create a manual order, actually a sample order once again. We're going to order the cheap one right here. It does have express delivery; it's obviously a much lower price as well.
So, let's select the large. It is $7.49. Let's calculate the shipping, and the shipping cost here is $4.75 for standard shipping. Again, these are both from Printify. We'll go to Printful in a minute.
So now these two Printify orders are being sent to production. Let's go back to Printful and actually create this order here. So, let's go to New Order. Alright, so we can continue down to shipping. Right now, there's a discount because this is a sample order.
So, normally this would be $9.25, which is somewhere between the two Printify prices we saw—actually almost right in the middle. Let's say continue to shipping, calculate our shipping here, and it looks like $4.69. So, for samples, that's actually pretty nice. I really like that, and it's going to come between September 15th and 19th.
There's a little bit of CO2 offsetting for a couple extra cents. Let's review this order. So, we're looking at $11.16 for the sample. Printful does a pretty good job of incentivizing you to buy samples, which I think signifies that they're very confident in the quality of their products. They want you to see it, get excited about it, and then really start selling your product.
So, I think one of the reasons, in my opinion, why they're always advertising the lower price for your sample is so you can actually go and buy one for yourself.
Now, let's sell our next product, which is going to be a mug. We have five mugs available from Printful, and now on Printify, let's go back to our catalog here, and we can search for a mug. Type in "mug," and we have a lot more results—many, many, many mugs to choose from.
But I'm just going to go with the bestseller, the ceramic 11 oz mug on the top. We'll select that one, and here the best seller is the white glossy mug on the top. We'll select that one, and this is where you're probably going to see some differing prices.
So, the t-shirts maybe were an anomaly here, but here in this situation of a mug, it's $7.95 compared to a much lower price of $4.40 with Printify. I'm going to start a new order on Printful, and again, we're going to make this full screen just so I can show you what we're doing here.
In here, we can drop our design. I'm just going to do the same exact thing; we're going to put our logo right in the center of the mug, and then I'm also going to see if I could put "Sandal Media" below that. So, let's apply that. Let's make it like that. There we go, "Sandal Media" in the center of the mug; it's going to wrap around, and we have that box we can use.
So, we're going to continue here. Now, let's go back to Printful, and you can see this is only from one supplier. It's $8.50 right now, so if we want to find a different supplier, we could go back and just choose a different mug that is a different price, and they kind of show you where it's from.
There are two providers on this one; all the other ones are District Photo—a lot from District Photo. So, let's sort these by popularity. Like I said, this is the best seller. Let's just see what this one does. We're going to start this designing process here.
Now, I want to buy a third product. Let's go over to hats on Printful and see what kind of hats we can find. I'm thinking I'm just going to roll with the retro trucker hat; it's a basic one right here. See if we can find good colors—black and white, blue and white. Yeah, we're going to go with that one right there.
And here, this is actually an embroidered hat, as we showed before. Printful does both embroidering and printing in different aspects. Obviously, you're not going to embroider a mug, but they do embroider t-shirts, for example, and hats, obviously, as well.
So, we are going to create—we're going to actually just start a new order here to see what this one is. Create a new order, and we can choose to just embroider in one color or multiple colors. I'm just going to do one color here; I think that looks fine.
We can add our own file; we're going to add this logo. Pretty straightforward to add that. Let's make this—let's change this so that that is invisible, and this one is white. So now we have our logo. Again, this is a really simple process—very easy to edit these on both platforms.
So, it's a really solid software on either one. Let's continue to shipping. So now what's going to be interesting is I'm ordering two different things from Printful. I want to see if they both ship in the same package. This is going to be something that could potentially save you on shipping costs.
So, if somebody's buying two different products from your store and they're from two different suppliers, as you might expect, that could drive up your shipping cost. So, let's continue to shipping here and see what the mug and the shirt will cost.
Looks like the shipping is $10.04 for this combination right here. I'm going to continue to review, and let's place that order. This, again, is from Printful. This is our second order. We're going to see if these both ship in the same package or independently.
Now, this is still waiting for fulfillment. We should have three things ordered now—two on that one and then one on the other order. So, on Printify, let's go to Printify and search for a hat, and we can see there are so many different hats here.
