Printful vs. Printify 2023 (My Thoughts after $1,000,000)

Product costs if you’ve thought about running a print-on-demand store you’ll know that there are a lot of options when it comes to choosing a print provider in my opinion the biggest three platforms are printful printify and gelato these three seem to have the biggest market share and are used by the

Most sellers overall but they’re actually extremely different from one another so today I wanted to break down the main differences between these platforms so you can see how each one actually works then I’m gonna break down the cost differences so you can see how much profit you’d bring home depending

On which platform you decide to use and then finally I’ll go over exactly what I would do if I was starting over from scratch before I had ever made Seven figures and fifty thousand sales if you plan on having success with print on demand or you want to be a six or seven

Figure seller it’s extremely important to choose wise when you’re picking a print provider because you’re essentially trusting them with your entire business so let’s get right into the breakdown if you’re unfamiliar with print on demand here’s a super quick breakdown so you can see how everything works and then you’ll be able to

Understand how these platforms are different from one another first a customer places an order for one of your products either on a website or an online Marketplace this could be anything from t-shirts and mugs to posters and phone cases next the order is sent to the print provider where the

Product is printed and shipped directly to the customer usually within a few days so if you’re using printful as your print provider once you get an online order and you click submit it’ll go directly to a printful warehouse where they’ll print and ship the item directly

To the customer now this is where we start to see the main differences and how printify and gelato are slightly different first of all printify doesn’t actually print and ship any products at all they allow you to choose from a variety of third-party print providers to connect with if you’re selling

T-shirts or mugs you might have several different options for print providers for who’s going to handle that order one of the benefits to this is you can find specific print providers that are holding the inventory that you need if you need to sell extra small shirts in a

Specific color you can probably find a print provider who can offer that having multiple different fulfillment options also means there’s competition this competition keeps the prices lower and it incentivizes each fulfillment center to ship out their products faster than all the other guys having multiple third-party fulfillment centers also

Allows printify to expand much faster than printful they can just integrate with a new facility once it’s ready to go instead of having to purchase new warehouse space hire staff and fill that entire Warehouse with the printing equipment the downsides to this multi-fulfillment Center approach is that some print providers are far better

Than others as far as quality production speed and responsiveness whenever there’s an issue with an order if a product hasn’t been shipped on time you have to reach out to printify and have them contact the facility to see what’s causing the delays and once this happens

It could take a few days for the smaller fulfillment centers to respond to printify and then you still have to wait for printify to respond to you but this can usually just be avoided by picking the best print provider for each product so you don’t have to worry about these

Kind of delays printify handles these issues by assigning a performance score to each fulfillment center this score includes quality control production time and stock reliability to help you decide on which Center is best for you I’ll put a list of my favorite fulfillment centers on screen to help you decide

Depending on what products you’re selling gelato is more similar to printify where they’re just a software company that connects you to different printing facilities around the world the issue here is that you don’t get to pick which fulfillment center is printing and fulfilling your orders instead their Advanced algorithm will decide this for

You this could obviously create some issues because you don’t have the same control that you have on printify and printful there’s also no competition between the centers on gelato so they’ll just continue to charge you a flat rate and there’s no other price options now it’s fairly standard for all of these

Platforms to have great quality and great customer support so the main differences here are just the way that they’re operated printful handles everything in-house they’ll print and ship everything from a printful facility printfi allows you to pick and choose which print provider you want to work with and with gelato they’ll use their

Algorithm to determine which print provider at the time is best for that order so ultimately the main differences are how much control you want over the products and what the price differences are going to be there isn’t much difference in the ease of use on these platforms either all three of these

Platforms are very streamlined and easy to use especially once you get going so main differences aside assuming that the quality and delivery speeds are roughly the same now we can talk about price we looked at several stores in my video covering three million dollar shops and since t-shirts and mugs are the most

Popular items to sell we’re going to use these products to compare the three platforms okay so here’s how I’m breaking down the costs we’re going to find the average price that mugs and shirts to sell for on Etsy and then I’ll compare the costs for if you’re brand

New and just starting out or if you’re an established seller getting lots and lots of sales which is the end goal to find the average selling price we’re going to look at these seven figure shops to see what they’re selling at and then try and use a conservative estimate

If you want to see how I find these seven figure shops make sure you watch that video that I keep mentioning for the mugs we’re looking at two shops the first shop called Ultimate Gift Shop sells each mug for 17.99 with 5.95 of shipping totaling 23.94 each mug another

Shop we could look at is called Strictly Business mugs and they’re selling each mug for 14.96 and 7.99 of shipping totaling 22.95 so we’ll use 23 dollars as an average mug price this is what our hypothetical store is selling each mug for including shipping now on printful

To fulfill the mug order you’ll pay 14.44 for the mug leaving you with 8.56 in profit before Etsy fees on gelato we without any discounts you’ll pay 14 and 11 cents for the same exact mug leaving you with eight dollars and eighty nine cents in profit before Etsy fees now if

We’re using the high quality but still very cost effective print provider called District photo through printify and we’re not paying for any discounts then the same exact mug is going to cost 9.62 that leaves us with a 13.38 profit before any Etsy fees pause here if you want to see the individual profit

