Custom tee-shirts are big business. The Fashion and Apparel Industry Report looks promising with an expected increase from $481.2 billion in 2018 to $712.9 billion by 2022.
It is a great time to get into selling custom. Should you use Printful or Teespring for your custom t-shirts? They are among top print on demand websites. There are plenty of similarities between the two companies, so which one is better?
We’ll review the pricing, the ease of design, integration with an ecommerce platform and customer support. From there, you can determine which option is better for your business.
Printful
The Pricing
Printful allows you to start with no upfront costs. This allows you to test out your designs to see which one will sell. You can upload a product and sell it on your website or through social media right away.
This means you can spend your marketing budget on advertising rather than start up costs.
Printful makes money with each sale you make. When you select a product to sell, Printful lists a starting retail price for the product.
Printful has a large collection of different brand shirts that you can print your design on. Each product has information which lists pricing, colors, shipping location and reviews. You can determine the quality of shirt and the price.
Printful is great because you can select high quality shirts to use. Printful prices its shirts competitively. There are competitors that are less expensive, but you may be sacrificing quality.
You should be able to create a profit from your sales through Printful. Custom printing tends to be more expensive, but most consumers understand this and are willing to pay extra for a customized shirt.
The Sample Order
Prior to selling your shirts, you’ll want to order a sample. The sample orders from Printful are very reasonable. You’ll receive a 20% discount off the list price. This is really the only way to see the quality of the products you’ll be promoting.
For every sample order, you’ll receive two products. Sample orders are limited to one each month. This may create problems for people trying to test out new products regularly. Integrating with an ecommerce platform or generating more than $300 from the previous month will allow you to earn more sample orders.
Designing
Designing a product on Printful is fairly simple. You can create a new order from the Printful dashboard and upload the products. You simply select the size, upload the design file that you want printed on your canvas.
Printful gives you great guidelines for what will be good to upload. For example, most random JPEGs are going to be too small for printing on a canvas. You’ll want a large JPEG or PNG that you can export from a RAW file. This can be done in Photoshop or Lightroom.
Once you have the right print quality, you can crop the photo and continue. Mockups of the products are provided to demonstrate to your customers what it will look like in a real-world setting. As you can see from the image below, it allows you to select text, clip art or upload a file. This can be added to the front, back or the sleeves.
Finally, you will place your custom order or save it to your ecommerce store. If you automatically connect it to an ecommerce platform, it will sync automatically.
Connecting to an Ecommerce Platform
Printful works well with ecommerce platforms. It will sync the products with Woocommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce and all the major ecommerce platforms.
Customer Support
From the online reviews, it seems that the customer support has received many mixed reviews. Overall, the consensus is that Printful is better than their competition for customer support.
Printful’s website contains an FAQ page to help its consumers. It also has a blog with resources for printing tips, fabric facts and embroidery files.
Printful has a solid return policy which covers most situations where Printful would be at fault. It’s shipping is fast.
The Printful support team is available during the weekdays by phone. You can access support through their website via a live chat. Email is also available for support.
Who Should Consider Printful?
Printful is recommended to anyone who is interested in experimenting with drop shipping and custom printing. It will quickly and easily link to your website.
You can order affordable samples and easily integrate it with an ecommerce store. It is great for the newbie to drop shipping, but also fits well for seasoned dropshippers.
You can learn more in this Printful review.
Teespring
Teespring is a custom printing company that has expanded from printing only tee shirts to printing everything from custom mugs to posters.
Pricing
There is no start up fees to design your shirts on Teespring. Teespring will make money from each shirt you sell, so you can focus your efforts on designing and marketing.
Teesprings shirts are priced competitively. Therefore, you’ll be able to earn some money when you sell the shirts. The cost of the tee shirt will go up with an increasing amount of artwork.
Design
The Teespring design process is relatively simple. After you select the product that you want to print something on, it takes you to a style and design page.
You can select from a variety of fonts for writing your catch phrase or brand name. You can also browse through the artwork and emojis that the have or upload your own artwork. Unlike Printful, there are many guidelines about what will print well on canvas.
Teespring has a similar design layout. However, unlike Printful, you are limited to designing on just the front and back. It does not allow for sleeve prints on the tee-shirts.
Integration with Shopify
Teespring integrates with the major ecommerce platform, Shopify. Therefore, if you currently have a Shopify store, you can easily post your Teespring designs on your store.
Customer Support
If you are looking for customer support with Teespring, you’ll want to click on their Help button at the bottom of their homepage.
This will take you to a FAQ page that can assist you in answering some basic questions. They have information for buyers, information for sellers, shipping topics and the company policies there.
Teespring also features buyer and seller support chat, which is available from 9am-5pm EST Monday through Friday. Email inquiries are answered within 24 hours on business days.
While Teespring does have customer service available, they ranked a 1 out of 5 for customer support on ComplaintsBoard.com.
The complaints range from the ethics of the company to not receiving the products. Some people complained about getting tee-shirts that didn’t look like their designs.
Printful vs Teespring – Verdict
Printful is probably the better option. Both Printful and Teespring allow you to put your own designs onto their products without any initial start up costs. You can easily see how much profit that you’ll make from each design that you have up front.
However, Printful offers you the ability to order samples at a 20% discount so you can see what it looks like before you market it. Printful also easily syncs with all the major ecommerce platforms. Teespring does integrate with Shopify.
The Printful customer support is slightly better than its competition. Therefore, if you think that you’ll need support during the process of setting up your online tee-shirt business, you may want to opt for Printful.
Customer service is important to your business. Teespring has overall more complaints than Printful. Therefore, you may want to select Printful for your business to ensure that you don’t have to hear complaints when orders aren’t filled properly.
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Sam Zaman loves to write on technology & related stuff. Ecommerce, mobile and internet marketing equally drive her interest. Likes gardening and experimenting with new recipes. An avid reader and absolutely mad @bout donuts 🙂