Let's see if they have the same one. Let's see if they have the same one. I'm going to search. It looks like they don't, so let's just look up "trucker." This one does have embroidery, and that is what I was looking to compare—not just the print.
So, you can see we add our design. This is just a regular hat—pretty straightforward. So, let's start designing that. Unfortunately, it is only from one supplier with a pretty bad reputation here. They're going to be quick; they're going to have not the best quality, and their stock reliability looks like a real issue here.
Regardless, let's test them out and see how it goes because I do want to see what the embroidering is like. I want to test out embroidering. This is the closest hat to the other one that is available, and let's try it.
So, start designing. So, let's try this again. I used their template, and I made one that I think is the right size. It's really hard to tell in this little cartoon hat—this kind of clip art looking hat—but okay, that's probably the right size.
I'm going to print this on gray, or I don't know; the navy just looks weird. It looks purple in this picture, so let's go with gray. I'm just a little more confident in that. We're going to save the product.
Oh, now we actually have some mockups. Yeah, that actually looks kind of good. Navy looks good here, so I like navy actually. Navy is a good one. I'm going to save this as a draft. At least we have those two colors, and let's go and create some sample orders.
Let's create a sample order, and I'm going to select the mug. We're going to order the mug, and so we can add another product to the order and see if these ship separately, which they definitely will, as I'm confident.
But let's go and order a true navy one. So, the price on this is $15.73, which is actually a little bit more expensive than the hat on Printful, but maybe it's a higher quality. We'll see when we actually get this one.
But once again, it's not a unanimous thing that Printful is always more expensive and Printify is cheaper. You can see here's another example that there isn't a one-to-one. They don't both have the same thing, and if you choose what I think to be the two closest things—like I want that style of hat—this one looks the same, just not mesh on the back, and here it is actually a little bit more expensive.
So, not a perfect example, but it's not always cheaper on Printify. So now we're going to place this order. Let's calculate our shipping, and the shipping cost here is $10.79, so it's actually pretty similar. It's really not that bad, and I will submit this order.
So now all we have to do is wait until all these products arrive. I'm pretty excited to see what they look like.
Now, the next thing that you really want to do is connect this to your Shopify store. We have a full free training on how to use Shopify, how to set up e-commerce, and how to really get going with that. I'll have the link in the description below.
No, this is not some type of top of the funnel where we charge you and upsell you. It really is just a free course. We have nothing to sell, no credit card; we can't accept your credit card. So, it's literally a free course link down below. Check it out if you're interested, and I'll see you over in there.
Alright, so the products finally arrived. I got a bunch right here. Let's open up and see what they look like. This one right here is the hat from Printful. I've used all of these before, but I've ordered this exact hat before, so I pretty much know what it's going to look like.
So, this hat did require approval. It took 6 days from the time I approved it until it actually showed up at my door, which is reasonable. I think six days is not terrible. This came with actually two different colors of embroidering. Originally, I designed it with nothing in the middle, and then their designers recommended I have blue in the middle, so I said, "Whatever, fine."
I think it actually turned out pretty good. Like I said, I've ordered these before; they hold up really well, pretty good material. It doesn't fade too much. There's a little dent in the middle on the front. The other times I ordered this, it didn't have that. Overall, I'd say this is definitely a pass. This is pretty good.
Now, the hat from Printify. Now, the design process was a little bit different on here. I'm not super confident in this one, but we're going to see what it looks like. Whoa! Alright, this one is a little rough—definitely kind of rough.
Yeah, I would never wear this. This is really bad. I don't know. Yeah, this one's bad. This is a combination of the design tool not quite making it easy to make the right size, so it doesn't look good. But secondly, it's not even centered, and the embroidering is actually pretty sloppy. The material looks like it's covered in dust; it's kind of dirty.
If I wear it—look, how big that is! It's not even—it's a giant logo that's not centered compared to the Printful one. Alright, so Printful hat, Printify hat—kind of a rough start.
Alright, now moving on to the t-shirts. I actually already opened this up because I thought it was a different package, but this is the t-shirt from Printify. This is not the Latvia one; this is the American one, and this one actually showed up really fast. It showed up in 7 days, which I know is not like Amazon fast, but compared to the other ones, this was pretty quick.
