I Tried Printful & Printify in 2024 - Do NOT Choose Wrong!!

so I tried printful and printify to figure out what the truth is between the two of them but if you're considering making a print on demand store and you're not thinking about your supplier like you're missing out on a huge aspect here it doesn't matter if you're selling on Shopify or Etsy or 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 to shipping costs by having multiple packages they could have individual products that cost too much they could result in low quality lost customers inconsistent products and a lot more than that so a lot of people out there recommend either printify or printful they're kind of Undisputed as the two biggest ones there are other ones as well 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 so I want to find out once and for all which one's actually better and to do this like 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 so 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 the customer service and other things like that but before we go placing orders let's take a step back because if you're like me when I first heard about these two companies quite a long time ago I thought all right printful printify the name is 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 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 Etc it could be your own website it could be 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 so really printify is the one that's different printful is the one that probably is what you already think it is where the the order goes to print full they have a big Warehouse they make your product they package it and then they send it out they do everything inh housee that's printful printify however is the different one they contract us out to third parties and you can control who the third party is but 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 so they have a lot of suppliers on there and like I said they go about rating them and and you can you can kind of choose your own but as you can imagine this fundamental difference gives you some pretty different stores like 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 they might have better customer service because you're working directly with who is actually printing your product so 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 and it doesn't matter which one you use we have affiliate links for both of them in the description below okay so going to sandal media. com printful on this one and sandal media. com printy on this one you can see the homepages here are really not all that different like they have a slightly different layout this is trying to tell you to start for free this one just wants you to look at products so let's start off by creating an account with both of these so that we can generate our designs and place in order and start to see learn a little bit more about which one is actually better so 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 type in some information here now we can say we are selling online we are a individual entrepreneur and maybe so far we have no no sales we can actually skip this as well doesn't really matter what you say with this and while we're waiting for that email let's go over to printify and set up that so we're going to sign up we're going to click Start for free and once again we're going to create our account with an email and a password and again they're going to ask you some very similar questions so we could say I have my own e-commerce store I am going to start my first on my online business first and I don't know just whatever you can 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 all right 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 uh Limitless profit and printful with their memberships right there I'll talk about the memberships a little bit later but let's kind of dive into the catalog available for both of these because that ultimately is really quite different so on the left side looking at print first of all 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 actually something I want to search for which is the Gilden 5000 t-shirt gildin 5000 gildin 5000 t-shirt they should be popping up it's a very very common one a lot of people purchase and uh use it starts at $647 you probably won't be getting that price right away if we say order a sample product we can check out their catalog and you can again browse through everything or right there as we would expect the Gilden 5000 very common t-shirt is selling for $79 now on the surface you might think that's a little bit more expensive but again there's a lot of variables going into this so let's dig a bit deeper by the way print printify as you might expect being that they have so many different uh 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 and so I highly recommend if you don't know exactly what you're selling at least make an account with both of these and uh really check out like 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 a just some model wearing the shirt and you'll eventually be able to see your design on this shirt and for the most part there's not a whole lot different here they offer for the same sizes it goes from small to 5xl most of these go from small to 5xl you have 24 colors on the print full version and down here it looks like we have nine colors or 23 colors like different suppliers have different quantities or different amounts of colors you can choose from and so that brings me into uh what the supplier thing going on here is so printify like I said uses third-party suppliers that are going to do the printing and the shipping and and really the entire fulfillment for you and they rate these on their own three metrics you can see here if you hover over it or if you click on it they have they rate them based on production speed based on quality and based on stock reliability how often do they go out of stock so looking at these you obviously want one with a higher score I generally aim for something better than 9.

3 uh 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 and 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 so that again you have faster delivery sometimes with that you get lower ratings 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 but going down here you can see we have the first one $10. 81 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 that's you're looking at $10.

81 with $689 of shipping whereas on printful you have $925 is the default price and you have uh $469 um worth of shipping there so that is even with that higher price that is cheaper they do have a little promotion going on right now um so we are getting a lower price right now as you can see there and of course printful growth would save us some money as well but like I said the prices are so variable among printify like you can go down here and find the cheapest one so if we sort by the price 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 it really does matter how many we sell because the bulk pricing C 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's 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 so on printful we can choose uh 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 uh 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 uh and we'll go back to split screen in a minute so let's start designing so if we click on drop your design here on the right we can upload a new file and I accept this 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 like the shirt pocket top uh 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 Drve 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 let's 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 U and trying to figure out where the pocket would be so on printify let's start off with the printify ranking the one that ranks the highest it's going to take 2 to nine business days to produce it it's going to take a little 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 and there's a lot of options here Fiverr AI generator shutter stock Google Drve 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 and 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 and they also have these nice mockup views you can look at and see like what it looks like when someone's wearing that so I think that's a little bit too far to the right we can actually go back to the design I I really like that they have this so we have this ready to go we can also customize the listing it's kind of autop populated we could just say Sandell media and now it's going to be a lot easier to import we could do this on printful as well um 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 lvia 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 and now I'm just going 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 so 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 uh men's clothing we're going to go to t-shirts once again I want to find the gildin 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 and we're going to start designing with this they do they are United States they are a pretty low price uh 2 to 31 business days that's pretty long and uh they have a lot of print err is and they also have 38 different colors which is substantially more than printful hats so we're going to start designing with this one and see what we can do here and now let's order this one let's create a manual order actually 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 uh it is $749 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 all right so we can continue down to shipping right now there's a discount because this is a sample order uh 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 um there's a little bit of CO2 offsetting for a couple extra cents let's review this order so we're looking at $116 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 and they want you to see it get excited about it and then really start selling your product so that's I think one of the reasons in my opinion why they're always advertising the lower price for uh for your sample so you can actually go and buy one for yourself so now let's sell our next product which is going to be 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 um 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 sellers 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 in this situation of a mug it's $7.

95 compared to a much lower price of $4. 40 with print device 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 and in here we can drop our design here 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 santal media it's a center of mug it's going to wrap around um and we have that box we can use so we're going to going to continue here now let's go back to printful and you can see this is only from one supplier it's 8 and a half 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 and they kind of show you where it's from so there's two providers on this one all the other ones are district photo a lot from District photo and so let's sort 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 this uh 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 H so I'm thinking I'm just going to roll with the Retro trucker hatch is a basic one right here see if we can find good colors black and white blue and white yeah we going to go with that one right there and here this is actually an embroidered hat as we showed before like uh printful does both embroidering and printing in different 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 uh 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 and we can add our own file we're going to add this logo pretty straightforward to add that um 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 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 uh 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 $104 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 uh so two on that one and then one on the other order so on printify let's go to printify and search for hat uh 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 um 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 I want to see what the embroidering like I want to test out embroidering this is the closest hat to the other one uh that is available and let's try it so start designing so let's try this again I used their template and uh 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 uh but okay that's probably the right size I'm going to print this on Gray uh or we I I don't know the the Navy just looks weird it looks purple in this picture so let's go with gray I just I'm a little more confident in that we're going to save the product uh oh now we actually have some mockups yeah that actually looks that looks way better that actually looks kind of good Navy yeah Navy looks Navy looks good here so I like Navy actually Navy is a good one I'm going to I'm going to save this as a draft we 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 print toy it's 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.