What is Printful?

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What is Printful? And how does it work?

If you’ve been asking yourself these questions, this post is for you.

Read on to discover what Printful is, how it works, its key pros and cons and some key tips on how start a print-on-demand business with it.

Let’s dive in with a simple overview of Printful.

An overview of Printful

Printful is a print-on-demand (POD) service that lets you create, print and sell custom merchandise through your own online store or a range of online marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy and eBay.

The platform offers a wide range of customizable print products including clothing, bags, posters, stationery, tech accessories and many more. It also comes with a built-in design tool that helps you apply your own designs to its product range.

As a print-on-demand company, Printful operates on a made-to-order business model. This means that products are only printed when you (or one of your customers) places an order for an item.

In addition to acting as your printer, Printful also provides a full set of fulfillment services. When Printful prints a product from an order in your store, it also takes care of packaging it up and shipping it to your customer — allowing you to focus on marketing your store and making sales.

(The company also offers some additional fulfillment options, including warehousing of non-Printful goods that you send to one of its warehouses for fulfillment).

Printful’s printing and fulfillment facilities are made up of a network of 12 locations across 4 continents, making it possible for the company to deliver on an average order fulfillment time of 2-5 business days (regardless of your customer’s location).

Printful was created in 2013 by Latvian-born businessman Lauris Liberts, who saw an opportunity to offer outsourced printing and fulfillment services after having struggled to keep up with demand for an online poster store he was running from his living room.

One decade on from its launch, Printful is now one of the biggest and most reputable POD services on the market today. With over 1,600 staff, the company has a current valuation of over $1 billion US dollars.

It is also the most popular print-on-demand service for Shopify store merchants — the Printful app has a rating of 4.7 in the Shopify app store along with over 5,870 (mostly very positive) customer reviews.

But how many people actually use Printful?

How many people use Printful?

Printful has provided print and fulfillment services to over 2 million customers over its 10-year history. During that time, the company reports that it has delivered 81.7 million items so far, with a current average of 1 million items being processed every month.

At present, there are more than 1 million registered Printful users — with at least 146,000 of these selling Printful products via Shopify, and another 79,000+ doing so via online stores built with Wix.

Where is Printful based?

Printful HQ is located in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.

The company owns and runs around 10 fulfillment centers for its POD services across the US and EU.

These are located in:

Additionally, Printful partners with several other third-party print companies across South America, Asia and Australia. These additional facilities are located in:

How does Printful work?

Printful’s print-on-demand service works by giving you access to around 330 customizable print items. You choose the items from Printful’s catalog that you’d like to add your designs to, customize them and then list them in your online store or on a marketplace.

When someone buys one of your products, the order is automatically sent to Printful, which then

Now, it’s important to understand that Printful is NOT an ecommerce platform or online marketplace. Rather, it is a printing and fulfillment company.

So, if you want to use Printful to sell printed products online, you’ll need to set up an online store or register an account with an online marketplace first — doing so will give you a sales channel for selling Printful products to online shoppers.

The good news here is that Printful integrates very neatly with a range of 20+ online store builders and ecommerce marketplaces.

These ecommerce integrations include:

To help you add your designs to one of the products from the Printful catalog, the platform provides you with an easy-to-use product design editor. This tool comes with a drag-and-drop interface that lets you upload your designs, position them on your chosen product, add text and make various other customizations.

When you create a product in Printful, the platform also lets you create product mockups to add to your online store listing. You can choose from ready-made mockups or alternatively create your own with Printful’s product mockup designer.

Of course, no ecommerce product would be complete without a product description — the marketing copy that explains what a product is and describes the benefits of purchasing it.

To that end, Printful provides clearly-written descriptions of every product in its catalog, including important details on product material and where the product was sourced. If you want to add your own take to product descriptions however, you can simply edit the default ones during the product setup process.

Another key aspect of Printful’s POD service is its branding functionality.

The platform lets you apply your own brand to just about every digital and physical ‘touch point’ in the customer journey.

On the digital side of the customer journey, you can easily add your brand logo, colors and social accounts to your products’ order tracking pages.

On the physical side of things, you can add your branding to the following items:

Is Printful a dropshipping service?

First of all, let’s quickly define dropshipping:

As you can see from the definition above, it’s pretty clear that Printful is indeed a type of dropshipping service, specifically a print-on-demand dropshipping service.

When you list and sell a Printful product through your online selling platform of choice, you don’t need to buy or store any inventory, nor do you need to manufacture, pack or ship anything yourself. Printful, like most dropshipping companies, performs all the key fulfillment tasks for you.

Now, POD services such as Printful are just one subset of the many dropshipping business types out there.

