Why I Don't Use Printful, Printify, or Etsy for Print On Demand

Hey everyone! Welcome back to another video. In today's video, I'm going to be explaining why I don't use Printful, Printify, or Etsy for my print on demand t-shirt business.

Now, for those of you who don't know, I've been a print on demand t-shirt seller for just about 10 years now, and what a lot of people don't realize is that I don't use Printful, Printify, or Etsy to run my business. In this video, I'm going to be explaining and showing you onscreen recording why I don't use these platforms and a lot of things that people don't share about these platforms that you really should know if you're just starting out in this business. So if you are just getting into print on demand, please watch this video first.

I think it's going to save you a lot of headaches down the road. So when it comes to starting a print on-demand t-Shirt business, the core of that business is having a print on demand fulfillment service. Now, most tutorials out there that are going to teach you how to start the business are going to show you to use Printful or they're going to show you to use Printify.

Now, although both of these are great print on demand fulfillment services, what most people don't realize is there are two very different ways to do print on demand. When it comes to print on demand, there is active print on demand and passive print on demand. This is something that very few people are sharing about the print on demand business, but both Printful and Printify are both in the active print on demand business model.

Now for those of you who this is the first time you're hearing about active print on demand versus passive print on demand, active print on demand is where you create your own website, you bring your own traffic and your own buyers. This is typically with social media marketing or it's done with paid advertising, and then every order that you receive, you pay for that order upfront and then you receive your full amount of money with the profit afterwards. And lastly, you handle all of the customer service.

This is more of building a full fledged clothing company, but using print on demand to fulfill those orders. Now when you look at the other way of doing print on demand, which is passive print on demand, this is where you are creating your t-shirt designs and uploading them to big print on demand marketplace websites. They are bringing all of the traffic and buyers for you.

The customer who buys your product is paying for the whole order upfront and you are just getting a split of the profit afterwards, and the big print on demand websites, they're handling all of the customer service for you. This way of doing print on demand, the passive print on demand way, is the way that I think a lot of new print on demand sellers are actually looking for. So with that being clarified, the reason that I don't use Printify, I don't use Printful is because both of these are for active print on demand.

Now with that being said, I don't want to just leave you hanging in this video. I actually want to give you a solution here. So if you don't want to go down this active print on demand route and you actually want to try the passive print on demand route, I'll quickly show you a couple websites that you can use that are passive print on demand.

I'll even upload a design with you to show you how easy this really is. And then I will put a link in the description to another video here on YouTube that is a full passive print on demand tutorial taking you from idea that you want to start, all the way to getting your first sales. So with that being said, let's switch back over to the computer and let me show you some of this.

So let's start out on Amazon. What a lot of people don't realize is that Amazon is actually the largest print on demand platform out there. If you search for a type of t-shirt, so this is gardening t-shirt.

This is just a great niche right now for print on demand. And you scroll down here, all of these are going to be print on demand designs. So when you click on any of these, you'll see that it looks like just any other product on Amazon, but it has as little label right here that says "Amazon Merch on Demand".

Now, whenever a listing has this little label right here, it means that the person selling this only uploaded this design and Amazon is doing everything else for them. So when someone finds this T-shirt and they pick what kind of item they want it printed on, they pick what color, then they select what size, they can add this to their cart, and they can purchase it just like any other product on Amazon. What's going to happen behind the scenes when this order is placed is Amazon is going to receive the order.

They're going to go pick out whatever color and size shirt you ordered, and they're going to print this exact design on it, ship it out to the customer and handle all the customer service. The creator of this listing is then just going to get their split of the profit, which on a t-shirt like this is going to be roughly $5. Now, something that's really cool about Amazon is on some of these listings, it's going to tell you how many of that exact listing has sold in the last month.

For this specific design, that is 50 plus bought in the past month. If you're saying an average of $5 profit, that's about $250 in profit per month from just a single design. Now, that's just on this listing, but on some other niches, when you're scrolling through here for print on demand shirts, you'll see 1,000 plus in the past month.

So a single design can make you thousands of dollars in profit every single month. Now, the reason that all of this works is because Amazon falls into the passive print on demand category, meaning that Amazon is bringing their own customers, just Amazon alone gets about 750 million people to their marketplace every month. Now, all of them are not looking to buy t-shirts, but I can tell you a substantial amount of them actually do.

So just to give you an idea on this, if you are interested in selling on Amazon as a print on demand seller, just look up Amazon Merch on Demand. Once you find this page right here, this is actually their application page to become a seller, just hit the sign up button right here. Again, this is totally free to do.

So Amazon is just the first example of one of these passive print on demand websites. There's actually several more. I've been selling on a lot of them over the years, and there's a couple that really stand out over the rest.

Just to show you what those are, the second one that I would really recommend to you is called Redbubble. And Redbubble is a little bit different than Amazon in that Redbubble is specific to print on demand. So they're not going to sell just every item that Amazon sells, rather they're just going to sell print on demand items.

