Item: Printful
Rating: 8
Author: The Doyens

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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Printful Review: What Is Printful?

This is our Printful review. What is Printful? Printful is a dropshipping clothing company. Printful is a print on demand clothing to help you start a clothing company. They’ll print your t-shirts, ship them, and handle returns for you. Printful makes it easy for people to start an online clothing company with little or no money at all. You don’t have to invest in inventory that’ll hurt your bank account or take up storage space. In other words, Printful doesn’t make it until someone orders it. It’s kind of like Jack In A Box.

Printful doesn’t have any no minimum orders requirements. It’s pay as you go per se. It’s a great solution for people who don’t have money to invest in inventory. You can manage your cashflow easier and deposit money in your Printful for anticipated orders. The t-shirt printing cost anywhere from 16 USD per shirt to as little as 9 USD depending on the t-shirt brand you choose (i.e., Hanes, Gildan, etc).

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How Printful Works Per Our Printful Review

Service & Fulfillment Centers

Printful has three fulfillment centers – two in the United States and one in Europe. They have a large inventory filled with t-shirts, sweatshirts, yoga pants, posters, pillows, and canvas for photographers. In addition, Printful mockup generator saves you time and money. They provide a free online mockup generator where you can import directly into your eCommerce site. There’s no need to spend money on Photoshop and time perfecting your product mockups. It’s all on Printful’s website.

Printful’s average fulfillment time is 3-5 days depending on their order volume. In other words, it’ll take 3-5 days to print your design then another few days or weeks ship it to your customer depending on shipping choice. The fulfillment time isn’t too bad; however, this could be an issue for impatient customers. I don’t think it’ll be an issue if their fulfillment time was 3 days max.

Printful Review: Shipping Speeds

Printful shipping API helps you offer the lowest shipping quotes to your customers. In addition, they ship your product domestically and internationally. They have live shipping quotes, so customers can choose the shipping method that suits their needs. Best thing about Printful’s shipping rates? It can cost as little as 2 USD to ship something domestically in the United States.

Printful’s Branding options

Printful offers branding options. You can print your logo inside, or outside a t-shirt; the logo can go on the sleeve and they offer tear-away tags. All you have to do is upload your logo into your File Library then choose where to print it. It’s that simple with Printful.

eCommerce Platform Integrations

Printful integrates with all the popular eCommerce platforms. This is awesome because it opens up multiple sales channel for your business. You can sell your products on Amazon, Etsy, your Shopify website, or WooCommerce all at once. It’s that easy to make money selling clothing with Printful. The current eCommerce sites are as follows:

Check out our eCommerce platform recommendations here

Printful Products (i.e., Clothing Brands)

Printful offers all the popular clothing brands. The current vendors include American Apparel, Los Angeles Apparel, Gildan, Hanes, Bella + Canvas, Anvil, Next Level, and Augusta. You can choose to print your design on t-shirts, sweatshirts, tank tops, baby onesies, and more. Each product has reviews on them, so you can determine which one is up to your standard.

Easy Inventory Management

Printful makes it extremely easy to manage your store. You can add generate your mockups and add your products on Printful’s dashboard then import it directly into your store. This saves a lot of time because it eliminates two steps – mockup generating and adding your products to your store. Inventory is managed by Printful, so you don’t have to worry about out of stock items.

Printful sends notification emails regarding low stock items, so you can prepare your inventory. In addition, they offer alternative products. Alternative products are backup products you can print on if your first choice is out of stock. For example, I have a t-shirt design on my eCommerce site. It’s set to print on Hanes. My alternative product is Gildan. If they run out of Hanes, they will print the design on Gildan t-shirts. This makes sure you don’t lose any sales.

Customer Service

Printful’s customer service is generally good. They’re really quick to respond when it comes to incorrect orders; Printful usually remedies the issues within a day or two. However, it does take Printful some time to respond to technical issues like servers, API calls, or webhooks. They send it to their development department to investigate and they usually come back with a generic answer. I’ve had a few technical issues that I had to solve myself. Overall, in terms of incorrect orders, they’re good about it and this outweighs their development department’s lack of support.

Printful Review: Pros vs Cons

Positives

Little to no money to start
Mockup generator
Real-time shipping quotes
Inventory management (i.e., automated out-of-stock updates and store removals)
Multi-channel integration (i.e., BigCommerce,Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon, Etsy, etc)
Branding options
Fulfillment centers in Europe
Reviews on products
Print backup choices
Import directly into your store

Negatives

No mass update
No inventory import or export via CSV or text file
Printing prices are relatively expensive
Print quality isn’t consistent with all t-shirt brands
Fulfillment takes slightly too long
Product updates are done manually (i.e., one by one)

How To Add Products With Printful

Let’s end our Printful review with instructions on how to add products in Printful. It’s a really simple process where they push your products directly to your store. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes to do. A side note though. Your image has to be very high resolution for Printful to accept it. Check out their requirements here.