Breakdown for each platform okay but that’s for if you’re a complete beginner without any discounts but what if you’re an established seller and you’re doing let’s say 10 000 mug orders per year you’re gonna want the best discount from each platform so let’s see what that

Would come out to be now on printful you have to earn each discount to earn the largest discount of nine percent each month you have to spend a total of ten thousand dollars in product costs and that does not include the shipping but assuming that you earn this nine percent

Discount every single month that’s 7.95 mug becomes seven dollars and twenty three cents plus the 6.49 shipping which means each mug is going to cost you thirteen dollars and seventy two cents to fulfill so if we made ten thousand mug orders at twenty three dollars each order that’s two hundred and thirty

Thousand dollars if you’re using printful you would pay one hundred and thirty seven thousand two hundred dollars in product and shipping costs and you’d be left with a hundred and fourteen thousand two hundred dollars in profit before any Etsy fees now a little detail here is that you have to re-earn

That nine percent discount every single month to keep it for the next month which means if you’re selling mugs you have to sell thirteen hundred and eighty four mugs each month to keep that nine percent discount coming in but for the sake of easy math we’re gonna ignore

That fact gelato’s membership costs a thousand dollars a year and gives you essentially fifty percent off all the shipping so on gelato the mugs cost us 7.49 plus 331 in shipping to totaling ten dollars and eighty cents after we have the discount that means we would pay a hundred and eight thousand dollars

To fulfill ten thousand mug orders leaving us with a hundred and twenty two thousand dollars in profit before Etsy fees and that’s before we subtract the thousand dollar gelato gold membership on printify you can purchase the printify Premium plan for about twenty five dollars a month and after about 25

Mug orders you’ll break even because you save about a dollar a mug you would pay eight dollars and fifty five cents per mug order leaving you with fourteen dollars and forty five cents in profit before Etsy fees or if you are selling ten thousand mugs out of your two

Hundred and thirty thousand dollars of Revenue you would pay printify 85 500 to fulfill all those orders that leaves you with a hundred and forty four thousand five hundred dollars before the Etsy fees and the three hundred dollar printify Premium cost again pause here if you want to see the individual profit

Breakdown for each platform if you sell ten thousand bugs a year with the maximum product discounts so what what about a successful t-shirt business if you’re selling 10 000 plus t-shirts a year here’s the breakdown and yes this is absolutely possible if you want to see then make sure you check out that

Video I did on the three million dollar print on demand Etsy shops we’re going to use the average prices from those shops we looked at which is between 20 and 22 dollars per shirt order so we’ll use twenty dollars as a conservative estimate but in my experience shirts

Usually sell for about 22 to 23 dollars so assuming we sell 10 000 shirts at twenty dollars a piece that’s two hundred thousand dollars in revenue printful is going to charge 11.78 plus a 399 shipping after the nine percent discount so that’s 15.77 for 10 000 orders is a hundred and fifty seven

Thousand seven hundred dollars that leaves you with about forty two thousand dollars in profit before all of the Etsy fees but again to keep that 11.78 price you’ll have to sell about 850 shirts each month to keep that new discount coming gelato plus gold they’ll charge you about 14.05 per shirt order meaning

For 10 000 orders you would pay a hundred and forty thousand five hundred dollars and that would leave you with about fifty nine thousand five hundred dollars in profit again before the Etsy fees and the cost of the subscription you’ll pay 13.35 for a t-shirt from Monster Digital

On printify meaning for those ten thousand orders you’d pay one hundred and thirty three thousand five hundred dollars on the products and shipping leaving you with a sixty six thousand five hundred dollar profit before Etsy fees and the three hundred dollar printify premium subscription pause here

If you want to see the individual profit breakdown for each platform selling ten thousand t-shirts a year with maximum product discounts but this is just for a proof of concept so that you can see the percentages that these platforms run on now for a little more context not every

Order that you get is going to be a single item like a single shirt or a single mug you’re probably not going to be charging the exact same as these platforms that we looked at and a lot of orders might qualify for free shipping which would drastically decrease your

Revenue but this is absolutely still possible and almost all of my orders are single items like one mug or one shirt so that’s just another piece of the puzzle to keep in mind when you’re deciding between these platforms the last thing that I do have to point out

That not everybody talks about and I’m definitely not trying to throw shade at anyone but we have to talk about the affiliate commissions gelato and printful have the highest commissions at fifteen and ten percent compared to the five percent that print of five pays out to their Affiliates this could be a

Complete coincidence and I am biased because I am a printify affiliate link down below but I’m also biased because I fulfilled tens of thousands of orders with printify and if I could go back to day one and start all over I would use printify all over again to me it makes

Sense to use the most cost effective option that gives me the most control even though their partners are third party a lot of them are still outstanding and produce great quality and really fast shipping times not only that but printify will also assign you a sales success manager to help you grow

Your business once you reach a certain sales threshold they have not paid me to say this I just really like their platform more than all of the other platforms and it’s made me substantially more money than I would have made if I had used the other platforms and since

Their quality is the same I have better control and their profit margins seem to be much better to me I’m going to continue using printify as long as they’re providing amazing service I hope this helps I’ll see you next time