So if you were to type in gardening t-shirt, these are just all going to be results specifically done with print on demand. So when you click on one of these, you're going to see what that looks like. And again, you can pick all of these settings here, you can add it to your cart and you can purchase it.

The same style here with passive print on demand. None of these are actually printed yet. So when Redbubble receives the order, the customer's paying for the full order, Redbubble is going to print it, ship it out, handle the customer service, and we just get a split of the profit.

But I do want to show you just one more of these passive print on demand websites, just to show you that there are a lot out here to use. This one is called TeePublic. TeePublic was actually purchased by Redbubble a couple years ago.

So it is the same layout as Redbubble. Now, TeePublic is a smaller website compared to Redbubble. To put it into perspective here, TeePublic gets about a million people to their website every month.

Redbubble gets about 10 million people to their website every month. But remember, both of these are print on demand specific. So although Amazon gets a ton of traffic, they're coming in to buy all different things on Amazon.

When people come to Redbubble or TeePublic, they are coming in specifically to buy something print on demand. So this is where things start to get really cool with passive print on demand. So if we go back over here and we go to Printify or we go to Printful, if you want to use one of these, yes, you're going to be using the active print on demand route.

But what most people don't realize is that you actually have to set up a Shopify store as well. So although Printify and Printful, they are free to use, you do have to pay for Shopify. Now, the first month on Shopify is a dollar, but after that, you're going to be paying $39 per month at a minimum just to have your print on demand store live.

Now, beyond having to pay for it, you have to build your store, you have to customize it, you have to make it look good so that people trust your store enough to make a purchase. On the other hand, here with passive print on demand, all you have to do is upload your design and create the listing, because everything else is actually on the big print on demand website. So you don't have to build the website yourself, you are just adding your designs to their marketplace.

So for those of you who are considering passive print on demand, you can absolutely get started today. Again, I would recommend that tutorial down in the description. That's just going to be the best thing I have to offer you from start to finish.

But just in this video real quick to show you how easy it is to upload a design and literally just get started from scratch, when you come to one of these websites, just click "create an account", fill out your first name, last name, put in your email address and a password, and click "create my account". On TeePublic specifically, it'll have you verify your email address, but once you've done that, then you can log into your account and you can start uploading designs right away. So once you've created your account, the button here will change from "create an account" to "upload art".

Just click on this. Depending on how many files you have ready to upload, you can do just single file upload and upload just one at a time, or multi-file upload and upload a whole handful of them at a time. I'll just show you how to do it with one.

Just click this PNG icon right here and select your artwork off your computer. Just give this a second to load here and it'll upload your file. It'll then show you what your design file looks like.

You can scroll down here, you can give it a title, and for your title, you can just name it what is on your design. So this design says, "Gardening because therapy is expensive". I'm just going to copy this, and then you can put it down here as your description as well.

Nice and easy. Over on your main tags here, we'll just type in gardening. And then in your supporting tags, just click in here.

TeePublic will even recommend these for you. So this is also about garden, it's also about nature, flowers, floral, gardener, plants, and anything else that is relevant to this design, you can add into your supporting tags here. Scroll down a little bit here.

Does this design contain mature content? Just hit "no" here. Yes, you are allowed to create designs for print on demand that have mature content in them.

No, I don't recommend doing it. It could just potentially lead to issues down the road. So I would just click "no" here, keep scrolling down.

It's going to give you options that actually look similar to Printful or Printify where you can say, what kind of items do you want this to be offered on? What color do you want those items to be shown in by default? And you can just select what you want here.

And then if you're good with all of these items, it costs you nothing extra to offer them on all these different items. You can then keep scrolling down, and you can actually pick what colors are offered for these products as well. So just scroll through here, hover over all these, make sure that you can actually read your design on all of these.

If anything looks too close to read, like a green on green, just uncheck that, and then keep scrolling through, make sure everything looks good, and then scroll down a little bit further. You can even offer your design on other items beyond apparel with just one click here. So stickers, phone cases, mugs, et cetera, all the way through, you can turn those on.

It doesn't cost you anything extra to offer your design on these other products. I actually personally don't turn these on. I leave it just to apparel.

If you watch that full tutorial, you'll get an explanation of why I've learned to do this over the years. So that's why mine are all turned off and just apparel is turned on. Just click "I have read and agree to the terms and conditions", and then click "publish".

And just like that in a matter of minutes here, you have a listing live on a print on demand website that is getting organic traffic. So by doing print on demand with this passive print on demand route, all you have to do is come up with good ideas and upload them to these big print on demand marketplaces. This, in my experience, is what a lot of people who are getting into print on demand are actually looking for.

They don't want to go down the active print on demand route where they then have to start advertising campaigns to bring people into their store. For those of you who are interested in learning more about passive print on demand and how do everything step by step, that full free tutorial is linked down in the description. So guys, I hope this video has been helpful and saves you a lot of headaches.

If you enjoyed it, please just give it a thumbs up, and I'll be seeing you guys all in the next video.