The material feels really nice. Obviously, it's a Gildan 5000, so they're all going to be pretty much the same shirt. The print quality—it's not the most saturated blue, but it looks very sharp, very detailed. I think they did a great job with this one. I'm really happy with this. It was cheaper, and it was faster, and the quality is actually pretty good.
So, as far as this t-shirt goes, I mean, this supplier did a good job despite not having the best rating out there. Now, let's check out the Printful version.
Alright, the Printful t-shirt here looks about the same, actually. Yeah, they look very, very similar. I think the blue ink is slightly different. I mean, if you held these side by side and said they were made by the same company, I would 100% believe you. These look very, very similar.
Now, the Printful shirt was actually about $1 cheaper than the Printify shirt after you paid for shipping and everything, but it did arrive one day later. That's kind of all margin of error, that stuff. So, that's kind of a toss-up. If you're getting a t-shirt, either one works well.
Now, I did order a third shirt that was the one from Latvia. That one took 13 days to arrive. Unfortunately, I had it show up to my old apartment address, so I don't actually have it, but I could see the tracking of when it arrived—13 days. I think it's a little bit too long, so I wouldn't be comfortable doing that.
To be fair, they printed it really quickly. The company did a good job; it just took so long to get through customs. But then, of course, we have the mugs. Now, the mugs showed up in very, very different packaging, so I kind of want to showcase that first.
This is the Printify version; it showed up in just like a foam cube. And then the Printful one showed up in this really cool cardboard box that folds into itself, and there's no bubble wrap required. It's just all cardboard. So, from an environmental standpoint, that's kind of an advantage. You could also advertise that on your brand that you don't use Styrofoam.
Unless you're using Printify, then you do use Styrofoam. So, let's open this up. Now, the Printify mug did take more than twice as long to get here. This took 9 days to arrive, but it was almost half the price. This was $4.60-something after shipping and everything, which is really crazy.
I think if you're shipping it for that cheap, I'm okay with waiting a little bit longer to get it. 9 days, I don't know, it's a little much. Let's see what this looks like, though. Here we go. Wow! So, for $4, I'm impressed. You get a mug that has printing on it.
If you look closely, the print is a little bit noisy, a little bit grainy, but I mean, for the price, this is good. If it's a mug that's meant to be like comedy or something funny or whatever, then I don't think the print quality matters that much. If it was like a picture of my face and it was printed like this, I would worry a little bit more about the quality.
But for this, I'd say this is definitely passable. Yeah, good job, Printify.
Alright, and then here is the Printful mug. This one, like I said, was double the price, but it did show up a lot faster. It came in just 4 days. Out of everything I ordered, this was the first thing to arrive, so definitely very impressive.
The quality on the print is also substantially better. We're getting a deeper, richer blue—definitely more true to color. Actually, when I hold them side by side, I realize the blue on the Printify one is really a lot more greenish. It doesn't really—it's not the true blue that I would hope for.
Also, the quality of the accuracy of the print is also much better. I just really did a bad job designing this, wrapping that all the way around. But yeah, look at them side by side. I would say, yeah, Printful definitely did a much better job.
We saw the quality of all of them. I have to say it's kind of a toss-up. It's definitely very supplier-dependent for Printify. Some of them do a great job, like the t-shirts. Some of them do a very affordable job, like the mugs, and some of them, in my opinion, just don't do a good job, like the hat.
On the flip side, if you're doing Printful, they're all very consistent. It was all showing up within about one week. It was very reliable quality; the pricing was pretty much right down in the middle with reliability—good price.
So, I think without knowing anything, I would say Printful is a really safe bet. But kind of concluding on this one, I would always recommend testing out both. Take your design, make it on either one of them, order a sample. It's going to cost you a couple extra dollars to order one of each, and sometimes you just need to feel the product in your hand to really see what the difference actually is.
Then you can determine which one is better. But for me, I think Printful, more often than not, is your safe bet. That's going to be an easier one to go with. Printify can be a little bit cheaper, can be a little bit faster sometimes, but it is a little bit of a gamble.
So, that's my take on Printful versus Printify. Leave a comment below and let me know which one you like, which one you prefer to use, or if there's another one that isn't one of these two.
Thanks for watching this video. I'm Mich Oen with Sandal Media, and I'll see you in the next video.