Online merchants can also use third-party dropshipping companies (such as Spocket, Syncee and DSers) to dropship a wider range of products. These dropshipping merchants sell everything from clothing and health and beauty items to pet supplies, electronic equipment and furniture.

However, the print-on-demand variety of dropshipping available through Printful and similar services is particularly popular with artists and visual creatives.

This is because POD provides an easy and cost-effective way for artists, photographers, designers etc. to turn their own designs and artwork into physical products like t-shirts, phone cases, posters, and more — all without the need for upfront investment or inventory.

What can I sell with Printful?

Printful’s catalog consists of around 330 printable items across 6 main categories.

These are:

Printful’s clothing and apparel category is particularly well stocked, with items available including t-shirts, hoodies, hats, sweatshirts, dresses, leggings, tank tops, swimwear, underwear and many others.

Its ‘accessories‘ category includes customizable shoes, flip-flops, tote bags, phone cases and handbags.

The ‘home & living‘ products on offer from Printful cover 5 types of wall art (posters, framed posters, canvas prints, flags and metal prints); stationery (postcards, notebooks, stickers and greeting cards); as well as customizable towels, pillow cases, aprons and various types of drinkware (water bottles, mugs, coasters etc.).

Selecting an item you’d like to customize and sell is pretty easy in Printful.

Its product library lets you browse products via the categories mentioned above (in the left hand side of the product library interface); alternatively, you can use more detailed filtering options that are available at the top of the Printful interface. The latter let you narrow down products by colors, sizes, materials, production technique and other criteria.

How much does Printful cost?

There are no monthly fees to use Printful. It is completely free to set up an account, create custom products, integrate your account with an ecommerce platform and list products for sale.

You only pay a fee to Printful when a customer buys one of your Printful products. This fee will be determined by several factors, namely:

It’s important to remember that a monthly fee for your chosen ecommerce platform or online marketplace will also apply; and depending on the sales channel involved, you may also face a transaction fee.

Now, if you sell more than $12,000 worth of Printful products per month on your store, you get access to the ‘Printful memberships’ discount scheme.

Made up of two membership tiers — ‘Printful Growth’ and ‘Printful Business’ — these schemes offer members significant discounts on standard Printful pricing.

These discounts can be as high as 33% off standard Printful product prices, depending on your monthly Printful sales volume (see screenshot below for more details on the discounts available).

If your store has not yet hit $12K in annual sales, you can still access the discounts on the ‘Printful Growth’ membership tier by paying a monthly fee of $24.99.

Of course, you can also use Printful to order customized print products for your own business (staff t-shirts, brand posters, mugs with your company logo on them and so on).

And if this is the case, you can avail of a range of discounts from Printful if you order in bulk.

Printful direct bulk pricing starts with a minimum order of 25 products, with discounts ranging from 5% to 55% depending on the product.

Where can I sell with Printful?

Printful ships products to most countries around the world.

The company currently has 9 shipping regions:

(At time of writing, Printful does not ship orders to the Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk regions in Ukraine; other countries that you can’t ship to include Russia, Belarus, Ecuador, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria. You can view the full list of shipping country restrictions here).

Standard shipping rates to the US for some popular Printful products are as follows:

Now, it’s important to note that regardless of your country or region, you have to set up your own shipping rates for Printful products in the product listing in your chosen ecommerce storefront, as the Printful platform doesn’t do this for you.

A popular strategy here is to increase your product price by the same amount as Printful’s shipping costs; doing this means that your customer is automatically covering the shipping Printful’s shipping charge to you when they purchase one of your products. This then enables you to offer ‘free shipping’ to your store’s customers.

This can be a very effective way to increase sales on your POD store, as ‘free shipping’ is frequently cited by online shoppers as being even more important than the price of the product they are hoping to purchase.

What are the pros and cons of Printful?

Let’s take a look now at some of the main pros and cons of Printful.

How do I get started with Printful?

To get started with Printful, it’s usually best to create an online store in a platform like Shopify, Squarespace, BigCommerce or Etsy first.

Once that’s done, head over to the Printful website and do the following:

If you need more detailed how-to information on all of the above, the Printful help center covers most of the basics very well.

Additionally, the Printful blog has plenty of informative material on marketing tips for POD businesses, along with a suitably-named ‘beginner”s handbook’ section if you’re totally new to the platform.

Finally, if you are torn between whether or not to list your Printful products in an online store or an online marketplace, you might want to check out our Shopify vs Amazon and our Shopify vs Etsy comparisons. These tease out the pros and cons of both methods of online selling and may help you decide what the best option is for your print-on-demand business.